This week I had the opportunity to visit the Silverball Museum Arcade in Asbury, NJ. I got to talk to Patty Barber, 53, Personnel Director of the arcade, and Tim Sulivan, 24, game technician who fixes the machines and keeps them running. They are a free play arcade, meaning you pay one upfront charge, and can play unlimited games for a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, due to the covid-19 virus, business was slow, and on Wednesday, March 18, they closed until further notice. However, this is only a bump in the road for an arcade that is confident they will come back strong, and continue to provide the community with a fun, friendly place to hang out. Let’s take a look inside the Silverball Museum Arcade.
Outside entrance view of the Silverball Pinball Museum.
1978 Silverball Mania pinball game, which shares part of its name with the arcade. It is one of the first machines you see when you walk in the door.
A row of pinball machines. Even popular movies jumped in on the pinball craze, including the Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball machine seen here.
More pinball machines line an entire row in the arcade. Their lights have an eye catching glow.
The 1988 Banzai Run pinball game. What makes this game special, is that the top half doubled as another area to play. The ball would be sent up there when it landed in a certain spot.
These pinball machines all have physical ticker score counters, as opposed to digital.
A row of some of the older machines in the arcade.
All the machines have an information card on top that tells you the year and name of the game, along with some details about it. There are also cards that display who holds the high score for each game.
Two machines with their information cards on display. The Black Knight game has an additional card stating the games 40th anniversary.
The 1981 Centaur pinball game. The stylized artwork is big and eye-catching, as a lot of pinball artwork was.
The arcade also has some classic cabinet games, including Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Galaxian.
Jerry Colonna, 42, poses in front of his arcade, Colonial Solider Arcade, Wed, Feb 26, 2020. Photo by Zachary Goldberg.
Jerry Colonna is a South Jersey Native who grew up in Mt. Laurel. He loved going to the arcade growing up, and his passion for arcades continued to grow as he did. Colonna opened The Colonial Soldier Arcade in Nov, 2018, in Deptford, NJ. His arcade is free play style, meaning guests pay one fee up front, and can play unlimited games for the day.
This wasn’t Colonna’s first foray into gaming. He founded New Jersey Gamer Con in 2014, a gaming convention located in South Jersey. I got to speak to him about this and more in our conversation. Read and listen below to hear what he had to say.
What made you interested in opening your own arcade?
Yeah so, a good friend of mine who has established the worlds largest arcade in the suburbs of Chicago, was pretty influential on my wanting to start an arcade of my own. So Doc Mack is his name.
Doc Mack opened and runs currently the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield Illinois. At the time, he and I were talking about my want to put an arcade somewhere to his arcade in New Jersey, and we’re bouncing around ideas and I came up with the idea of maybe easing into the, easing into it with the event. So we created Gamer Con then, New Jersey Gamer Con.
And with every Gamer Con I had more and more games. I would store them all year, bring them out. So with each passing event I kept growing the collection and I grew the collection to a point where I said alright, the middle of 2000, well actually probably 2017, I started looking for an area to possibly put this arcade. So I transitioned out of Gamer Con in 2018 with a partner, and eventually she took over entirely and at that time the timing was right. I found this location, it almost found me and I jumped on it.
Is there a reason you gravitated towards south Jersey?
Absolutely. Being a south Jersey native I’ve had a connection and roots in this area and when NJ Gamer Con started, and the same thing applied when the arcade started. I wanted it to be family focused for my family, rather involvement for my family. So I have two children, a total of 15 nieces and nephews, and they’re all within the age group of my two kids. So there’s a lot of kids, and then it just was something, a business that I could have them involved with. So same thing with Gamer Con, they were all involved, they would always help. It was gonna be in south Jersey specifically for that reason.
Do you have any stories of interactions with guests?
Once we opened, there was a couple occasions where early on people would come in, and usually an old timer like myself, someone comes in and they’re like taken back by the idea that this is here again, because it’s so nostalgic for so many people, they’re literally taken back to a point where one guy was standing in front of the counter and staring and he was like, this is unbelievable, and he was like, he’s like I’m almost tearing up this is all my memories right here. And it wasn’t the first, it wasn’t last guy to act like that. So that kind of stuff is like, you can’t put a price tag on something like that.
Listen to Colonna tell this story below
Anyone can get any game they want, and in their own home. Why would someone go out to an arcade today?
There is no reason why anybody should come here to play the console games for example. Ok…
Listen to Colonna give his explanation
Can you touch on the restoration process of the games?
So you take a typical board and you have rom chips and you have your capacitors your transistors mounted, and once any one of these go bad you either are pulling it out, or desoldering it and replacing it, reburning it, either which way you have to get it back to the way it was. So the difficulty is you’re not walking into any old store and picking up any one of these pieces, so you’re tracking a lot of it down online.
“…Just sourcing the equipment has become an art form.”
So you’re dealing primarily in a 3rd probably 4th 5th hand you know, market where you’re capturing an item like this whenever you can, either at another cabinet, a project cabinet that’s dilapidated but maybe it had good bones to it. Your pairing up parts from one cabinet and another, maybe two or three cabinets putting it together. You’re gonna find something hopefully on eBay, your gonna look online for market place items or Craigslist items that get listed. And then you network with other operators throughout the country and a lot of people trade amongst each other. So it too in itself, just sourcing the equipment has become an art form.
What do you think the future of arcades is?
So nationally, and especially, and specifically in NJ, more arcades are opening now than ever. I can tell you just within 5 miles of here, I’m the first of 3 arcades that will be open in this area, if you count Dave and Busters in Gloucester township and the then when you count Round One that will open here. There’s another free style, free play excuse me, free play style arcade that opened in Burlington county this year. There’s about 6 or 7 free play style arcades that opened in Newark Jersey in the past 5 to 6, 7 years. Go back 10 years there was probably one arcade, free play style arcade in New Jersey…
Hear the rest of Colonna’s story below…
What makes going to an arcade a useful experience when some people still hold a stigma against them?
I grew up through the 80’s and was a teenager in the 90’s so I saw that stigma. I heard that, you know, arcades equals hangout equals you know bad behavior, you name the elicit bad behavior. It was like skateboarding. Skateboarding in a park equaled defacing property, equaled loitering, equaled you name the elicit behavior. I mean, it always tied every activity to something that was negative, if it didn’t fit the standards of the day or the 1950’s. Anything that was coming out, and new and different, there was always a bad group of people in everything. So that kind of ruined the, the image or whatever at the time, but anybody today I think holds an arcade in like a higher regard. I think most people are like, its fascinating to see again. Like I said it’s a nostalgic thing, nobody is like, “uh, this place, this is gonna bring all the bad kids.”
There’s far more people today who look at something like this as something they treasure.
I think sensationalism kinda, you know a headline here and there about this or that and everybody can make assumptions, can make a generalization about something based on the news cycle, and the social media, the way things spread, and the way things get out there, people exaggerate the real information. Anybody who would hold something against something like this, I think those are a small percentage of people. There are far fewer of them today than there were ever before. There’s far more people today who look at something like this as something they treasure.
What’s your favorite arcade game?
I have like a little bit of an emotional connection to a game called carnival…
Hear Colonna’s story behind his favorite game…
I was a little bit cocky about it because here I’m a little guy and I was just beating these guys asses at this game
Hear Colonna talk about another one of his favorite games
Ready Up NJ 