EVAN PHILLIPPE: The first thing you see walking up to the museum is our window front, which is kind of small and set back from the street.

ERIC JOHNSON: This is Evan Phillippe. His museum doesn't sound like any other you've been to.

EVAN: Half the noise is patrons enjoying themselves, yelling, screaming in joy, screaming in unhappiness, or yelling in sadness at a machine because the ball drained right down the middle.

ERIC: At the Pacific Pinball Museum, your paid admission fee gets you unlimited access to more than a hundred playable pinball machines, but this place is about more than just play.

EVAN: We don't just say, "Here's a game." We present the game within the context of a decade, and this is the artwork that's inspiring, and this is what's being referenced in it.

ERIC: There's even a first-of-its-kind feminist exhibit called Beyond the Backglass.

EVAN: The first exhibit to ever celebrate women's contributions to pinball through engineering, art, mechanics, software.

ERIC: One of the games in this exhibit is Xenon, featuring the work of Grammy Award-nominated musician Suzanne Ciani.

SUZANNE CIANI: I was very interested in getting the whole composition to work, to think of the pinball as actually playing a piece. Because I think to add excitement to the game that the background sound should speed up as you play the game.

EVAN: She worked on this game in 1980 for Bally. She was the first woman that was given carte blanche to do a real deep aspect of a game, which was all the sound, voice, and music.

ERIC: To a lot of people, these games are time wasters, little diversions. But after you go to this museum, you start to see art, science, history, culture, technological breakthroughs, and much more. This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast, can a museum still be a museum when it's noisy and bright and also extremely fun? What does it take to keep these old machines playable and working decades after they came out? And how can pinball unlock memories from the past? We hear from Evan Phillippe right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by Transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, Overcast, and more. Go to Transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial. When you sign up for the Call 'Em Like Museum newsletter at likemuseum.com, you'll get weekly updates on all of our new episodes and you're automatically entered in our gift shop giveaway. Our 12 prize packages include items from the museums featured on this season of the show. It's free, it's easy, and it only takes a few seconds. Just head to likemuseum.com to sign up. That's likemuseum.com. Good luck.

So I like to start off by asking everyone about their relationship with museums. What does the word museum mean to you?

EVAN: That's a great question. Wow. Ever since I was a little kid, I've just really enjoyed history to a huge degree, to the point where I took too many classes in college and only needed a couple units but kept taking them and almost got to a minor in history, but just really enjoy it. Have gone to museums my whole life, whether they're big or small, all over California and a lot of the other Western states. And I really enjoy the small kind of homegrown little municipal museums that are in an old house that really get overlooked. I really believe they have an important cultural and historical mission and you always learn something and it makes it fun. And that's always been really important to me.

ERIC: Where did you grow up and what was the first museum that you remember going to?

EVAN: I grew up on the bottom of the peninsula near the South Bay, so Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos area. Wow, the first museum I remember going to, the first one that really left a mark, was the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose.

ERIC: The Egyptian Museum.

EVAN: The Egyptian Museum, which is absolutely under the radar, has one of the largest collections of Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt and London, and it's in San Jose. It's absolutely amazing. I remember going there as a kid with school on a field trip in, I think, second grade. I know I went to museums before that. The Academy of Sciences, probably, as a 2- or 3-year-old, but the Rosicrucian in San Jose left such a huge impression on me because of course Egyptian art and history is absolutely fascinating and carefully recorded and wonderful to just dive into. So that one really left a mark on me.

ERIC: Do you remember specifically what was said to you or how it was presented? What was it that triggered this feeling of either wonder, or what did it do for you at that age, do you think?

EVAN: That was probably the age of everything. You grow up in California and about the oldest piece of California history you can really touch with and connect outside of all the Native American history would be something like the California missions that are about 230, 240 years old. So it really stops in the mid-late 1700s. So to be in front of even a minor statue that's 2-, 3-, 4,000 years old is absolutely mind-blowing. And they have a recreation of a tomb that you can walk into. And since I've never been to Egypt and I've never seen one myself, that's as close as I've been even now to this day as I've ever been to something like that. So they had a really nice setup and exhibit, but it was probably the age of everything that was really hard to wrap my head around as a kid.

ERIC: So the Pacific Pinball Museum, you deal in much more recent history. How many pinball machines do you have in the museum currently?

EVAN: We have 105 that are playable. And if we count the non-playable games from the '20s and '30s and '40s that are static exhibits — they all work but they're a little too delicate for patron play — that's another 15 or so. So about 120 games.

