Marcelo Blanco
Every time a machine that seemed lost lights up again, Marcelo Adrián Blanco’s pulse still trembles. He has spent four decades immersed in the same work, and it still moves him as it did on the first day. That enthusiasm, more than any title, explains why a restorer born in Buenos Aires in 1971 became one of the most sought-after names in pinball outside Argentina.
The boy who saved money by fixing toys
The spark came early. As a child, he played with Meccano, that system of screws and metal strips that teaches how to assemble and disassemble the world. At ten, he discovered pinball in the arcades of the Atlantic coast, the only place where he could get close to one of those machines. The fascination became a commitment at fourteen: when his father bought a lot of antiques and an old pinball machine appeared inside, the teenager claimed it and paid for it with 300 dollars he had saved by restoring Japanese toys. He opened the backbox, saw the tangle of relays, coils and wires that made everything work, and could no longer think about anything else.
A love against the law
Falling in love with these machines was no small detail. For much of the twentieth century, pinball carried a reputation as a vice and was associated with gambling and underworld figures such as Al Capone. That reputation led to bans: New York only legalized it in 1976, when Roger Sharpe demonstrated before city council members that it was a matter of skill and not luck. In Argentina, it was also restricted, which is why Blanco had had to settle for playing on the coast during the summers of his childhood. Devoting his life to an object that had been treated as suspicious for so many years was, in itself, a statement of principle.
What is played inside the backbox
He affectionately calls that mechanism a “crazy brain”: a mysterious machine that counts points and makes decisions without anyone fully understanding how. Deciphering it requires more than enthusiasm, and that is where his training in electronics came in, those six years of technical secondary school that gave him the vocabulary to converse with sixty-year-old machines. His rule is almost religious: preserve as many original parts as possible, as classic car restorers do, because replacing everything destroys both historical and collectible value. The rest came through trial and error, intuition and an obstinacy for detail that impatient people find hard to understand.
Teaching so the knowledge does not go out
Blanco understood that a craft that is not passed on dies with the person who practices it. That is why he travels every year to the United States, settles there for several months and gives seminars in Ohio and Chicago before audiences that take note of every step; in his latest series of talks, he explained how to plan a restoration without sacrificing the machine’s historical or economic value. To move within that scene, he had to become comfortable in English, and today he speaks it fluently. The same vocation for sharing led him to open a YouTube program, document his work on Instagram — where he posts as @marceloadrianblanco — and join the Recreativas.org team in June 2024, which in Spain preserves and digitizes the graphic art of pinball machines and arcade games. Recognition from his peers went so far that the city of Girard, Ohio, gave him its key.
Machines valued for what they awaken
For him, no restoration is justified by money alone. What matters is what these machines awaken in people. He painted more than one hundred units of The Addams Family — the best-selling pinball machine in history, with 20,270 units — and yet he admits with laughter that it is not his favorite: he is not interested in the prestige of the model, but in the story each owner carries. He has seen everything in four decades, including people who, in the middle of the 2001 crisis, dared to buy one of these machines, as if seeking refuge in an object that gives back something of childhood. When someone debates whether they are a luxury, he answers with a simple example: there are people who live in a small one-room apartment and keep their pinball machine as if it were a family treasure. That bond, not the market value, is what sustains his work.
While factories continue releasing new titles and clubs and museums devoted to metal and lights keep appearing, a stubborn porteño insists on saving from the dumpster machines that almost no one knows how to repair. In every one that comes back to life, beyond electronics and paint, there is a simple idea that has driven him since he was fourteen: that something made to entertain deserves to keep working.