PINSPOTTING EXTRA: MARCO SPECIALTIES

The moment you pull into their parking lot in Lexington, South Carolina, you know you’re not at just another warehouse. This is Marco Specialties – the beating heart of the modern pinball world and the largest distributor of pinball parts on the planet.

Terri and I arrived on a bright spring morning with one mission: to experience the mecca of pinball restoration and new machine distribution first hand. What we found was far more than cardboard boxes and shipping labels.

Marco Specialties was founded in 1985 by Mark and Nancy Mandeltort, originally doing diverse work including luggage tags, mail order ads, and operating video games, before pivoting to pinball. 

The company’s entry into pinball parts began when they started salvaging old pinball machines from local distributor dumpsters every Friday and parting them out. Their motto is, The only bad pinball machine is a broken pinball machine. Marco’s mission is to keep games working and out of landfills. Paul Mandeltort took over after Mark passed unexpectedly at the end of 2021, with Marco Ramirez as the right-hand person running operations for nearly 14 years.

Stepping through the front door feels like entering a high-end automotive garage, except every ‘car’ is a pinball machine in some stage of glory. In the office area, a carefully curated selection of restored classics wait to find new homes.

The magic, however, happens in the back; we were lucky enough to get a guided tour of their massive warehouse during our visit. 

In the warehouse, there is aisle after aisle of shelves towering 20 feet high, stocked with over 30,000 different pinball parts – from rare 1970s Bally coil sleeves to modern LED kits, custom ramps, and reproduction plastics. If your game is missing any part, Marco probably has it in stock.

The main building has an area where manuals and promotional material are kept. They have the facilities to scan banners and print reproductions as needed for shows and sites.

What separates Marco from other suppliers is its obsessive attention to detail and inventory depth. During my visit, I watched warehouse staff pulling orders with impressive speed and precision.

Marco has a shipping container filled with the items that they take to shows. They back a trailer up and load what they need.

Another building on the main campus has bulk goods, such as these rolls of wire, available for ordering by the foot.

Beyond the commercial side, Marco has become a genuine community hub. They sponsor major pinball events, run educational seminars through Pinball University, and actively support pinball’s growth. 

Marco’s team clearly loves pinball – you can see it in how they talk about machines, the care they take with restorations, and their willingness to hunt down obscure parts that most suppliers gave up on years ago.

If you’re a serious pinball enthusiast, a visit to Marco Specialties should be on your bucket list.

Whether you’re hunting for that elusive ramp for your Bride of Pinbot, looking to buy your first (or fifth) new game, or just want to geek out with fellow flipper fanatics, this is the place.

If you’re anywhere near Columbia, South Carolina, make the pilgrimage. Tell them Mick and Terri sent you.

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As part of our visit, Pinball News presents an exclusive interview with Paul and Marco of Marco Specialties on May 16, 2026.

(Introductions around the table)

Mick: I’m Mick Brown, known as MG Brown at Pinball News, and I am the North American Correspondent for Pinball News, where I have an irregular column called PinSpotting. Terri and I travel around the USA, visiting sites and writing reviews and information helpful to people who include pinball and arcade visits in their travel. This was also the topic of a presentation I did for the 40th Pinball Expo in Chicago a couple of years ago.

Terri: I’m Terri Brown, and I just follow him around to all of the pin spotting locations. Behind every great pin spotter…

Mick: She’s being modest. Terri has her own Superstars of Pinball trading card, made by Twin Galaxies. So she’s not a small player by any means.

Marco: I’m Marco Ramirez. I’m the current COO for Marco Specialties. It’s been almost 14 years since I started doing this in November.

I had the pleasure of working originally with Mark and Nancy, and once Nancy retired, Mark unfortunately passed away, but since then, Paul and I have been kind of just taking this thing and running it, and you know, Paul and I, we do this every day, and we’ve got a good team behind us. So that’s the goal — to continue to keep pinball alive and keep pinball machines out of landfills.

Paul: That’s our goal. I’m Paul Mandeltort, and I am now at the helm of Marco Specialties, taking over after my father, Mark, passed unexpectedly. It’s been a long transition. Marco is my right-hand man. I keep telling him, “Hey, your name’s on the building, so let’s make this work.”

