RePlay’s 50th 

by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com

Fifty years is a long time in a person’s life to do anything and for RePlay Publisher Eddie Adlum, this year actually marks the 61st that he’s covered our “coin-op” amusement industry. Thinking back to when he got the idea to create this publication and beginning publishing in 1975, it probably didn’t occur to him where it would lead him and our business.

Through the years, there were several other publications covering our industry. All of the others, while earnest in their efforts, were running a sprint while Eddie and his team were busy running a marathon. Although pretty much all of their competitors are out of the race, nobody at RePlay takes that for granted. Their continued heroic efforts to cover the news of the amusement game business means so much to everyone in the business.

I’ve been honored to write a monthly column for over 20 years, more often focusing on what’s outside the industry than on “how-to” columns. Whatever I wrote, Eddie must have liked because he never called to edit me. We’re all on the same page to promote it to the world and protect it from the world, to be a beacon of positivity, bringing fun through the games we create and operate.

When you’re young, most think of 50 years and feel that’s forever away. If you get to 50 years of doing anything, you realize that it was just a blink of an eye and wonder where the time went. There are many of us who’ve grown up in this business together, growing older and, hopefully, wiser together. And what’s great is that we all have our unique story to tell about what drew us into this business and kept us in it.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the lure of making a lot of money was probably not the number one reason you got into this business. At every level, this is a hard business to be in and an even harder business to stay in, especially for 50 years. When you create something like a beautiful magazine every month like clockwork, printing words, pictures and ads onto sheets of plain white paper that you bind up, it becomes a beautiful, living, breathing entity unto itself. That is satisfying.

I guess reality meets dreams when a reader calls to critique what you wrote, complain about their game’s position in the operator poll or the location of their ad. And such is the endless quest to make it better while knowing you’ll never achieve perfection, but when the next month comes, you try anyway.

At a time where so many magazines have abandoned print for online versions, I admire RePlay for straddling both. It gives physical weight to everything that RePlay covers. It also gives the opportunity for readers to physically share the magazine so that others discover it and become subscribers… and then they do the same.

A couple of years ago, I crated up 45-plus years’ worth of RePlay Magazines and sent them to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. There, they will be enjoyed for many more years and stand as a historical record of our industry.

Time flies and if you’ve been on this journey with Eddie, Ingrid, Key, Barry and Matt, and don’t forget Steve White and Marcus Webb and others I missed, let me just say “Thank You” for this magazine and everything it represents. It represents all of us. Happy 50th Birthday to RePlay Magazine!

Jack Guarnieri started servicing electro-mechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at [email protected].