Pinball museum visit brings back arcade memories

A few weeks ago, my wonderful wife, Cecelia, (who frequently asks each week if I have written about how wonderful she is my column…LOL), was out of town for the weekend, and I had gotten everything that I had really needed to get done at the office finished that Saturday in the early afternoon.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

I found myself in the unusual position of not having anything that I had to do or anywhere I had to be, which nowadays is kind of a weird feeling that I am sure many of you can relate to especially in the age of COVID-19.

After taking a few minutes to contemplate what to do with myself for the rest of the day, I decided to head over and try the new Pinball Museum of Corbin.

The pinball museum opened in early August and features 65 pinball machines of all types from classic old machines to newer releases, In addition, it has a number of classic video games, such as Donkey Kong, Joust, Defender, Ms. Pacman, Galaga and Frogger.

This isn’t some stuffy museum where you can’t touch anything. For $15 per person, you can enter and play as much as you would like, except for about four special machines where they charge $1 per play with the proceeds going to charity. For $20, you can purchase a day pass, which allows you to go in and out as much as you want during the day, which is the option that I chose and the one that I would recommend.

Spending a few hours playing video games brought me back to thoughts of my childhood and teenage years where I spent more than a few hours in video arcades playing games.

I think I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade when Pepperoni’s Playhouse opened, which was a now defunct pizza place over where Ollie’s is now in Corbin that had a good size arcade in the back of the store. If you brought in your report card, they would give you free tokens for each ‘A’ that you received, and being a straight ‘A’ student – in everything but handwriting that is – I got quite a few tokens every six weeks. It was a blast.

After eating pizza with my parents and getting my free tokens my sister and I would head back to the arcade where I think I played about every video game in the place at some point or another.

There was a really cool Tron video game, which was based on the movie, that I really enjoyed in addition to Spy Hunter, which was this really cool driving game where you drove this James Bond type sports car, complete with machine guns built into the headlights. It had bad guys trying to shoot you or run you off the road, and you could get cool upgrades, such as oil slicks, smoke screens and rocket launchers.

Pepperoni’s Playhouse also featured some other classic video games, like Pacman, Galaga, Donkey Kong and a slew of others.

At any rate, I tried my hand again at a few of these classic video games when I visited the Pinball Museum of Corbin.

I am every bit as bad as I remembered at Donkey Kong, Ms. Pacman and Joust. I never could master those three in particular. I was still pretty decent at Galaga and Defender though.

Regardless of whether I was any good at the games or not, I still loved playing them for a few hours.

I also tried my hand at the vast majority of pinball machines in the place too. I have to admit that there is a lot more nuance and strategy to pinball than I remembered with having to time when and where you hit the silver ball in order to flip it where you wanted it to go.

It was a really fun, relaxing way to spend a few spare hours on a Saturday afternoon.

The Pinball Museum of Corbin is located on Main Street near The Depot on Main and The Caboose Sports Tavern.