It’s been quite a journey. We’ve been absolutely thrilled by how far we’ve come as an organization, and I think how far the pinball community has come since we first started investing in it. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own. I’m really proud of everybody who’s really poured their hearts into this thing. Because we really had no idea where this was going to go in the beginning.

Fun little tidbit, you know, my father, Mark, originally named the company Marco Specialties. 1985 is the year my sister was born, and it is also the year they founded the company. But back then, Mark had no idea what we were going to do. So that’s why they called it Marco Specialties. We kind of stumbled into pinball a few years in. We were initially doing luggage tags, mail-order ads, laundromats, and operating video games, and didn’t want to change the name. So it kind of fits a little bit of everything.

Eventually, we were rummaging through the local distributor every Friday when they threw out their old pinball machines, and we’d take them out of the dumpsters, part them out, and make a set of parts. So that’s kind of what gave us the inspiration: “Oh, wait, these things are not getting made again, and they’re going to be collectible one day.”

That’s what started Marco Specialties. It’s been amazing to see how far it’s come since the start.

Mick: We have an International audience. My editor is based in the UK, and many people in Europe tune in to our PINcasts. Having said that, would you just give our readers who may be unfamiliar with your company a short summary of what Marco Specialties is?

Paul: Marco Specialties is here to help you keep your games up and running. All it takes is one spring, screw, or nut that you can’t find, and the game isn’t fun anymore. We always say, “The only bad pinball machine is a broken pinball machine.” The company’s mission is to keep games working. help educate people on how to repair, maintain, preserve, and promote pinball in the long term.

Marco: Marco began as just an operation to keep games out of the landfill. We’ve grown into the broader assets. Here’s how you share pinball with other people. So we’ve made a big investment in the pinball show community in the last 10, 20 years now, really. We’ve actually met Martin quite a few times over the years.

We love all the work Pinball News has been doing to support the community. One of the oldest and most trusted organizations in the pin-space. Thank you for all the work you guys have been doing. We really think it’s integral to the success of the industry you’re seeing right now.

Paul: You guys are one of the key organizations there for that, for sure. And we can also support the International market. That’s becoming increasingly challenging with the way the world is going, but we’re still doing it. Shipping is very expensive. Hey, it’s 50 bucks to send an empty box across the border. A lot of people don’t know that. So we can still do it quite cost-effectively, all things considered. It’s a daily challenge we hope you understand, given what you’ve seen of our operation.

We’re a small business at the end of the day, and yet we’re servicing the whole world. And we’re pretty proud of the fact that we’re able to do it at all.

Mick: Who do you feel is your customer? I realize that if I’d asked that question back when I was working for Bally in the 70s, the answer would have been different. But who do you think your customer is today?

Paul: We talk about this a lot internally, and really, it comes in about three or four major buckets.

The primary and most important people to us are the self-identified pinball technicians of the world, the people who specialize in repairing games. And in that category are the people who don’t yet know they’re pinball technicians, but are becoming technicians. So it’s that kind of person who can change the oil on their own car. They are the ones who see the game on the side of the road, and they take it home. They probably already have a pickup truck. So that’s the core of the industry, the backbone.

Then, there are many other subgenres within the community. Obviously, the collectors, people who collect machines in any capacity, we support all of them. And they’re one of our major drivers as well.

We also serve what we call the community operators, a new breed of operator emerging.

Well, as you guys have been around long enough to know the history. In the ’80s and ’90s, the traditional operators grew into large organizations and companies, and they turned their backs on pinball because it had the lowest revenue per square foot among coin-op equipment. And so that’s a segment that we intentionally don’t market to. We still support them when we can. But at the end of the day, they are serviced by the traditional old-school parts distribution network.

We focus on people who didn’t have access to pinball machine parts and who haven’t had the experience of the ’90s. If you were to call a distributor to order parts and they’d say, “No, you need to open an account with us; you need three trade references, and you have to apply for a line of credit.“

That was one of the original reasons we got into the business: Mark was having a hard time finding parts for the old games we operated back in the day. Then we realized, oh, wait, if anybody has an old game in their basement from their friend whose bar shut down or whatever, it is literally impossible to get parts.

