What’s the first thing you’re supposed to do when you walk into a pinball museum? Play everything, obviously — but standing in the doorway of the Raleigh Pinball Museum on Hillsborough Street, you might freeze for a second, trying to figure out where to start. There are machines from the 1950s sharing floor space with ones from the early 2000s, each one lit, calibrated, and ready to go. The whole room hums.
The museum has been operating in one form or another for years, growing out of founder Greg Sherard’s personal collection into something that now tops 80 machines on any given visit. It sits in a strip of Hillsborough Street that also pulls NC State students, longtime residents, and the kind of people who can tell you the difference between an electromechanical machine and a solid-state one without you asking. You will meet those people here. They are enthusiastic. That is not a complaint.
The admission setup is straightforward: you pay a flat rate at the door — usually around $15 for adults, less for kids — and every machine is set to free play for the duration of your visit. No pockets full of quarters, no watching your credits drain while you’re still figuring out the flippers. You just play. That single decision changes the whole experience. You’re willing to try machines you’d never risk money on, which is how you end up spending 20 minutes on a 1971 Bally that has no digital display and makes a sound like a typewriter being thrown down stairs.
The range is what gets you. There’s a The Addams Family machine from 1992, which was the best-selling pinball machine ever made and still earns its reputation. Next to it might be something from the 1960s with hand-painted artwork and bumpers that click in a completely different register. Then there’s a row of late-90s machines — Medieval Madness, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars — that represent the era when manufacturers were throwing everything at the table, literally, with moving toys and multiball sequences that can spiral out of control in the best possible way.
It’s worth noting that the machines are maintained in genuinely playable condition. A pinball machine that’s tilted, sluggish, or half-lit is a sad thing, and whoever’s doing the upkeep here takes it seriously. You’ll occasionally see a machine pulled from service with a hand-lettered sign on it, which is actually a good sign — it means someone noticed and cared.
The space itself isn’t large or flashy. It’s a single room, essentially, with machines arranged in rows, ambient noise from a dozen games at once, and the particular low light that makes every marquee glow like a stained glass window. On a weekend evening it gets crowded, and that’s fine — pinball is social. People cheer for each other. They compare scores. They narrate their own failures out loud. You will probably do this too.
If you go on a weekday afternoon, you’ll have more space to breathe and longer uninterrupted runs on whatever machine you claim. Either way, budget at least two hours. You’ll think you’re ready to leave and then notice a machine in the back corner you somehow missed, and that’ll be another forty-five minutes gone.
There’s no food or drinks on site, so grab something on Hillsborough before you go in. Then put your phone away and just play.
