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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jaredmorgs" data-source="post: 8091" data-attributes="member: 459">It's hard for me to work out what the origin of my pinball obsession was, however I think it might have been a pre-90's Playboy pinball down at my local bowling alley in Milton, Brisbane. This was when I was about 10 or 12. This would have been my gateway drug into Pinball. I found a couple of orphaned credits on the machine, and began to play it. I sucked, but there was something about it that made me not care. Unfortunately the "parents" of the orphaned credits came back and being duckheads, they switched the machine off while I was playing it. This kind of made me shy away from pinball, because I associated the conflict experienced with the pinball game with negative feelings. Then when I was in junior high school, we had a local sports outing to the same bowling alley, and they had Fish Tales there.  I *invested* $1 for a game, and was caught "hook, line and sinker" (pun intended).In pinball's heyday of the 90's (well at least the heyday of my generation), you couldn't walk two blocks in Brisbane's CBD without stumbling across the cacophony of sound that was a "Family Entertainment Centre". There were two major ones in my town. PlayTime (about 6 locations), and TimeZone (1 location).My friend stayed down at the Gold Coast for a bit, which had the largest TimeZone in the southhern hemisphere. There was a huge array of pinballs on display, but one he was raving about was a game called "Judge Dredd". He was into comics, and loved the franchise. What impressed him the most was the fact the music sounded so realistic (Judge Dredd being the first DCS title released by Bally). That cemented it for me. Why would you want to be a Street Fighter "Joystick Jockey"/"Button Masher" when you could interact in such a physical way with a game. Nothing came close.Then I discovered the holy grail of pinball. A passionate operator opened an arcade almost solely dedicated to pinball machines up on a local enterainment strip called Petrie Terrace in Paddington, Brisbane. I gazed longingly through the window at tables I'd never seen anywhere before. This operator had a Big Guns table, and a Whirlwind table, which in the more modern inner-city arcades just were't being operated. I introduced myself to the operator as he had his head buried in the guts of a malfunctioning machine. He kindly explained basic electro-mechanical theory to me, and that was my start in the amusement machine industry.  I was 14.I worked for the operator for about 10 years on and off as a counter attendant. Playing the games during the down times. Learning how to fix and strip tables. At one point I actually worked for a rival arcade restoring the sadly neglected pinballs to full operational glory (early 2000s). It was so incredibly satisfying to take a totally stuffed table and repair both the electro-mechanical components, but also replace bridge rectifiers and re-plug cable looms to get playfield GI working again. My passion for pinball runs deep. Runs long. I will never lose it.</blockquote>

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