Bruce Mowat sells and services nostalgia, but his business is about to become a memory.

For 30 years, pinball machines and jukeboxes have been Mowat's life, fixing them up in arcades, bars, bowling alleys and corner stores around the province since he was 18, then, for the last six years, as the owner of Jukebox Junction, in the white clapboard building at the corner of 12th Street and 10th Avenue—on the New Westminster-Burnaby border.

But times are changing.

The older homeowners who bought the machines for their basement rec rooms are downsizing to condos and younger homeowners with money to burn are spending it on elaborate home theatres and sophisticated video game systems. Currently, Mowat runs his business just two days a week, relying on curiousity to finally get the better of the thousands of commuters who pass through the busy intersection in front of his store every day.

Soon, he says, it will be no more.

It wasn't always that way. Before there were Playstations and iPods, there was D. Gottlieb and Co. pinball machines and Wurlitzer jukeboxes. It was a simpler time, with simpler fun, says Mowat.

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to play the game, you don't have to go to the manual to figure out your next shot. It's easy to play, you have a ball rolling around a playing field, you're hitting targets."

The first mechanical pinball machine, Bingo, was manufactured in 1931 by the D. Gottlieb company for the Bingo Novelty Company. The first powered game with lights, sounds and music was built in 1936 by Harry Williams, who went on to found the Williams Manufacturing Company seven years later. Over the years, manufacturers like Bally came and went and games got more complicated, adding levels, multiple flippers, even more balls, as they tried to compete with computerized video games. By 2004, only one major designer and builder of pinball machines remained, Stern Pinball.

Mowat says the customers who find their way through his shop's front door are looking for memories. As soon as they see the garish graphics, hear the bells and chimes and pull the plunger on one of the machines lining his store, their eyes light up. "These games don't go out of style, they don't go obsolete, you played them when you were a kid, it's the same big bang for your quarter."