Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive

Something else started around this time: Pinball Resource.

Become a resource

Young’s obsession with pinball dates back to the early ’70s, when he was a student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that eventually led to a career at IBM. He and his friends were fascinated by the game.

“Being a group of engineers and mathematicians and so on, we put our fingers in there, and if we couldn’t fix something, a technician would come in and we would watch and learn from him,” he said.

Eventually, Young and a friend began driving multiple cars, which is known in the industry as “route-sharing.” “We had about 26 games on the Lehigh campus. So, to support that, you need parts.” As Young’s personal and professional pinball collections grew, so did his collection of parts, which he eventually began selling to others.

“By the time I graduated from college, I probably had 30 or 40 games of my own, in addition to the games we developed, and then I had to maintain and fix them. And I kind of just randomly started doing it and started advertising in some early magazines,” Young said.

He advertised in the Pinball Trader newsletter, the largest publication in the hobby at the time. Magazine editor Dennis Dodel called Young a “Pinball Resource”.

“The name stuck,” Young said.

Under glass

If there’s one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it’s that they break, and they break a lot. You’d never know it, thanks to the amazingly effective sound-absorbing properties of the glass you play under, but the game of pinball is incredibly violent. Each 80 gram silver ball acquires amazing momentum as it flies from one target to another.