As some of you may remember, Animated Meat first came to life in 2008 as a way to document some sights that managed to slip through the cracks of most popular travel websites. You may also remember that the original website was built on Apple's now defunct iWeb. From there, it migrated over to WordPress where it met an untimely demise at the hands of Russian hackers. Many of those old, pre-2012 entries have found a new home here in the Before the Now section. I would consider these posts as my starting place as a writer, probably comparable to a musician's first demo tapes. They are very rough, but I took them all seriously and wrote each one with passion. While I would like to believe that I have matured in my abilities as a writer, it is my hope that I carry this same blind passion into all of my new efforts.

Pinball Hall of Fame - Originally Published 2010

September 22, 2018

Tim Arnold is a man who loves pinball. So much so that he opened the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

The Pinball Hall of Fame is housed in a nondescript warehouse just off the Strip. Don’t look for flash. The flash is all back on the Strip. This place is about pinball and that’s it.

The facility is lined with hundreds of machines from the early days of gaming until the present. All of them are in wonderful working order.

I even managed to find my old nemesis, Black Knight. This was the first fifty-cent pinball machine I ever played. Even though we haven’t encountered one another since an afternoon at PJ Pizzazz in 1983, he still proved to be a worthy adversary. Bring plenty of quarters and keep an eye out for some of your favorites.