Silverball Retro Arcade is a museum on the Asbury Park boardwalk where you don’t just look at pinball history behind glass — you flip, slam, and tilt your way through it. It holds a rotating collection of roughly 600 vintage and modern pinball and arcade machines, with about 200 on the floor at any given time, and every single one is set to free play. You pay for time, not quarters, and then you wander a room that plays like a working timeline of American arcade history.
What Exactly Is the Silverball Retro Arcade?
Most museums tell you “do not touch.” Silverball does the opposite. Admission is based on time, and all games are on free play, so no coins are required. That single detail changes everything about the experience. Instead of shuffling past a roped-off Gottlieb machine from 1966, you get to actually slap the flipper buttons and see if you can beat the high score taped above the glass.
A placard hangs above each pinball machine extolling its particular virtues and putting it in historical context, so you’re learning who designed the game, who painted the backglass artwork, and why a particular scoring rule mattered, all while you’re mid-game. It’s part arcade, part living history lesson, and it somehow never feels like homework.
How a Dad Collecting Pinball Machines Turned Into a Museum
The whole place exists because of one kid’s reaction to a bumper and a flipper. Rob Ilvento founded the Silverball Museum on the Asbury Park boardwalk in response to his daughter’s love of pinball. As Ilvento put it, “Autistic children have a difficult time connecting. But Morgan connected to pinball like nothing else.” What started as buying his daughter one machine to play with at home turned into a collecting habit that got wildly out of hand in the best way.
The Silverball Retro Arcade was founded by Rob Ilvento, who opened his humble attraction in the basement of the Groovy Graveyard Record Store on Cookman Avenue in 2009. It wasn’t glamorous. It was a basement under a record shop, stuffed with machines a guy couldn’t stop buying. Founders Robert Ilvento and Steve Zuckerman quickly realized they needed bigger and better-located digs, and the move to the boardwalk is what turned a hobby into a genuine Jersey Shore institution.
Ilvento wasn’t new to building things from nothing, either. He’s known for launching the 19-chain Cluck U Chicken in 1985 while a sophomore at Rutgers University — so a record-store-basement pinball collection turning into a boardwalk landmark isn’t exactly out of character for him.
Just How Big Is the Collection?
Big enough that Ilvento himself has lost track of the exact number more than once. He owns 600 machines total — some digital, some electromechanical, some dot-matrix, all playable — with roughly 200 on the museum floor at a time while the rest sit in storage. Collectors apparently take this seriously. Ilvento has said people have told him it’s the top pinball collection in the world, noting some games were made in runs as small as 150 units, which is exactly what collectors come for.
One of the standouts on the floor is a seriously rare one: a 1977 Bally Evel Knievel machine, of which only 155 were made. You won’t find that one at your average bowling alley arcade.
Surviving Hurricane Sandy
The museum’s boardwalk location nearly ended it in 2012. Hurricane Sandy flooded the place, and the damage could have wiped out the whole operation. Luck and good planning saved the pinball machines themselves — the water rose 13 inches high, but the pinball games were sitting 18 inches off the ground. The video games didn’t fare as well, and neither did the building, so Ilvento had to gut the entire museum and rebuild it from scratch. He kept his staff on payroll the whole time and met his goal of reopening the museum just two months after the storm. That’s a fast turnaround for a full gut renovation on a boardwalk building.
New Jersey’s Surprisingly Weird History With Pinball
Here’s something that makes the museum’s location extra fitting: New Jersey has a genuinely strange legal history with pinball. For decades, cities across the country treated these machines as gambling devices rather than games of skill. Pinball was illegal in New York City from 1942 until 1976, and plenty of other places had similar bans on the books.
New Jersey’s own shore towns had their own rules, some of which are stranger than you’d expect. A pinball historian investigating old boardwalk laws in Ocean City, NJ found that it’s technically illegal to operate a pinball machine after midnight or all day Sunday there, though that law only applies to non-arcades, since places with actual arcade licenses are exempt. Silverball, happily, has never had to worry about that one — it’s a licensed arcade on a boardwalk built around exactly this kind of entertainment.
Is It Really a Museum or Just an Arcade?
Honestly, it’s both, and that’s the point. Open every day of the week, Silverball Retro Arcade offers the experience of discovering a curated museum of artistic and historical gaming wonders. You’ve got shuffle bowling, Skee-Ball, and air hockey sitting right next to electromechanical machines from the 1950s that most people have never laid eyes on, let alone played. The business has earned real recognition for pulling this combination off — a 2017 USA Today Readers Poll named the Silverball Museum “Best Attraction in New Jersey.”
The idea apparently traveled well, too. The Asbury Park location opened in 2009, with a second Silverball Museum opening in Delray Beach, Florida in 2017. But the original — the one born in a record store basement — is still the boardwalk’s beating, blinking heart.
Planning Your Visit
The Silverball Museum Arcade is located right on the boardwalk in Asbury Park at 1000 Ocean Ave. Since pricing is time-based rather than per-game, there’s no pressure to ration your quarters or pick favorites — you can bounce from a 1960s Gottlieb table to a modern dot-matrix machine to a round of Skee-Ball without ever reaching into your pocket for change.
If you’re the type who gets a kick out of unusual, hands-on history rather than the roped-off kind, this is a boardwalk stop worth building a Jersey Shore day around. It’s loud, it’s bright, and it’s one of the few “museums” anywhere where the exhibits are actively trying to beat your high score.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