ERIC: The idea of clocking in, going to work every day, being surrounded by more than a hundred pinball machines, sounds like the sort of job that a 10-year-old would make up. How did you get into this line of work? How did you wind up at the museum?

EVAN: I got lucky. I have a marketing background and they had a job posting just pre-COVID for operations and marketing support. I was really familiar with social media and it was only two blocks from where I lived. I was looking to do something a lot closer to my kids, be much more involved in their schooling and upbringing. I was in the PTA for their school, so I thought I'd take a look. I had been to the museum before I knew about pinball. I did not know the depth of its impact on culture and history and how you could tell what game [and] what year it was from by the age and the look of the game, the pop art that's on the game and how that was social commentary. I was just really lucky, to be honest. I feel very lucky because it's a great organization with great people and a great mission and super unique.

ERIC: Yeah, absolutely. I've been to the museum several times now — I've been very lucky to go — but for someone who has not been to the museum yet, I want you to describe what they see and hear walking in through the front door, and then take us through the different rooms and exhibits at the museum.

EVAN: Sure. The first thing you see walking up to the museum is our window front, which is kind of small and set back from the street. At night it's beautiful. The games glow and they're jewel-like, so at night they're incredible and it really draws people in. But you almost certainly hear bells and some of the voices of the games and really a lot of the patrons, half the noise is patrons enjoying themselves yelling, screaming in joy, screaming in unhappiness, or yelling in sadness at a machine because a ball drained right down the middle. And that's really a huge amount of the fun of the museum is hearing people's reactions to games. But when you first walk in, you'll see our front counter where we process patrons, you'll see our static exhibit of games from the '20s and '30s, which is part of a gambling exhibit and pinball evolution exhibit.

And that leads into our history room, which is games from the 1940s to the late 1960s, including Humpty Dumpty, which was the first pinball game that had flippers, from 1947, and people can play that. And it's not just a static exhibit, it's a playable game from 1947.

ERIC: That's real history there. The first one with flippers. Yeah.

EVAN: And it's really fun. The flippers are on their sides. They didn't know what they were doing. It was a gimmick. It was just an attempt to make this game more interesting because you just shook it before that. And it ended up taking off because people finally felt like they had some sort of input and control in the game. Maybe I could get better at this like you get better at tennis or baseball if you play it more. And [it] never looked back. So now everything of course has flippers. So you walk through the history room and we have these beautiful murals on the walls by a really celebrated artist from the Bay Area, Dan Fontes, who recently passed away. He did the giraffes in Oakland as well that are on the posts underneath the freeway, really famous. You walk through that room, you get to our women's exhibit, which we're really proud of.

The women's exhibit is the first exhibit to ever celebrate women's contributions to pinball through engineering, art, mechanics, software. And it's the first exhibit of its type anywhere in the world. We're super proud of it. Great games, really due for focus, considering a lot of games are very white male gaze oriented, especially from the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and now it's much more universal. You walk through that room, you get to our oddball exhibit, which is one of my personal favorites. And that's an exhibit of games that had new divisive gimmicks and they're too divisive so they never get done again. So they're one-off games where we tried something new, like someone had to try flippers at one point, it took off, maybe this will be the next flipper. And it ended up not being the next flipper. So you have games that are extra wide, extra tall, extra small, faster, slower.

You have games that are upright like arcade cabinets that are played off of mirrors to take up less space. Incredible stuff there. Super rare, can't find it anywhere. It's one of my favorite exhibits. All the games are really screwy. Going through that room to the very back of the museum, we have our Lucky Juju room. The Lucky Juju was actually the initial name of the private arcade — which eventually grew into the museum — that was just in that back room.

ERIC: This was 20, 25 years ago, right?

EVAN: About 23 years ago.

ERIC: Yeah.

EVAN: And you would only come there on Friday nights. You would go in through the back door through the parking lot just to a single room with one jukebox and about 12 games from the 1960s and '70s. And that's really where everything grew from. So that's a special room. We've got a good mix of games in that room, all really exciting stuff. And you kind of horseshoe back on the other side of the museum from there to a 1970s room, which has really great games like Sea Witch and Harlem Globetrotters and Evel Knievel and my favorite jukebox, which has a lot of '70s and '80s music on it, so I'm aging myself.

And then through that room, you get into our modern room, which is games from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. And it's still being produced today, so we have games from 2026, but we have some very special games from what's considered the last Renaissance era of pinball, which is the late '80s to the mid '90s. Games like Funhouse and Twilight Zone and Addams Family, incredible games that everyone loves. They really hit a stride. It was the perfect balance of speed, playability. That's a fantastic room and usually our busiest room.

