My First Pinball Machine, My New Obsession

There’s a special kind of thrill in buying something that doesn’t just work the moment you bring it home. Most of today’s gadgets come sealed and sterile, optimized for convenience. You push a button and they do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Reliable, yes. Exciting, not so much. Pinball, though—that’s different. Pinball is messy, mechanical, alive. When I dragged home my first machine, a Bally Space Invaders from 1980, I wasn’t just buying a game. I was adopting a puzzle box disguised as furniture, humming with alien art and flashing lights, promising both frustration and delight.

Space Invaders isn’t just something to play—it’s something to solve. At first glance, it’s all about chasing high scores and nudging the cabinet at just the right moment to keep the ball alive. But the real game lives under the glass. The moment the left slingshot refuses to fire, or a bulb stays stubbornly dark, or a sound vanishes into silence, the machine transforms from arcade entertainment into an electrical riddle. One minute I’m flipping for points, the next I’m elbow-deep under the playfield, multimeter in hand, tracing schematics like a detective. Every little malfunction is its own side quest.

And the fixes are addictive. There’s something magical about finally hearing the satisfying thunk of a solenoid you just revived. It’s like the machine gives you two scoreboards: one for the game itself and another for every repair you manage to pull off. Both pull you in. Both keep you coming back. When friends visit, they just see the glow of the playfield and the chaos of the ball ricocheting around. I see the quiet victories—the connectors reseated, the fuses that held, the brittle parts that survived forty-plus years.

What I didn’t expect is how much joy this machine would bring to my family. My kids love it for the spectacle, the flashing lights and the crash of the bumpers, but they’ve also started peeking under the hood with me. Together we’ve traced wires, tested fuses, and talked through how switches and coils actually work. It’s become more than just my project. It’s a shared adventure, a way to show them that machines aren’t magic, they’re knowable. And the look on their faces when a fix we made together sparks the game back to life? That’s the moment the joy multiplies.