Movies of War

1 of 3 2 of 3 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter. Not to be base and crude when speaking of an obscenely beautiful temple of worship, but holy fucking shit.If that’s your first reaction stepping into the newly opened VanCity Pinball & Arcade, you are by no means alone.Owner and long-time pinball aficionado Angelo Muro has filled the room with nearly 70 lovingly restored tables, arranged in more or less chronological order. Start with 1975’s Wizard, inspired by the Who’s rock opera Tommy and one of the last machines of the electro-mechanical era.And then work your way up to recent game-changers like Jersey Jack Pinball’s, a 2013 wide-table stunner that comes complete with a spinning farmhouse and melting witch. Or Stern’s much-lauded Godzilla, from 2021, where you find yourself on the side of Japan’s most famous fire-breathing lizard while defending Earth from the invading Xiliens.Spanning the years in between are some of the most classic tables ever produced: The Addams Family, Road Show, The Twilight Zone, Funhouse, Fish Tales, White Water, Medieval Madness, and, well, you get the idea. All of them in one place in an era when finding a pinball machine in your favourite dive bar or pool hall is no longer a guaranteed thing?Interviewed at VanCity Pinball & Arcade, located in a 1932 building at Venables and Commercial, Muro says that, even as he started loading machines into the space, he wasn’t totally sure his vision was going to connect with Vancouverites.“I guess my expectations were a bit low,” he says. “So I kind of kept this, not a secret, but more a place where no one could look inside. Then some of my pinball friends came in and they were blown away—very complimenting. It’s very emotional to have such positive reactions right away, because believe it or not, a lot of people have the same reaction when they walk in. Sometimes there’s just silence for a couple of seconds as they take it all in.”While a friend has contributed a couple of machines, almost all of the pinball tables belong to Muro, who has spent the past 20 years sourcing them up and down the West Coast. In the early days of building his empire, some resourcefulness was required.“It was harder to find them because there was no Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist,” he recalls. “So you have to be more gritty. You’d go to kind of dive bars and places where the business wasn’t going that great.”Those machines would often be run by a single operator in the area, and would have a phone number on them for servicing.“So I would phone the number on the machine and ask, ‘Do you have any broken machines that you don’t want? I don’t care if it’s broken or not—I want it,’ ” Muro says. “And sometimes they’d go, ‘I’ve got one over here—come meet me at my warehouse.’ So that’s how I did it—by building trust with all these operators in the States."And even here locally," he continues, "I became kind of friends with all these different operators, and anytime they wanted to dump a game, they knew that, as long as the price was right, the condition didn’t matter to me. When someone’s trying to get rid of a machine, most buyers want a working machine.” MURO'S LOVE OF of pinball didn't begin in an arcade (“I never went as a teen because my parents wouldn’t give me the quarters”) but instead in a friend’s basement.“Fast forward to my 20s," he recalls, "and my best friend’s mom came downstairs when we were gaming and goes, ‘Would you guys like a pinball machine?’ We kind of looked at each other and went, ‘Sure, that sounds cool.' And so she got a pinball machine from someone that was moving and needed to unload it.”The table that arrived—Space Shuttle—was a Williams machine from 1984, and one of the first multi-ball units to hit the North American market.At first Muro was happy to be playing something different from video games, his main goal being to keep the ball alive as long as possible. Then he began reading the instructions found on every machine, and realized that one of the most fascinating things about pinball is that strategy matters, especially when the end goal is either unlimited replays or the high score.In addition to teaching Muro that there was a better way to play pinball, Space Shuttle was the machine that started him down the path to becoming a collector. When a flipper stopped working, he and his friend went looking for a fix, having no idea what they were doing. Inside the coinbox was a number to call for troubleshooting. While he doesn’t remember who answered, the important thing was someone did and began working him through possible problems.“He was like, ‘Okay, you checked the fuses under the game, but how about the back box? Did you take off the backglass?’ ” Muro recalls. “I remember that day—I found the backglass key in the coin door, opened it up, and it was like a rat’s nest of working with all these boards and electronics, and lo and behold there were these fuses, with more than one burned out. And so we fixed them.”Inspired, Muro stripped the machine right down, replacing the rubber components on bumpers and flippers to make them bouncier, and cleaning up the playing field, including having it covered with clear coating from an auto-body shop that made the play notably faster.“It changed the machine,” he marvels. “I loved what the whole process did to the machine. And so from then on I became addicted to looking for machines to buy and restore and make better. I was around 20, probably had a minimum wage job and going to school, but I was also looking for broken machines to buy."On Friday and Saturday nights," Muro continues, "I would work on them with one of my best friends, Grant. That’s what I loved to do—when my friends were going out drinking, I was playing pinball on machines I’d fixed."Eventually, his electronic wizardry would help build a skill set that landed him a well-paying job with BC Hydro as an electrical engineer. With that came perks—a steady paycheque, job security, and a guaranteed pension. But as he continued to fix up pinball machines in his spare time—filling his parents’ basement with machines and placing restored tables in pubs and pop-ups—he started to feel like he was working two jobs, one more fun than the other.And so a decade ago, he made a decision.