Arnold had long aspired to open a pinball repository. His rationale was similar to that of a kid with the newest video console: What's the use of having cool games if you're playing them alone?
His pinball palace, Arnold figured, would only work in a tourist-packed city. New York and Los Angeles: too expensive. Orlando: too humid. In 1990, he and Owens bought a house with a tennis court on 2 1/2 acres in Vegas, whose neon Strip resembles a pinball game's playfield.
He lined his tennis court with games and covered them with tarps. He built a 10,000-square-foot windowless hangar in his backyard. To get there, you walk by other evidence of Arnold's affinity for cast-offs: 2,000 sun-cracked bowling balls; a turnstile from the New York New York casino, and a 10- to 12-foot-long fiberglass hand that Arnold rescued from Caesars Palace.
He has packed the hangar with 800 or so of the bulky machines, some stacked 18 feet high, while they wait to be fixed. Many were rescued from drained swimming pools, swap meets, car dealerships and tobacco warehouses.
For years, Arnold lugged the machines into the backyard for parties to raise money for his repository. In 2006, 16 years after moving to Vegas, Arnold opened the nonprofit Hall of Fame in a dowdy plaza a few miles east of the Strip. A devoted volunteer known as Hippy helps care for the 4,500-square-foot space. Arnold wishes he could move to a bigger place with room for 600 to 800 games (including one each of all 384 produced by his favorite manufacturer, D. Gottlieb & Co.).
Arnold doesn't charge admission. Each month, he takes in about $16,000 from the games played, but some months that's barely enough to get by. Proceeds go to charities (mainly the Salvation Army), which led Las Vegas CityLife, an alternative weekly, to name Arnold one of its "local heroes."
--
On this afternoon, Mark Scheffki walks into the Hall of Fame, and nostalgia takes over.
Scheffki, 46, drove here to determine the worth of his parents' 1970s machine, Bali-Hi. But he was drawn instead to the decade-old game Scared Stiff. Elvira -- the self-proclaimed "Mistress of the Dark" -- skulks on its back glass with a black cat, a skull, a frog and a hand waving a machete. Scheffki sprints through levels that are "Hair Raising!" and "Skin Crawling!" Elvira's voice shouts: "Frogs everywhere!"
