The museum touts the largest collection of classic pinball and arcade games in the world.
There was an attempt to relocate the roughly 1,100 vintage pinball machines and digital arcade games to a venue in Palm Springs, but the effort fell through, according to published reports. The nonprofit announced in July that because of the nearly yearlong coronavirus public health lockdowns, its financial situation had turned dire, and options had run out. on the floor of the facility, located at 700 S. The 40,000-square-foot museum will host live and online bids starting at 3 p.m. “The greatest thing about the museum was really not just the fact that they had so many games but that they had such a broad variety of games,” Matthews said in an appearance this month on the Pinball Profile podcast.(CNS) – More than 1,000 arcade games, including a plethora of pinball machines dating back decades, will be on the auction block starting Friday and through the weekend as the Museum of Pinball in Banning prepares to close its doors for good. Pinball great Bob Matthews, who runs the INDISC Pinball Tournament, which was held at the Museum of Pinball for five years, said fans of the game would dearly miss Weeks’ museum. Weeks tried to offset the cost of running the place by renting space to marijuana growers, he said, but it wasn’t enough to keep the pinball paradise open. The museum ultimately wasn’t profitable, though, due to its very limited schedule. They were all playable, and “people used to visit this place from all over the world” to spend all day playing retro arcade games. The museum, housed in a 44,000-square-foot warehouse flanked by mountains, had housed around 800 pinball machines and just under 1,000 arcade games, Weeks said. The Museum of Pinball also had an enviable assortment of old-school arcade games, which will be auctioned off. They’d need a facility large enough to store them all – and Weeks found the warehouse in Banning, a small city around 80 miles east of Los Angeles. He approached a friend about opening a “barcade,” but by the time those plans fell through, Weeks had already started amassing a sizable collection of pinball machines. That arcade closed a few years later, and Weeks abandoned his obsession with pinball for a few years … until the mid-2000s, when he noticed a classic pinball machine in the corner of a bar where he was attending a concert, and all those teenage dreams of an arcade business returned, he said. At 18, he traded in his home location for a real storefront. In the 1970s, as a teenager, he opened up an arcade in his parents’ garage. So when he returned home and found out how many more pinball machines there were, he looked for ways to make his hobby into a business. “When I saw my first pinball machine, I was just 13 or 14 years old, at a motel my dad stayed at in San Diego,” he said.Īt the time, he said, he imagined it was the only machine of its kind in the world.
Weeks’ obsession with pinball has gone through phases, but it first peaked when he was in middle school, he said. The museum had an enviable collection of pinball and arcade games “It’s like a funeral,” Weeks told CNN of the museum’s closure. More than 750 of them have already been sold – the rest will be available at a weekend-long auction later this month. The Museum of Pinball shuttered for good this month, leaving its illustrious collection of rare or unusual pinball machines and arcade games – around 1,700 machines total, Weeks estimates – to be auctioned off.
It billed itself as the world’s largest collection of pinball machines, and a Guinness World Record was even set there for most people playing pinball at once (the record, thanks to the museum and its patrons, is now 331 players).įrom 2014: Inside the wild comeback of tournament pinballīut nostalgia couldn’t sustain the museum forever. From 2013 to earlier this month, the museum was a tourist destination for pinball fans, who could pay to play on any of its hundreds of machines. Weeks’ museum was an arcade with so many games that they’d only fit in a windowless warehouse in Banning, California. That’s why he opened the Museum of Pinball – to take guests back to their youth, or to introduce young people to games they couldn’t find on an Xbox or PlayStation.Īnd for a few years, the museum was a monument to nostalgia.
Pinball machines may be relegated now to bars or bowling alleys, but for museum owner John Weeks, they had a lifelong appeal. The Museum of Pinball was only open for nine days a year in pre-Covid times, but when it was open, it glowed like – well, like an arcade in its neon-lit heyday.
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