Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame: Tim Arnold’s 700-Machine Nonprofit Museum
Tim Arnold started running pinball machines in Michigan in 1972 at age sixteen, opened Pinball Pete’s arcade in Lansing in 1976, and eventually moved his collection to Las Vegas. In 2006, Arnold opened the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame as a nonprofit project of the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club in a Tropicana Avenue strip mall — about two hundred restored machines on free play, with all profits donated to charity. The collection outgrew its space, moved to a larger Tropicana location in 2009, and finally landed at a purpose-built 28,000-square-foot warehouse at 4925 Las Vegas Boulevard South in 2021.
More than seven hundred pinball machines are now on free play at the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame, all maintained by volunteers, and Arnold runs the operation entirely on donations and quarter-by-quarter coin drops. The museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that donates one hundred percent of profits to the Salvation Army of Southern Nevada and other Catholic charities. Arnold has been vocal in interviews that he draws no salary; the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame exists as a working museum and a charitable operation in equal measure.
Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame in the Las Vegas Valley
The current Las Vegas Boulevard South building sits across from the Mandalay Bay area at the south end of the Strip — a deliberate location chosen to pull both tourist and local foot traffic. The Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame is the largest publicly accessible pinball collection in the world, and its Yelp page carries over twenty-four hundred reviews and more than five thousand photographs. For the Las Vegas Valley, Tim Arnold’s operation is one of the most unlikely cultural anchors the city has produced — a working nonprofit museum that just happens to have the deepest pinball collection on Earth.
- Trade
- Museum & Attraction (Nonprofit)
- Founder
- Tim Arnold
- Founded
- 2006 (current location 2021)
- Address
- 4925 Las Vegas Blvd S, Las Vegas, NV 89119
- Status
- 501(c)(3) nonprofit
- Website
- pinballmuseum.org