Pinball wizardry

Just like Pac-Man circling back for the last dot in the center of the maze, Chattanooga Pinball Co. is moving forward by going back to where it started.

Since 2007, owners Dale and Tane Levin have been selling refurbished arcade games out of a 60,000-square-foot warehouse off McFarland Avenue.

For three weeks, they’ve been shifting inventory to a 20,000-square-foot retail store on Rossville Boulevard in the building where they started the business in 2005.

“Nobody could see us down there,” Tane Levin said of the former location. “They had trouble finding us. Most of our sales there were on the Internet, but here there are customers every day.”

Thanks to an 8-foot Pac-Man chasing a ghost around the outside of the building, a former used-car dealership, visibility shouldn’t be a problem anymore, her husband added.

“He makes the building,” he said. “At 3 o’clock, traffic starts backing up on Rossville Boulevard, and everybody’s stopped, so they’re looking at him.”

The building’s 5,000-square-foot showroom holds about 200 arcade cabinets and pinball tables culled from an inventory of about 1500, Dale Levin said.

The tables are arrayed along one wall and have been painstakingly restored to their former glory by a trio of technicians and Tane Levin, a self-proclaimed “clean freak” who removes every part from the tables and dusts, vacuums and waxes until everything shines.

“This is my relaxation,” she said, while she and son Matthew, 15, removed mud caked onto the playing field of “Hitters Rally,” a baseball game rescued after the May floods in Nashville. “This is cool to me, to take something that’s dirty, take it apart, clean all the pieces and see what it looks like afterward,” she said.

Thanks to her attention, the tables gleam with flashing lights, buffed ball ramps and back-lit marquees with B-movie chic names like “Revenge From Mars” and “Mata Hari.”

Beside these are dozens of arcade cabinets, some plugged in, most still dark, offering games both classic (“Galaga,” “Ms. Pac-Man”) and contemporary (“X-Men vs. Street Fighter”).

Since 2005, Chattanooga Pinball has sold 4,000 to 5,000 games, most to baby boomers, though that trend is shifting to young professionals eager to bring the arcade experience into their homes, Dale Levin said.

Chattanooga Pinball is one of only a handful of stores offering refurbished arcade games in the country. Until recently, online auctions constituted 80 percent of the business, but that’s declined by 70 percent to 80 percent recently, Dale Levin said.

The visibility of the new location and a new emphasis on repairs and restoration should make up for the loss, he said.

“It’s really booming,” he said, gesturing to about 30 games stored in what used to be a service bay while they wait to be restored. “There are a lot of machines out there.”