A grandad dubbed 'Dr Pinball' says the retro games are becoming so popular that he has a four-and-a-half-year waiting list to fix them.
Mark Squires, 64, founded The Pinball Surgery where he repairs, renovates and services the retro games and said many are returning to play to "relive their youth".
His business has become so popular he has fixed more than 500 machines and owned around 180 himself.
Mr Squires, from Swavesey, Cambs, fell in love with pinball while working as an electronics apprentice after he left school and has worked on them ever since.
The retiree who used to work in marketing and communications said: "When you're an apprentice, they give you a brown coat.
Mark Squires, 64, founded The Pinball Surgery where he repairs, renovates and services the retro games and said many are returning to play to "relive their youth".
His business has become so popular he has fixed more than 500 machines and owned around 180 himself.
Mr Squires, from Swavesey, Cambs, fell in love with pinball while working as an electronics apprentice after he left school and has worked on them ever since.
The retiree who used to work in marketing and communications said: "When you're an apprentice, they give you a brown coat.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00I'm Dr Pimble, they called me that because after my apprenticeship in electronics when I was about
00:0516-17 years old I earned extra money repairing pinball machines in arcades at the coast,
00:11but I kept my brown jacket on that I used to wear in the factory to keep my clothes clean
00:15and walking in with that on and a set of test leads around my neck I somehow picked up the
00:19nickname Dr Pimble. I went through what most people do as they get older, family and all the
00:24rest of it and then about 20 years ago I went to see a customer of mine and in the corner of his
00:30room was a broken pinball machine and I remarked I used to repair them and ended up taking it home
00:35in the back of the car and that sent me back down the rabbit hole and I've been kind of running
00:40pinball repairs ever since and somehow it's grown into what we call now the pinball surgery.
00:46The number of machines I've fixed, well several hundred in different people's houses
00:51and I've owned almost 180-200 machines of my own so it's got to be around about 500 machines
00:57one way or the other. Pimble's making a comeback because it's a very social thing. Although people
01:03do sit around and play these on their own they tend to be a family game and they also are very
01:08heavy to move around so it's easy to go to somebody else's to do something different or go to a club
01:13where there are other things and let's face it these tables started life in coffee bars
01:18and student union bars where people used to literally play them while they waited for their
01:22friends to arrive and then when their friends did they turned into a kind of beer mat table
01:26or coffee table. I'm often asked if there's a machine I haven't been able to repair
01:31and the truthful answer is that pinballs are rather like cars. As they get older the parts get
01:36harder to get hold of but these days we have the luxury of being able to fabricate in plastic using
01:423D printing and there are plenty of small engineering companies so it's not a question
01:47of whether you can fix it or not it's a question of how long do you want to spend going to all the
01:52trouble of fabricating the parts to get them working. Some are more modern some are older
01:57but if I had to be pinned down it would probably be the 90s machine Medieval Madness by Williams.
02:03It's a great favourite of mine because it has a very python-esque theme and a lot of very silly
02:07call-outs and sound effects. I've had people who really want to spend money to get a machine back
02:15to better than factory condition and the reason is that it means something to them.
02:21They've either proposed their wife over that machine in an arcade years ago and found it again
02:25or that machine was in their student union bar or their rugby club or the coffee shop that was just
02:30down the road and means something to them. There's a big retro vibe going on at the moment which is
02:34driving pinball uptake and I think that type of thing for some people particularly whose children
02:41have grown up and left home and left them with a free space for a pinball machine
02:45has kind of brought them into it.