We support pinball through the community, a friend, or an arcade, and they want to fix their games. We were the very first pinball e-commerce store. Our domain goes back to 1999. We’re the very first people to have a shopping cart. We’re the very first people to have a URP system in this business.

We’ve always done that out of a need to serve customers in the pinball retail parts market. So that’s the areas we’ve been focusing on. And then now it’s growing. The home user community has become very important for us.

Marco: The hard part now is trying to stay focused because now lots of people are coming into the industry, so we have to make some tough decisions on where to prioritize them, as you know, you’ve seen we’ve got a lot going on, so it’s hard to stay focused in this realm. I’m really proud of how Marco and team are doing, and we’ve built an incredible crew that can handle the very challenging business.

Terri: Your presence at pinball shows has shifted from representing Stern to collaborating with the homebrew community. What prompted that change in direction?

Paul: We feel it’s a natural growth segment. The original goal, when we first started attending these pinball shows back in the day, was to stay off-Stern but still work with them on a regular basis. We’re still one of their biggest parts distributors. And now you’ve had to look around for… We’ve never intentionally been in the game sales business. That’s a whole different market for us. What we do is out of service to the community.

Back in the day, if you were to go to any show, it was literally, we go, oh, we got to get new games to shows. And so at the time our store was the only company that ships and sells any games at all. So it was a natural conclusion. We flew out to Chicago, met with Jody back in the day and John Buscaglia, and worked with the team over there to develop the demo game program, which is the first of its kind in pinball history.

We’re really proud of how it’s grown and taken off, and now supported across multiple dealers. Back then, there was no dealer network. None of these things existed back then. We helped put all that stuff in place. Now, the show program has advanced to the point where everyone can enjoy the games. The mission has been accomplished. We get new games for the shows, which really support the community. We are now growing to bring the next cohort of people, which we’re really excited about, the homebrew people. We’re building on the success of encouraging Stern.

We are really thrilled that Stern is now supporting the community, and we continue to help and build those partnerships and, more importantly, at a scalable level that we can continue to support. Because the reality was, with our small team, you know, there are at least 20 significant major shows around the country and dozens more smaller ones. It’s physically impossible for us to have a physical presence on all these shows. We had to find a way to grow that. We worked with Stern to develop the partnership program. Now Stern can work directly with local dealers.

We also support the dealers, and we’re still on site, still lending a hand when we can. But from the get-go, it was a net-zero-revenue opportunity for everyone involved. It was expensive to move equipment around between shows. It was really just to service the community. Now we’re just taking that and building the next level with the homebrew community as well. We love that Stern is now going to TPF, and we were just at Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee.

Typically, there are over 50 brand-new machines at the major shows. It’s absolutely incredible. It’s never happened in the history of pinball ever. It’s really, really cool to see that now; we’re really proud of that.

Marco: As part of this whole thing with the community, one of the things we use the homebrew segment for is a recruiting ground for us. We have recently hired people from the homebrew community over the last two years. We have started working with many vendors and creators in that space. Aaron from Fast Pinball is a good example.

We’re doing a lot of collaborative work with these guys. That’s also, in our opinion, the future of our industry. When you talk about a designer from a design standpoint, that’s where your Scott Danesis, your Keith Elwins, and your Mark Seidens come from: the homebrew side. Ernie as well – Ernie Silverberg, who’s now our product director here at Marco Specialties.

Paul: The homebrew scene is cultivating, and it’s ushering in the next era of pinball designers who get a chance to work with some of these OEMs. It’s very exciting, and we take pride in helping move it forward, not just for them but for the pin community as a whole.

Terri: So your goal is to have a distributed model of talent that can kind of plug in with larger companies, rather than being hired and on staff, and only doing that?

Marco: Ironically, it turns into this ecosystem of networking. Communities within these other OEMs and manufacturing with toppers and different aspects of pinball in general, but absolutely, it’s a huge networking and opportunity builder for the community.

