It was at that moment that something else began: The Pinball Resource.
Become the resource
Young's obsession with pinball dates back to the early '70s, when he was an undergraduate at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead him to a career at IBM. He and his friends were fascinated by the game.
“As we are a group of engineers, math people and so on, we would get involved and, if we couldn't fix something, the technician would come, we would observe him and learn from him,” he said.
Over time, Young and a friend began operating multiple machines, called “route running” in the industry. “We had like 26 games on Lehigh's campus. So to maintain that, you have to have parts.” 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 from college, I probably had 30 or 40 games of my own outside of the games we were operating, and then I needed to maintain them and fix them. And somehow I stumbled upon that, and I started advertising in some of the early magazines “Young said.
He took out an ad in the Pinball Trader Newsletter, the hobby's biggest publication at the time. The magazine's editor, Dennis Dodel, nicknamed Young “The Pinball Resource.”
“The name stuck,” Young said.
under the glass
If there's one thing you should know about pinball machines, it's that they break… a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective soundproofing properties of the glass it's played under, but a game of pinball is surprisingly violent. Each 80 gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it is catapulted from one target to another.