Meet Christian, the Hudson Valley's Local Pinball Guy
If you own a pinball machine anywhere in the Hudson Valley, sooner or later you end up talking to Christian Fernandez. He runs Tri-State Pinball, a family-run shop based in Newburgh, NY, and pinball machines are not a sideline for him. Moving them, buying them, fixing them, and finding them new homes is the whole job, every single day.
Who You Are Actually Calling.
Plenty of websites promise to take care of your pinball machine. Call most of them and you get a form, a call center, or a broker who has never lifted a backbox in his life. Call ours and you get Christian. He answers the questions himself, looks at your photos himself, and shows up with the truck himself. Family-run means exactly what it sounds like: no dispatcher reading a screen, no franchise playbook, just people who know these machines and stand behind what they tell you on the phone.
Machines Rescued from Basements.
Ask Christian about his favorite jobs and you will hear about basements. Machines wedged behind furnaces. Games that went down a staircase decades ago and never came back up. Rec rooms where the pinball machine outlasted the pool table, the carpet, and the wood paneling. Getting a full-size machine out of a tight space without damaging the game, the walls, or anyone's back takes planning and the right equipment, and it is the exact skill this business was built on. If that sounds like your basement, the pinball machine removal page walks through how a pickup actually works. In many cases we can haul a machine away at no cost, and if it is worth money, we pay you.
The Actual Local Buyer, Not a National Network.
Type "who buys pinball machines" into a search bar and most of what comes back is national lead generation: slick sites that take your photos, spit out a number, and then hand your information to whoever pays for the lead. Christian is the other kind of buyer, the real kind, based 20 to 40 minutes away from most of the people he works with. He looks at the machine, makes an honest offer, and pays cash. When you sell your pinball machine to Tri-State Pinball, the person making the offer and the person carrying the machine out of your house are the same person. That is the whole difference, and once you have dealt with the other kind, you understand how much it matters.
More Than Hauling and Buying.
The rest of the shop stays busy too. Christian repairs Bally, Williams, Stern, Data East, and Jersey Jack machines in homes across the region, so if your game is acting up, the pinball machine repair page covers what he works on and how a house call goes. There are usually around 16 used machines in stock, each one gone through and tested, listed on the pinball machines for sale page with delivery available. And for birthdays, office parties, and backyard events, pinball machine rentals come with delivery and setup included, so all you have to do is press start.
Where We Work.
Home base is Newburgh, in Orange County, and the working range is roughly a 40-mile radius from the shop. That takes in most of the Hudson Valley, including Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Kingston, Middletown, and Warwick, plus the nearby edges of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Three states, one local shop, which is exactly where the Tri-State name comes from. The full town-by-town list lives on our service areas page, so you can see for yourself how close we really are before you ever pick up the phone.