If you look at these homebrew games from five years ago to what they are now, some of them are OEM-level machines. They’re definitely pushing the envelope in their own way. One thing that I really noticed last year at the Expo in Chicago is that you’re also introducing a lot of artists into pinball. Some of these homebrew guys are starting to hire artists to do commission work for their machines, and that’s another way to bring more people into pinball.

Terri: So what are your top-selling items?

Marco: Pinballs, the actual physical ball, and probably rubber kits and electronic displays for the games are our core essentials. We have our own brands for all three products: Silver Jets and PRW (Pinball Rubber Works). It’s a formula developed by Mark, Nancy, and Paul. We also have the Pinscore brand. We have our own display brand. So we have several in-house brands that are staples. The other one would be coils, the PinCoil line as well.

We look at all the data. Also, historically, we consider ourselves experts in the industry. We have a lot between Paul and everybody. We’ve got over 100 years of pinball experience. And we look at what customers want, what consumers need. We also look at how to modify them or improve them. That’s something we do, engineering on that side of the house, to make sure the customer is getting not just the pinball part, but the best part they’re going to get anywhere. Paul, have you got anything to add to that?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, things that make the game break are usually what make people pick up the phone and call us. Rubbers are the most common ones. Then the mission is to be the one-stop shop for all their little odds and ends, especially with a broad collection of games. And so we have over 50,000 products and kits all said and done. We have spent years developing systems and techniques just to keep up with all this stuff.

Marco: Rubbers, because they break eventually, and of course, we’ve been spending engineering effort to get better and better durability and reliability, and have several other product lines there as well. At the end of the day, the stuff getting hit by the ball, that’s what’s going to break. That’s generally what people need to buy regularly. We try to make the ordering process as easy and seamless as possible while also making the parts more durable.

If something’s breaking a lot, we’ll try to get a better version engineered that maybe the OEM didn’t want to spend as much money on. Now that the games are worth more, some people are willing to spend a little bit more money on replacement parts.

Paul: The economics have shifted on that; a lot of people give OEMs heat for cheaping out, but the reality is their margins are still really low, and they have to cut costs where they can. Otherwise, they won’t be in business.

I’ve seen all sides of this process; I can empathize. And though it’s hard to engineer and develop reliable systems, we spend a good deal of time engineering better parts. It’s really hard just to get one part right, let alone all of them. So every day it’s a project, and we have a list, literally thousands of things that we want to do. It’s a never-ending battle.

Terri: I get that there are a lot of standardized parts across the industry, but do you work on the development of new parts, or do you do that sort of thing in reaction to game development that’s happening, that you’re part of the process?

Paul: We try to focus on parts that keep the game running across as many games as possible. That’s the number one priority. Any time customers say ‘I’m having a hard time finding financing’ we will do our best to find someone to provide a loan or line of credit for them. So that’s one of the things that we, especially early on, did a great job of doing. We still do a great job on this.

When somebody has that one weird request, we’ll take a look at it: “Oh, wait, this is actually a special thing. You can’t get that anywhere.” We call them unobtanium parts. And we have a lot of parts that cost us more to make than we’ll ever sell. So that’s one of the difficult things. I think we’re one of the very few companies in the industry that makes that kind of investment. On paper, any accountant would say, “What the hell are you doing? You’re never going to make your money back on that.“

We also know that if we don’t make this part, the game is useless. And now all those thousands of games will go in the landfill one day. That’s the motivation for us – a higher mission. That’s how we prioritize because otherwise, if you try to do absolutely everything, you’re never going to get anything done. It’s one of those priorities I mentioned. For game-specific parts, that becomes a test: “Is this going to break the game?” If so, it goes higher on the list.

Then there’s the thorny area of licensed stuff. That’s where we have to be careful. Certain stuff is licensed, and sometimes licensors… don’t see the broader mission of things, we leave that alone because at the end of the day we have to focus on the problems at hand.

Every part of a project is an analysis. It’s pretty fascinating. And Marco does all that in about five seconds in his head, but it normally takes a regular person a week to do.

Terri: So, apart from regular stock items, what previously unobtainable item or items are you most proud of making available to the pinball community?

Marco: What I’m thinking of is more for Project Pinball. We were working hard to move into… what was the unit called? The unit where…people in wheelchairs could play pinball. I forgot the name of that unit.