ERIC: This is not an arcade, even though it might look like that at first blush to a visitor. Could you talk about the effect that you want to create for people who come to Pacific Pinball Museum and how you distinguish yourself from just a pinball arcade?

EVAN: There are plenty of, even museum in name, other arcades out there that will have a collection. Maybe they even have a collection that has a variation of age ranges of games. They have EM games, games from the '50s, and modern games. We have a really strong investment in having games from the 1940s to the 2020s and covering every era, not just a couple examples, but dedicating rooms to these decades. And we also do things like put the games in chronological order, make sure there's a topper on top of that game that describes why that game's important, who the artist was, who the designer was, the manufacturer, the year, some important facts about that game. We try to rotate the games often to keep them fresh, and we have so many that we're able to do that routinely.

But with the murals and the artwork, we have dedicated curated exhibits, so we really try to lean into being a true museum as [opposed] to, say, a private collection that someone has and they're bringing it out to the public, which is great. And that makes pinball fun and it's bringing pinball back into the popular lexicon. But we're really trying to educate folks. We really try to tie it to STEM backgrounds, tie into the culture, the history, talk about pinball going back to the mid-1700s when it really had its ultimate ancestor and how that's evolved to the game we know today. So hopefully people have a lot of fun playing, they reconnect, they have a great social time, but they accidentally learn something in the process. And that means a lot to us.

ERIC: Accidental learning is one of my favorite things. It's where you can do ... It was Randy Pausch who did "The Last Lecture." Have you seen "The Last Lecture" or read the book?

EVAN: No.

ERIC: He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and he gives this very famous lecture where the idea is like, what if you could give one lecture before you die? And he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And so he's like, no, I'm literally going to give the last lecture. And he talked a lot about what he called the head fake. I like the idea of bringing someone in under the premise of like, yeah, we're going to play some pinball and you accidentally learn about history or you get exposed to the exhibit you're talking about highlighting the women's contribution to pinball. You get them to think differently than how they were when they came in.

And especially with our free play model, if you went to a normal pinball parlor that still used quarters and you saw games from the 1950s or '60s, but you're used to playing games from the '80s, '90s or 2000s, you might say, well, I only have a certain amount of money. I'm only going to play the games I'm familiar with. I'm going to play these newer games that I think are fast and fun and exciting and bright, and I'm just not going to play those older ones.

Because we have our model of free play where you come in and you have that single fee so you can play whatever you want, if your favorite modern game is being played by someone, you might as well just play something in the meantime. And we have these people branch out and explore other eras and they find out they're just as much fun. We have people in their teens and 20s who end up playing games from the 1950s and '60s and adore them because of the different style of play. It's the same game, but slower, five balls instead of three, simpler scoring and mechanics, and they're super fun. So we don't get pigeonholed or folks don't get stuck in a certain era of games that they're familiar with or they think they'll like. And it turns out that most folks like all the eras. If you like pinball, you are going to like something about a game from the '40s the way you like something from a game from the 2020s.

Another thing that you do that I think is really interesting is that you have these volunteer repair nights. Can you talk about where that idea came from and what that does for you as a museum?

EVAN: It's huge. And as a nonprofit, it's really absolutely necessary. We genuinely couldn't operate without a volunteer base that is supporting us. Like most nonprofits that are run correctly, margins are very tight. You flip most of what you make back directly into your mission of preservation and bringing things to folks, and that's what we do. So we genuinely wouldn't have the budget to maintain a onsite staff of five or six repair people just to repair things all the time. So every Monday is the only day of the week that we're closed at the museum, and that's what we call our fix-it night. And our fix-it night is where we have between six and 12 volunteers come in. We have an overall pool of about 20, and it rotates and fluctuates just depending upon when folks have time available. There are a lot of retired mechanical and electrical engineers, some folks that worked in the video game industry at arcades in the past, and that's really how we function.

That Monday night is the five hours between about 5 and 10 is really when we repair everything that's broken throughout the week. The games are super mechanically intensive. They get played a lot. That ball is actually pretty heavy. A lot of people have not held a pinball, but it is significant and it is going around the playfield quickly and it's hitting plastic and it's hitting mechanical items that are moving and counting scores, so they break. We keep a running log and we tackle that game by game every Monday night, and we have a really incredible success rate of getting almost 100% back up by the end of Monday nights. And that's really what we owe the patrons in terms of a gaming experience. The games need to work correctly. They need to score correctly. They need to have a good experience because we do have other people in the field that run very large arcades or even things that are referred to as museums — but maybe just a name or maybe just for tax reasons — that don't maintain the games the same way.