“The hard thing was not quitting BC Hydro. It was telling my dad, ‘I’m quitting BC Hydro,’ ” he says with a laugh. “He’s an old-school guy who says, ‘Work hard. Get an education and get a good job—one of the pension kind.’ It was like, ‘I’m leaving my great-paying pension job to do this pinball thing,' which he never understood in any case.”He’s quick to note that he completely understood his dad’s concern, and wondered himself if he was making the right career call.“It wasn’t an easy decision,” he shares. “It was the first time I ever talked to a counsellor, and that was really eye-opening and helpful. As a side note, I think that everyone should talk to a therapist or counsellor or whatever. Anyhow, the research that I did said people would always regret the thing they didn’t do, not the things they did do. And so everything pointed to ‘You follow the dream and take the risk.’ ” VANCITY PINBALL & ARCADE came together quickly. Knowing that he was running out of space to store the machines he’d collected, Muro also knew that he didn’t want to have to sell them.“I’ve got a lot of attachment to them,” he admits. “And once I sell them, I won’t see them again. Because there’s no pinball bar in Vancouver, I can’t just go play them somewhere.”While he’d thought about starting a dedicated pinball hall over the years, nothing felt right. That changed when an entrepreneurial-minded acquaintance suggested he check out 1739 Venables Street, which over the years has been used for everything from Christmas pop-up markets to punk rock concerts to wedding receptions. Because the building is scheduled for redevelopment, there was no years-long lease to worry about.“I was like, ‘Wow—high ceilings, big area. I like this. So I’m going to give it a shot.’ It all happened in three weeks.”As the pinball machines were moved, Muro’s wife Alicia helped him decorate the space, hanging framed posters above the tables, and creating a Mars Attacks floor-to-ceiling mural on one of the walls.Muro is something of a doting parent to his ever-demanding, part-mechanical part solid-state children. Pop by VanCity Pinball & Arcade and you’ll find him on the floor amid all of the flashing lights and glorious sonic chaos, wearing a headlamp, fixing tables in real-time when they break down, and offering tips should you look like you’re struggling to master the complexities of a particular game.No one likes to admit who their favourite child is. But of the nearly 70 tables at VanCity Pinball & Arcade, Muro acknowledges that White Water, The Addams Family, and Medieval Madness might be his number ones.“White Water is my personal favourite,” he says. “It’s lighthearted and it’s humourous—I like the sound effects of the Bigfoot, and there’s a bit of risk/reward where you can get five-times jackpots. Also, it’s easy to play one-handed. I’m a pretty good player so, yeah, I sometimes have to play people one-handed.”The pinball ace acknowledges that the opening week of VanCity Pinball & Arcade was more wildly successful than he’d dared hope.The room, which he sees as a pilot project for something bigger down the road, operates on a flat flee, with no quarters, loonies, or twoonies required. For $15 you get a half-hour of play on all machines, including a small selection of video games that includes Pac-Man and Buck Hunter.For those with hours to kill, and tables to conquer—Jersey Jack Pinball’s Guns N’ Roses, Gottlieb’s Roller Disco and Stern’s, um, eye-catching Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons—$35 gets you unlimited play all day.To visit on a recent Saturday was to see machines occupied by tattooed East Van beardos, bespectacled computer programmers, basement-dwelling Call of Duty disciples, corpse-coloured goths, Mohawked punks, and Canucks-jerseyed jocks.Perhaps most exciting were the kids, who were either righteously sugar-jacked or understandably thrilled to be discovering the joy of a game that looked dead in the water at the turn of the millennium.Muro acknowledges he first fell under the spell of pinball as the sun seemed to be setting on a pastime that endured from the '50s to the '90s. Taking its place at the turn of the millenium was the meteoric rise of video games which—thanks to Xbox and PlayStation—suddenly offered arcade-quality graphics at home.Driving home the sea change in taste, pinball giant Williams stopped making new machines in 1999.“What was really sad is that they closed pinball down because their slot machines were more profitable,” Muro says. “As I started getting into pinball, I watched a lot of documentaries, and you would have world-class designers like Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie—who designed for Williams—going ‘Pinball is dying, and I’m really scared for the future.’”Things got even worse around 2008 and 2009. Stern had to lay off most of its staff, including those responsible for designing classic tables like Pirates of the Caribbean and Indiana Jones, both of which are at VanCity Pinball & Arcade.But gradually, in the middle of last decade, Muro started to see a shift where the world came back to a game that he never stopped loving. He has a theory why.“As things became more and more digital, it became the mainstream,” he offers. “Even video games are cool and tech-y. I think there was a thing where people started to want things that were tactile, tangible, and something they could touch. And that is pinball."Video games are cool," Muro continues, "but you can play them on your phone or computer, and almost replicate what it felt like in an arcade. With pinball, it’s physical and mechanical and you can’t replicate it. Unless you come to a place like here.” Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com