Paul: Yeah, well, the broad category is accessibility pinball. So, for the disabled, they don’t have to use their hands or limbs. I know Rusty was working on that, and Dan Spoler, and they had a few controllers there.

Marco: There’s just so much. I think one of the biggest ones is the motors category. Motors are very expensive. And, you know, like the Judge Dredd motor, I think we’re one of the only people in the world that have that motor. Mark was always adamant about, you know, keeping these parts that no one else had. He was willing to invest in it. The batch that he had back in like 2012 or 2014, something like that. It’s a $300 motor; things like that, which no one else seems to invest in, we do. We try to go in and help when we can. But as Paul says, our accountants think we’re a little insane when we hold on to too much inventory, but you never know. We stock a lot of parts for sure.

Paul: Actually, one of the silly ones, Marco, is like those springs we were getting. I forgot which one it was. It was like one of the coil springs or whatever. But we ended up having to buy like 10,000 of them, which was the minimum order, even though we were only going to sell a couple of hundred. It’s a silly little spring, you know. It was like, what is that, a three-cent part?

Someone will ask, “Why are you charging three bucks for that?” I tell them, “Well, we had to buy 10,000 so you could buy this one.“

Marco: The other one was the switch adjuster tools.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right. We spent years looking for that thing. We ended up engineering it ourselves.

Marco: Pinball Skates is another one. We manufacture those now, and they make it much easier for customers to move their machines; that’s always an issue when you’re on your own.

Terri: How have the import tariffs impacted your business? I know it’s impacting the parts going out to customers, but what about you guys getting parts?

Marco: It’s definitely impacted timelines for getting parts delivered to us. And then the other part, too, is that we want to be competitive. We also want to ensure we’re adhering to quality standards. We have very high-quality standards on our end, typically because we sell many parts to commercial operators. And so those kinds of parts have a higher breakage rate. A lot of that product is above quality standards.

We didn’t have much impact from the tariffs because we source a lot of our products domestically, especially steel. That’s been a thing. Chicago, back in the day, was the mecca of…

Mick: Chicago had its own tightly-knit community of game creators. They called themselves the “Hairy Who Imagists.” The Elmhurst Art Museum in the Chicago suburbs hosted an exhibition in early 2017 on the Chicago Imagists. I wrote an article for Pinball News about the exhibition.

Paul: Absolutely. Everything was made there, everything was designed in Chicago.

Marco: Some things are worth going overseas for, because they are cost-effective, but many component companies are still in Illinois. We do a lot of business with these guys, and even during COVID, we didn’t have too many supply issues because so many of our products are domestically sourced.

Paul: I think long-term, the effect is still going to be felt. Everything’s getting more expensive. We got lucky with tariffs in the short term because it turns out many suppliers haven’t realized any of this U.S. sourcing. Chances are there’s some imported component in there, especially, like, pinball machines. The actual carbon steel, the regular grade pinballs that everyone buys and sells, we were the largest importer of those. You cannot get that grade of steel in the U.S; no manufacturer makes it.

So now our high-end balls, the Silver Jets we make, are made in the U.S., but it took us a while. We found the final supplier that’ll do them. But for the regular pinballs, that low-carbon steel is a cheaper material. It’s used because it does not magnetize at all. But nobody in the U.S. will make that. We’ve called like thirty ball suppliers. Nobody will do it. This example shows that many supply chains simply evaporated from the U.S., and that’s just the new reality we live in.

What we’re going to see, I think, is that prices are still going to continue to go up. These kinds of things, like tariffs, take years to percolate down. Because a lot of our suppliers are smaller, they don’t have advanced forecasting systems; they might be sitting on a big bucket of inventory that they, you know, you buy steel in lots, right? So you might have years’ worth of steel. And so, until you buy the next batch, you don’t really know how much the current batch costs.

That’s an area where it’s a juggling act for us, again, across such a huge catalog, we try to only raise prices when we have to. But at the end of the day, the problem with tariffs, and the scary thing about them, is that they’re due up front before you sell a thing. That puts a lot of people in a tricky spot in the long term. Fortunately, and ironically, for most pinball suppliers, pinball itself is usually not their main business line. Those kinds of things get overlooked.

