Silver ball still rolls at Pinball Perfection in West View

Arcade regulars half a century ago may remember the appearance of a game featuring a few lit-up lines representing tennis-table paddles, trying to make contact with a dot zigzagging across the screen.

Fans of pinball machines, the main attractions at such establishments, tended to scoff at something that simplistic.

Despite their opinions, Atari’s Pong ended up paving the way for the rush of video games that quickly surpassed pinball’s popularity.

But as far as Dan Hosek is concerned, the silver ball is on a perpetual a roll.

“I started out as a player standing on a milk crate in Millvale,” he said, and today, his collection of machines constitutes a literal museum.

Pinball Perfection, his venue at Route 19’s horseshoe curve in West View, is home to more than 300 tables, dating as far back as the 1930s. From noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, plus 7 to 9 on Friday nights, enthusiasts are invited to test their flipper-finger skills, either as seasoned veterans or complete novices.

“It’s amazing to have a kid walk up to a pinball machine,” Hosek said. “They don’t know how to start it. They don’t know it has flipper buttons. They don’t know that the game has three balls. It’s an alien.”

Once they get the hang of it, youngsters may find pinball to be as entertaining as Pong’s 21st-century descendants.

Video games still were relatively new when Hosek started working at an electronics company as a teenager, learning how to solder and what goes where inside a circuit. Both skills came in handy the first time he fixed a pinball table.

‘You can have these’

“I was coming home from work, and I heard that this bar caught fire and it was by my house,” he recalled. “They put three pinball machines out by the dumpster. Two were just toast, but there was a Cleopatra and it wasn’t so burnt up.”

The find turned out to be of historical significance: The game based on the renowned Egyptian queen was the first solid-state machine — controlled digitally by a microprocessor, as opposed to electromechanical operation — produced by the erstwhile D. Gottlieb & Co., a leading manufacturer for arcades.

As Hosek built his restoration skills, he was able to build his personal collection by way of out with the old, in with the new.

“There were these giant arcades that had lots of mechanical games, and they were replacing them with digital games,” he said. “As I started doing repairs, they’re like, ‘You can have these, or we’re just going to knock them apart.’ So I started dragging mechanical games come like crazy.”

In 1991, he launched a pinball-based business with fellow hobbyist Todd Umstott.

“We started out basically putting our collections together to get the first storefront open in Millvale,” Hosek said, and they eventually worked out of five buildings.

Their inventory grew substantially following an offer from a Florida game distributor.

“Basically, they said, ‘You can have this whole building, 700 machines, videos, pinballs. Some are savable. Some are scrap. The deal is, it’s got to be broom-clean when you’re done,’” Hosek recalled. “Six 24-foot trucks back to Pittsburgh, and we filled our warehouse. That gave me a surplus of parts that I’m still using.”

Inside Pinball Perfection

The operation later moved to West View, where Pinball Perfection opened as a museum in 2008 following five years of renovations to a former shop for vehicle repairs and painting.

Umstott, who owns a series of 7-Eleven stores, serves as co-curator with Hosek. Also on board are director Ed Leicher, director, and Dan Kifer, Joe Kleiber and Ray Streb, who handle operations.

They saw machine sales spike during the covid-19 pandemic among quarantined people seeking diversions for home. While Pinball Perfection offers some brand-new games, the preference often is for vintage tables.

“Mechanical games have a resurgence because you can afford to find one. And it’s going to be broken, but yet it’s all there. You just have to learn how to fix it,” he said. “So we’ve been trying to teach people how to trouble shoot and the basic fundamentals of mechanical.”

Another market driver is what he calls “barcades,” places with pinball for patrons to play while enjoying assorted beverages. An example is Vellum Fermentation, and Hosek is proud to show his first-place award from a recent tournament at the South Side craft brewery.

He takes further pride in the stars of his machine collection, such as a Sharpshooter game autographed by co-designer Roger Sharpe, a founder of the Professional Amateur Pinball Association.

“It took me a long time, but I have the only full collection of Star Wars games in the world,” Hosek said. He completed it through a three-way trade, giving up a rare Gottlieb Charlie’s Angels electromechanical machine.

And he has almost all of Gottlieb’s System 1 solid-state offerings, lacking only a table called Roller Disco. He said someone in the area has one, but won’t part with it.

Pinball Perfection’s assemblage extends beyond its namesake machines to Pachinko, its Japanese cousin, and even video games.

From Pong to Pole Position, Defender to Dragon’s Lair: That’s entertainment, too.

For more information, visit pinballperfection.com.