And that makes it a difficult experience. It's not great for pinball if you walk up to a game, spend money on it, and it doesn't work correctly. So we really try to make sure every patron has a good experience. We're just deeply indebted to these people. The volunteers are really what make the museum work.

ERIC: It's really telling that it's every Monday. I mean, lots of museums have restoration where they have some piece of artwork that's damaged and maybe every hundred years or so they need to restore it. But you have people in there every single week, which really goes to show how much damage, like you're saying, how physical your collection is. Yeah.

EVAN: It is. With something like a video game, yes, you're talking about a screen that might go out at some point. You're talking about buttons and joysticks. With a game like pinball, it really is more like a watch or an engine that's running. So there's a lot that needs to be tended to. What's really wonderful about these games like old cars and like a lot of mechanical items, they actually function better when they're getting played a lot. And so we're lucky that we have a pretty good attendance rate throughout the week, no matter the age of game, because they actually really are happier when they get played a lot. They seize up and they freeze when they don't. So they get exercise the way they need to, but plastics become 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, they do crack. So thankfully we're able to get a lot of replacements for those.

ERIC: Why is that, that games are happier when they're being played?

EVAN: They just have so many moving components and they use dry lubrication. You would think that everything inside these games would be just dipped in some sort of Tri-Flow or some sort of silicone lubricant to keep them moving, but they really would get too grimy. The game, the ball itself, and all of the mechanics in the game actually create grit over time and that would just get really goopy. So really the only thing that's keeping all these contacts open and everything moving is that they don't have an opportunity to sit for a really long time and develop, say, a surface rust or get stuck in a position. So the more they get played, the happier they are, especially the EM, the electromechanical-era games from the '60s and '70s, are so happy if they just get played a lot. [They're] very reliable, and because they were in bars and billiards halls originally, they're also built to take a punch.

They're strong games. You can actually be pretty rough with them and you won't break them. They actually like it.

ERIC: They're used to dealing with people trying to tilt them and trying to nudge the ball in a certain way. Yeah.

EVAN: Kick, tilt, push, shove, depending upon how you play. I'm terrible at it. I tilt out the second I touch a game other than the flippers, so I don't, but there's some people that are incredibly skilled at it.

ERIC: I think for the longevity of your collection, it's good that you don't serve alcohol at the museum. (laugh)

EVAN: Mostly from the perspective that they can't get poured into games. If you go to a modern pinball game in the popular model that exists now, the barcade, which is really meant for millennials and older Gen Xers that are used to arcades but really want to get a drink too and be social, very often you'll end up with beer drinks on those games and they actually have beer seals that run around the glass, which keeps it from leaking in too much. And so did the old games, but now that beer seal's 60 or 70 years old, it's not super reliable. But we also lean very heavily towards having kids into the museum as well, which keeps us from doing something like that. And it's really important for us to keep that pump primed with a new generation that likes pinball, becomes familiar with it, knows what it is, enjoys it, so we can make sure that pinball stays relevant and exciting for folks.

ERIC: Do you have a museum story? Maybe there was a time you got lost, a time that you were moved to tears, or a time you saw something that blew your mind. No matter what your story is, I want to hear it. Head to likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." It might end up on a future episode. That's likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit "subscribe" there too. Thank you so much.

Can you talk about the people who come to the museum every week? For someone like me, I'm a millennial, I grew up loving the idea of going to the video game arcade in the mall. I'm the target audience for what you're doing, but I'm wondering about this next generation, kids who have grown up with access to playing games on the iPad. What is their reaction to playing pinball and how do you get them engaged in this very different style of gaming?

EVAN: We really do have a huge age variation. Pre-pandemic, 2019 and earlier, we actually leaned heavy in an older demographic, folks in their 60s and older who remembered playing pinball in bars and billiards halls in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. And we still have that crowd, but post-pandemic, it's really shifted to the Gen X [and] millennial crowd and their families. So you have Gen Xers and millennials who are bringing their own kids to play pinball and sometimes their parents. The most magnificent thing is when we get three generations of the same family in the museum playing, and you would assume grandpa would be on the older games and the kids would be on the games from the '70s or '80s and the grandkids would be on the games from the 2020s. It's actually all completely opposite. It's the kids on the '50s games, the grandparents are on the new ones, the parents are floating between everything, checking on people. It's fantastic. We have such a great response from kids coming in because pinball is so unique. It is something between a sport and a video game.