The prices are going to keep going up, unfortunately. That’s just the reality of the world we live in. The problem is that the cost of living goes up more. We’re one of the first companies in our zip code to raise our minimum wage, and so things like that. We’re trying to stay ahead of it while keeping the organization sustainable.

Every once in a while, we get feedback, oh, you’re really expensive on this part. And we try to maintain a balance, we have to be able to invest and buy the next part. And we have to pay our team, who are all very talented, awesome people. It’s really a delicate, tightrope act to get that right. There are a lot of people who don’t understand that you can’t run a business by marking up a part by 10% over cost. It’s not possible.

Some people who haven’t run a business before will try to do that. That’s one of the challenges after COVID: some people start garage-based businesses. We now have many competitors in the pin space. Why don’t you keep up with those guys? They’re not paying health insurance, they’re not paying rent, not paying air conditioning, storage, warehousing, insurance, labor, all that stuff. So there’s a lot of overhead in running a business, making it hard to balance.

The tariff shock, as I said, is not done yet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other disruptions like that happen, but it’s something we monitor every day. We try to have as many supply chains as we can reasonably have without tying up too much money in inventory. At the end of the day, it’s interesting.

Terri: It’s a balance between getting them while they’re at this price as opposed to waiting and buying more later, and you never know what’s coming at that price.

Paul: A lot of people panicked and bought when the tariffs happened, right? Oh crap, it’s going to go up even more. And then you’re stuck with all this expensive stuff, and later it got cheaper. It’s tricky. Now the new thing is the oil price. That means freight prices will rise significantly. That’s another thing, it’s basically a tariff. There are many externalities we’re dealing with.

Mick: Friday, typically, at least in the industry that I was in, people like to knock off early on Friday. But if I could just ask both of you one more question, and we’ll get out of your hair. Could you share a brief, entertaining, or interesting story about an interaction with a customer? A story that would put a smile on somebody’s face.

Marco: So when I first got in, I actually volunteered to be on the phones to start talking to customers. What I realized immediately was that a lot of the customers who call are very experienced. You can’t really talk your way out of not knowing the answer to those customers’ questions. At the same time, it was apparent that many new people had been introduced to pinball ownership.

One particular customer called me up, very annoyed, and wanted me to even drive up to him. He was in the Delaware area. “We’re going to throw it in the landfill, blah, blah, blah.” I talked him down and had a conversation with him. Finally, I was like, “What are you trying to do?” He was trying to search for a short in a wire.

He said, “I don’t understand how you guys can work on these machines? It’s very hard to get to the bottom of this wire.“

I ask, “What are you doing?” He says, “This area where I’m working through is so small. How can anybody fit through it?”

It turns out that he was trying to work on his game through the coin door! I finally realized that, and I immediately went online. Found the YouTube video with Todd Tuckey showing how to work on a game. I knew the essential basics of taking the lock bar off and all that, but I figured this guy would probably get a kick out of this video. So I sent it to him, and about an hour later, he called back, and he said, “I am such an idiot!” He and I just laughed about it. I told Mark the story, and he said, “Unfortunately, he’s not the first person to do this, just so you know.“

About a year later, the same customer emailed me because he ordered some plastic sets from us. The customer says, “I don’t know what you guys did to these plastics. These things are so horrible. They’re so hazy. They’ve even got burn marks on them.“

I said, “Send me a picture. Let me look at it.” He sent me the picture. I said, “Well, you know, there’s a peel-off protective film on the front and the backside of these things.” But he had already installed them all in the game, thinking that if he installed them, they would look better. Unfortunately, they did not.

I got a chance to meet this customer at the Allentown Pinball Festival, probably about six or seven years ago. He introduced himself to me. He’s like, “I’m the guy who tried to work on his game from his coin door.” I immediately knew exactly who that was.

Paul: Yeah, it’s funny, I just remembered, and actually, to answer one of your earlier questions, one of the very few non-pinball parts we did in recent years is we got the belts made for ice Cold beer for the mechanism that makes the rail go up and down. There are these belts that nobody had anywhere, and so we sold them, and I can’t remember. I don’t think I was on the phone at the time, but I was in the office. I think Steve or somebody had handled it. But the customer calls, furious.

