It was around this time that something else started: The Pinball Resource.
Becoming the resource
Young's obsession with pinball dates back to the early 1970s, when he was a student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead to a career at IBM. He and his friends became fascinated by the game.
“Being a bunch of engineers and math people and so on, we had our fingers in it, and if we couldn't fix something, technology came and we watched it and learned from it,” he said.
Eventually, Young and a friend began operating multiple machines, which the industry calls “running a route.” “We had about 26 games on Lehigh's campus. So to keep that going, you have to have components.” 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, I had probably 30 or 40 games of my own outside of the ones we operated, and I had to maintain and fix those. And I just happened to get into that, and I started advertising in some of the early magazines Young said.
He placed an advertisement in the Pinball Trader Newsletter, the largest publication for the hobby at the time. The magazine's editor, Dennis Dodel, dubbed Young “The Pinball Resource.”
“The name stuck,” Young said.
Under the glass
If there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they break – a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-dampening properties of the glass it's played under, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball acquires remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another.