Because [in] a video game, you're dealing entirely with a screen, you're trying to make points. With a sport, you're generally outside, but you can be inside and you're doing something in real physical time, in a real physical space, and you have a ball or there's a lot of movement, and pinball's in between. It has both and it's in a finite space. You're indoors, you're comfortable, you're out of the sun, you're out of the rain, and it's tactile. There's so much feedback from the game. You can hear and feel the game. What you're doing is in real time. Every game is like a snowflake. Every game that gets played is entirely different. The ball moves and hits something in a different order in a different way. It's incredibly simple. You just have two buttons. There's no six or seven buttons. You don't have to learn combinations like you would in a video game.

You're really just trying to keep that ball from draining. So even kids who have never played their entire lives who are 7, 8, or even if they're under 20, I don't know if someone's played pinball until they come into our museum, if they've played before, you pick it up in two or three minutes. And you very often start in an era of game that is flattering to your play style, whether it's the slower games with five balls from the '50s, '60s, '70s, or if it's the newer games with three that play a little faster, but are forgiving if a ball drains immediately, it'll give you another one, make sure they don't turn you off by being too brutal at the beginning. And once they find that game, they branch out into the other eras that they like. It's really incredible to see. Very often, especially during the summer like now, when we have field trips and summer camps visiting, a 5-, 7-, or 8-year-old's first game of pinball might be a game from 1952 and they really enjoy it and they figure it out really quickly.

ERIC: There's some intuitive aspect to just hit the ball, make it go someplace, and then see what happens. It's sort of like ... I saw someone online once said, every baby is a scientist. The're just constantly running science experiments, just dropping stuff off the high chair and see what happens.

EVAN: A hundred percent. It is so much fun, and I will fully admit this. I love pinball. I enjoy it. I will never claim to be a great player. And if I do something cool on the playing field, it's generally by accident. If someone else is watching who knows how this game is working and says, "Wow, you just finished these three steps to accomplish this," that's great. I did it by accident, but it's still fun. And that same experience happens with kids. They roll by accident into doing something really cool on a game. And then once you've done that, you're kind of hooked and you start playing different variations of that game from different eras and you discover each game has its own personality and you find ones you like. Maybe it's an extra-challenging game and that's why you like it. Or maybe it is just an easy game and you can kind of zone out and play it and enjoy it. You can really play with what you need at that moment because we have so many and the game's so different from game to game.

ERIC: When I was visiting most recently, you were telling me about your favorite game, Magic Circle, which has kind of a Romani theme and it's from the '50s or '60s, right?

EVAN: It's from the late '60s.

ERIC: The late '60s. And it's the first one on your right as you walk into the first room, and it's also extremely difficult. Is that a coincidence? Did you do that on purpose to put a really hard game right up front?

EVAN: We really shouldn't have that one up front.

ERIC: (laugh)

EVAN: It just works out in terms of the age range and it is a fun game to play if you know how to attack it. It does happen to be one of the first games. I do think it is probably one of the hardest games in the museum. I really get a big kick out of the fact it has this happy, friendly, bright-and-poppy gypsy theme, and then it just punches you in the face. Its design is absolutely diabolical. It just gets shot down the middle. The flippers are spaced out extra far. The kickers just throw things in the outlanes, the tilt's hypersensitive. It's just a brutal game and that's actually what makes it fun. I enjoy the juxtaposition between the artwork and the game play. It's really fun on that game.

ERIC: Yeah. What is your favorite thing that you've heard a visitor to the museum say?

EVAN: Anytime a visitor plays a game and has to run back up to the front desk to tell us what their experience was.

ERIC: Ohh.

EVAN: That happens pretty routinely where someone ... say, Safecracker, which is a relatively rare game we have from the '90s. It's a smaller playfield that gives you a coin if you accomplish certain things in that game. You don't run out of balls in that game. It's actually a timer because you're trying to safecrack. And you get a coin, and it doesn't just give you the coin, it actually rolls out of the head and you have to grab it during gameplay and try to put it in the front to accomplish a different level. So you're scrambling to grab this coin while you're playing, and very often people will just run up to the front and say, "I got a coin. What is this? What happened? What did I do? What am I supposed to do with this?" That's always really exciting.

We used to have a game called Orbiter One. It's currently being repaired. It was a game designed by NASA engineers in the 1980s, and most people think there's magnets involved because of how weirdly the ball acts in this game. It's actually just a convex plastic form that has dips in these two spinners that spin so fast you can't see them spin and they grab the ball and wing it around like a gravity well and then throw the ball out again.

And everyone will run up to the front desk and say, "Wow, the magnets are great in that game." There are no magnets. I thought the same thing the first time I played it. So that is always fun. Probably the best story we ever had was we have a game from the 1970s by a company called Interplay, which is a Spanish pinball company. It's a relatively rare game. It's called Dragon, and it's a beautiful game. We were able to get that game donated to us in almost perfect brand-new condition. It was still sealed in its factory box. It is essentially a brand-new game from the '70s.