“It’s a belt. It’s too small; I sent for two of them. It’s crap.“ The guy’s pretty annoyed. I guess he’s under a lot of pressure or whatever. We’re going back and forth. How is this possible? What’s going on? We’re going back and forth. Finally, I think Mark says, “Have him take it out of the bag.” He pulls it out of the bag, and all of a sudden, the phone goes quiet. The belt was just folded over.

It was probably a decade ago, and I don’t remember how it wrapped up. I think eventually he was fine, but it’s just like, okay, guys.

Terri: Yeah, it’s good that you guys were there because you fixed the problem and you kept the game from going into the river.

Paul: Those interactions are what keep us going at the end of the day. Many companies are trying to eliminate their customer service teams. We’re doubling down on it because we know that every time we talk to somebody, we help inspire them. We learn about new problems that they’re having. And it also just gives us a lot of energy to keep on doing what we’re doing. It’s just the future.

Mick: Yeah. Any company like Marco needs best-in-class customer service. On the tour, Cheyenne mentioned that you guys have these tech talk videos where you help people. Just talk about that a little bit, how those came about.

Paul: We call it PinTech live, and Imoto is actually our host for that. She’s in charge of the content, but essentially, what we do today started out with Kyle Spateri. We hired him specifically to do that series for us, and then when he transitioned on to Stern we ended up doing community outreach and we have a lot of techs from all over the country that have been helping us with this series. To attack some of the problems that, with these funny stories that we talked about, people just don’t really know how to start with owning a new pinball machine.

You know, we’ve done videos on that, we do snippets, we do live shows where people can come in and we show you how to solder on a game or how to change out your Electrical components like a transistor a resistor on your board machine, so just all the basics.

One of the first videos Imoto did was how to set up a pinball machine and at the time we had several people in the office that were like, “well, I don’t know if this really is a thing that people want a video of” and now it’s one of our highest viewed videos! We send it out nearly every week to a new customer who says, “Hey, I just bought my machine, I don’t even know how to turn this thing on.“

So we do it to cater to all facets, especially new customers, you know, and I always tell somebody when I sell a machine to them or a part, “you know, pinball is DIY, you’re gonna have to learn how to take the glass off and get a ball unstuck, right?” So, even basic stuff, and it’s true, the more you dive into it, the more interesting it becomes, right? And you know, then you want to learn how to fix them, and there’s just so many really cool aspects of ownership.

Marco: We were just trying to cater to all the new customers that are coming in. The series actually did really well, especially during COVID, when a bunch of new people came into the industry. And it’s continued to do very well. And Imoto’s done a really good job. We’ve also now started doing tech school at shows. We started our first one at the Texas Pinball Festival, arriving a day before the show started and we put people through a tech course on fixing their pinball machines.

Paul: Yep, and we had a lot of really good techs from around the country who were part of that process, and they were pretty much essentially instructors. Todd Tuckey was one of the ones there. There’s a lot of history and knowledge being transferred to everyone.

Marco: It’s really exciting when you see 21-22-year-olds in there wanting to learn how to fix a game. Again, that’s all about investing in this pin-community, in this ecosystem.

Paul: Those people are the future. That’s the future of our industry. I always say pinball techs are unicorns because they are. They’re hard to find. There aren’t that many of them. And you need more of them to keep pinball growing.

Mick: Everyone’s time is valuable these days, and thank you again for accommodating us on short notice. We also appreciated the greeting out front. Hopefully, we can use it for the featured photo for my article.

Marco: Thank you, guys, for coming in.

Paul: Anytime you’re in the area, you’re more than welcome to visit us. We have a whole studio area that Imoto and Kyle use to film. It’s essentially our game room, with all our demo pinball machines set up. That’s in a different location; It’s about two or three miles from here.

Marco: Paul and I have this conversation every week. We need another building. We need another building. You know, so we…just keep buying containers.

Paul: They’re really inexpensive these days. Stack them high, make them wide. Yeah, we’re thinking of putting a little swimming pool in one. LOL

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