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For customers who want help with making game-room choices, Mr. Young's Web site offers packages: mixes
of equipment at various prices. Mr. Young's basic combination, at $6,550, consists of two machines: any new Stern-made pinball machine and an upright Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga video game. (BMI's price for the two,
if bought separately, is $6,750.) His most expensive package, at $43,275, includes eight arcade machines, a jukebox, foosball and an air hockey table. That is $2,000 less than BMI's price for all 11 items if sold individually.
The discounts for video games that are played on televisions can be much greater, even within months of their debuts. Still, the TV-based games are typically no more than $50 apiece to begin with, and the game console that is hooked up to the television usually sells for less than $150. A busy resale market for the systems and games offers many bargains, but those products are generally aimed at young children, teenagers and young adults who are often on tight budgets, relative to those of arcade-game buyers.
"My typical customer is between the age of 35 and 65 and has income of at least $75,000 a year," Mr. Young said.
Bargains are scarce in the market for arcade-style games.
"You certainly won't find us selling a pinball machine at a discount," Gary Stern, president of Stern Pinball, said. "I'd rather take one apart and use it for scrap in other machines than sell it at a discount." His company, based in Melrose, Ill., outside Chicago, is the nation's only surviving manufacturer of pinball machines after the market contracted over the last three decades. "The country used to crank out 100,000 pinball machines a year," he said. "Now it's about 10,000, all from us."
His hottest product this year is the Elvis model. "We're known for licensed designs with beautiful artwork, lighting and sound, like 'Terminator III,' " which features the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said.
In the last five years, Mr. Stern's residential sales have doubled, to 20 percent of his market. "Bars and bowling alleys are still big on pinball machines," he said, "but more people want them at home."
Nostalgia runs so high, Mr. Stern said, that even though he normally adjusts machines destined for home use to play free, one customer insisted that they require coins. "He just likes to put in money, I guess to exactly replicate the arcade experience of his youth," Mr. Stern said.
As Mr. Gabriele, the mortgage broker in Stormville, N.Y., recaptures his past, he has the company of his parents, his wife and his children, who range in age from 1 to 16. "We'll play for hours," he said. "All my kids' friends come here, which is nice."
But even Mr. Gabriele acknowledges that he sometimes welcomes a change of scenery: "I might feel like saying, 'Hey, let's go out somewhere.' Not that anyone
would listen."