It's rare. Not many of them came to the United States. We had a gentleman visiting the Bay Area with his wife from Spain and had flown into the city and had visited us on a lark because he liked pinball. And he went through the museum, found that game, played it for half an hour, came up to the front with tears in his eyes because he actually remembered playing that game with his dad in the early '80s in a bar in Spain.

ERIC: Wow.

EVAN: And had not seen that game since 1982 or 1983, and it's just an incredible connection. I could never imagine that that game would stand out that way to a significant single person that way.

He only essentially played that game the entire time they were visiting the museum for two hours and getting photos and video with his wife. It was incredible. And we do get a lot of stories like that. Another gentleman with a game from the '60s did not know we had the game that he played while in college in the laundromat. He put [himself] through college in the late 1960s by running laundry for everyone in his dorm room. You would wrap it up in a bedsheet, put it outside the door. You would tag it. He would pick up everyone's laundry in a dorm room and he'd run laundry the entire night.

ERIC: Oh my gosh.

EVAN: And deliver it back the next morning. And that's how he paid his way through college. And he said the only thing that kept his head screwed on straight was this one pinball game he could play so he could stay awake while running laundry at night, the entire night, to get all these dorms' laundry done. And we had that game. That game was, I think, Kings and Queens, which is an EM game from the late '60s. And he can't even remember playing it, but he got good at it. He would zone out and go half asleep and play that game. And we had the game, not the exact one, but the same version that he had played in the late 1960s. So stories like that are absolutely amazing. We get them every week at the museum.

ERIC: Yeah. And you alluded earlier to the fact that a lot of pinball machines, they're designed for the male gaze, let's say. I think that's the phrase you used. Do you ever get people coming up to you and being like, "Um, what's up with this artwork or this theming here?"

EVAN: We do. We live in a very educated area. I think a lot of people are looking at the games and we present them in context of the time that ... And that's really the job of a museum, of course, is that we don't just say, "Here's a game." We present the game within the context of a decade and this is the artwork that's inspiring and this is what's being referenced in it. For instance, we have a game called Shangri-La, which is a beautiful game and it has a Asian kind of artwork and theme and it was during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is interesting. It's a really big cultural item. It's absolutely leaning into that area and decade. We absolutely have people come up to the front. A good example is a game called Gigi, and that game has kind of a Marilyn Monroe theme, but also with clowns.

ERIC: Okay.

EVAN: It's an interesting combination from the 1950s.

ERIC: (laugh)

EVAN: And people say, "What is the deal?" And it's like, this is a Marilyn Monroe caricature. Not really sure how it got involved with circuses and clowns, but it does. The clowns and circuses are actually — and carnivals — are a big 1950s pinball theme. So there's an interesting crossover with pop culture and what was popular at the time, but people will absolutely come up and ask us, "Why is the artwork ...?" A good example was Apollo 13, it's a '90s game that's a really fun pinball game. You see every actor from that movie on the backglass except for Tom Hanks. He's the one who either didn't release his likeness or wanted too much money, so they have a single astronaut with a closed mask in the middle and every other actor around it.

ERIC: Oh my gosh.

EVAN: So we'll have people say, "Where is he? Is he inside the mask?" I think that's what they were insinuating is that he's in there, but no, you're not going to see him because the license wasn't released.

ERIC: Oh my gosh, that's amazing. What year did you become the executive director?

EVAN: Three years ago.

ERIC: Three years ago. What do you wish you had known three years ago when you took over? What is something that if you could have gone back to 2023 and told Evan then, what would you say?

EVAN: I think you always tread carefully when you start a new job or a new position somewhere and you err on the side of being thrifty. Use things we already have, let's repurpose things that we already have, let's recycle items and make them work and people will be happy. You'll save on the budget. We've really, in the last year or so, realized that making capital investments into the museum itself immediately pays off in terms of a customer's experience, how well the patrons take care of the museum if it looks nicer, that adding more materials on walls, more artwork lends to a greater experience. So I really think the biggest one would've been to say, be more aggressive with spending money to improve the museum experience, make the museum look nicer, don't worry about trying to reuse or recycle too many things. It's okay to get something new because really elevating the museum that way really pays off almost immediately. And when things are nice, people take better care of everything. And that's really shown itself to be true as we've continued to grow and develop more business yearly. And I think that's the one thing that I would've been more aggressive on.

ERIC: Yeah. And then looking to the future, what's something that you haven't been able to do yet? What's your next around-the-corner goal, if you're going to be deploying those resources more aggressively, what do you want to do in the future?

EVAN: That's a great question because it's really now the pie in the sky dream. The museum itself is wonderfully run, very, very concise, packed. We're kind of out of room in terms of what we can show with our existing collection. Even though it is, as it stands, the largest pinball collection that you can play publicly in California outside of, say, a show like Cal Extreme or Golden State Pinball Festival or Pinagogo, which are shows in California where you have a lot of pinball games for a weekend. We have the world's largest collection. So we have 105 in the museum that are playable. We have over 1,200 more in a warehouse out on the old Naval Air Station that we rent from the city of Alameda.

ERIC: Oh my gosh. (laugh)

EVAN: So having the world's largest pinball collection is great. It's just not fun if you're not able to bring it to folks. So really the ultimate pie in the sky goal now, the main focus is retaining and procuring a permanent home that's large enough for the bulk of the collection, which means we're focused into 25- to 30,000 square foot buildings. So large buildings with big parking lots that are HVAC controlled to make sure the collection's preserved because we have games going back to the '20s and '30s. So it should be AC, should be heated, should be dry, should be dust-free, should be carpeted, should be well lit.

We have a high bar to accomplish, and it's just now something we have to do because it really — aside from monetizing that collection, bringing it to folks, and seeing the proof of concept with the smaller museum with 100 games work — we know what we can do with 12- or 1,300 and we just have to make that happen. It's just a slow process because it's a combination of saving money, fundraising, finding someone who's a seller who will work with us and work with our nonprofit status to maybe give us a little bit of a break on price and take some tax deductions. And we know that person's out there, we just haven't run across them yet, but that's the main goal for the next five years.

ERIC: Yeah, makes sense. So the main museum, the publicly accessible part of the collection, as I mentioned, it's in Alameda, California, a couple minutes outside of Oakland. Could you talk about how the Pacific Pinball Museum fits into the neighborhood that you're in and what it's like with your neighbors?

EVAN: The museum opened at a really interesting time. Alameda has two main streets, very similar to Palo Alto where I grew up. Palo Alto has University and California, Alameda has Park Street and Webster Street. So they have a kind of east end and a west end of Alameda. We're on the west end off of Webster. And the west end off of Webster was in a rough spot for about 10 years because the Naval Air Station had closed in the late 1990s. It was a depressed area, a lot of empty businesses. It was considered the rough side of town for decades after World War II. It was the side of the town that sailors hung out on when they had leave. A lot of people living in Alameda were told not to go to Webster Street. Really interesting history. When we opened originally 23 years ago, it was a relatively quiet street.

A lot of empty storefronts, a lot of vestige businesses from the Navy era like tattoo parlors, bars, dry cleaning are kind of the triumvirate of this used to be a military town when you have all three of those together. And over the past 20 years or so, we've seen it develop into this incredible, diverse, eclectic boutique street that has so many wonderful little businesses. We are exceptionally lucky to have the amount of restaurants and the eclectic nature of stores that are all around us within walking. It really leans into our business model of wristbands, which allows folks to come in and out as much as they like so that you can take a break after an hour of playing pinball, which is something you really have to do. I have to do it. Every now and then we get players which are able to stick out four or five hours dedicated, which is amazing to me.

ERIC: Wow.

EVAN: But if you take this break and you have your wristband, you come back and forth as much as you like, you visit local stores, you get a snack, you get some food, you get a drink, you come back. And we're open late and we really ... Not only do we support the local street economy and community, they support us and we're very lucky to have that. And when we look at this larger possible future location, some other large arcade collections in the United States do what they have to do, do what makes economic sense, which is they'll go out really far out of town, they'll pour a big concrete pad in a field, build a big metal prefab structure, get all their games in there. That's something they can afford, that's something they can make work. It makes sense. We've really figured out that we need to have those restaurants and other shops to make a really interesting day-long experience for folks.

So that actually really influences where we look at in the future. A big building would be fantastic, but we need to make sure there's local food and something else to look at. If a member of the family gets tired of pinball, maybe there's something else for them to take a look at and take a break locally so the entire family doesn't have to leave at the same time and then they can come back. We're very lucky and it's a great street to be on. And I'm saying that as a biased Alamedan, I've lived there for 20-something years and my kids go to school there. We really love the island. We feel very lucky with the location we are, with the neighbors that we have. We've got a good relationship with the city of Alameda. We rent our large warehouse from them. We've kind of danced with different possibilities in terms of a larger permanent building with the city of Alameda.

We haven't gotten there yet, but the discussions are always really good and friendly. So that's always open and always something we're chasing. So we feel really lucky to be where we are.

ERIC: You mentioned at the start of our conversation how, as someone who appreciates museums, you're especially drawn to these smaller, boutique, niche-type museums. I am too. That's how I've got interested in this podcast, really. Could you talk about the museums that have inspired you, the things that when you go to another museum, you are inspired by how they work or how they've arranged their collection and what you've learned from them?

EVAN: A good one that pops out immediately — and of course they're on a different scale with a different focus than us, but I think the way their collection is laid out is magnificent — is the Oakland Museum of California. So they have these three levels. The first one is natural history. You go up to the next level, you have cultural and person history, and then the top level is just a regular art museum. So you have these three different levels that you can float between. They're divided up wonderfully, but there's definitely crossover connection between each of these levels. They're all about California, but the division and the way you can spend an hour or two in each one and then move up or down between them, I really enjoy the way that museum is set up. And it's influential with the way our museum is set up in terms of how we break these rooms into different decades or types of games, but you can wander through them.

It's not a hodgepodge collection which is thrown together. There's a lot of thought to how this collection is set up and how it's designed. And I think the Oakland Museum, at least as a big-museum example, is a great example of that. In terms of these little boutique museums, which I've always enjoyed, even though they're small, sometimes they have amazing collections. They have things which you would expect to find in the Smithsonian or a larger museum, but it's in, say, the former governor's mansion that's a small under-radar museum in Oakland or Sacramento, and they have incredible artifacts. Really you get into the situation where, oh sure, it should be at a bigger museum or preserved differently, but that bigger museum either doesn't have the budget, doesn't know about it ,or can only store it and not show people, but you're looking at it. And it's being brought out to the public in this smaller venue. And I think that's amazing. And we have things in our collection, I think, that surprise folks. I think we're a big museum in terms of pinball, but still to have the only example of, say, a game from the '20s, '30s or '40s, or one of five prototype Atari video pinball games from the late 1970s surprises folks. It's really cool.

ERIC: What is a small detail about the museum that only you appreciate, that the average visitor is not going to notice, but every time you see it, you're like, "Ah, good."

EVAN: People play so differently and there are people like me who don't move a lot when they play. I'm focused, I'm enjoying myself, I'm not going to move a ton. I truly enjoy — even to the point where sometimes people might in some eyes take up too much space during gameplay — I absolutely love seeing people's individual reactions to games. The body English, the excitement level. Some people take up half an aisle when they're playing a game. They're leaning really far back out. They're super animated. Some people are just hyper-focused. Some people yell, some people are quiet. The difference with how each person plays and exhibits joy or sadness at how a ball has run is just absolutely incredible to me in terms of human condition. It's all different and it's all wonderful, and I think even with folks who take up a lot of space maybe when they play because they're boisterous and that might encroach on other players' personal space ever so slightly during a certain moment, I truly enjoy. It's really fun to see because you just know they're super engrossed in the game.

ERIC: Yeah. If you're in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

EVAN: That is a great question. I have the affliction. I'm a bibliophile, so I absolutely dearly have too many books and buy too many books and buy books I maybe will only barely prick into and not read entirely or maybe never even get to. I'm pretty good about that. I do read a portion of them at minimum before they go into the huge collection I have. So bookmarks, books, anything [book-related] ... It's really for the last 15 or 16 years is really what my kids would like that I would get to try to get them ... I'm already in the museum gift shop because I'm there because I enjoyed the museum and I enjoyed an exhibit. What would make them interested or encourage them to be interested in something I am because I want to share this exhibit or museum with them. So what will they be interested in that's connecting and bridging that? But very often it's books. Yeah. It's always books. And I have a real weakness for the huge art, gigantic books which really need their own coffee table. They don't end up on a coffee table. They end up on a huge shelf, but I'm really weak for those.

ERIC: I aspire to be the sort of person who has a lot of coffee table books of artwork and things like that, but I don't even have a coffee table.

EVAN: I don't either. It's hard.

ERIC: Evan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Great seeing you as always.

EVAN: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

ERIC: Thanks again to Evan Phillippe for coming on the podcast. The Pacific Pinball Museum is in Alameda, California, and it's open every day except Monday. One of my favorite things in their gift shop is these little Lego pinball machines, and you can win one of these in our gift shop giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for our email newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, Lightning Pod. Our marketing specialist is Julia Wild, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz. Last year I produced a ministory for them about the sound of pinball and that's how I met Evan. That story was so much fun to do that it gave me the idea to do this podcast. I'll put a link in the show notes.

And thank you for listening to this episode. I'll see you at the museum.