Reluctant to Find

One of the things I miss most about the 80s through mid-90s is how you could just randomly encounter a pinball machine, within a good twenty-year range of vintages. They were scattered through malls (before every mall from Thunder Bay to Windsor was a fucking identical Smartcenter. Eat it, penguins!), family tap and grills both independent and franchised, and even less likely locations like garages and flea markets. Decent takeout pizza places had one in addition to the mandatory standup arcade cabinet (which, of course, were more common in even more diverse locations, but come on, pinball). Now, if you're lucky, the local mediocre bar has a High Speed: The Getaway clinging to life with half the playfield worn off, and one has to drag one's ass all the way to Silver City to play a couple of licensed current-era Stern tables. At least the more twee of those remind me of the beloved toy pinball machine of my youth (from either Canadian Tire or Sears, I think, research pending. I got sidetracked getting misty over old Lucky Hen machines).
Even the hillbilly town I grew up in - now a barely recognizable upscale retirement community, but that's another story for an older storyteller - managed to have a few machines pass through it that I much later learned were rare. I made a stop at Pizza Pizza nearly every day for months when they had Hook and Black Rose side-by-side (naturally Rose got like 90% of my quarters) - and just recently I found out BR is some kind of uncommon and beloved cult classic. I should also mention that the local theme park arcade had a Ninja Baseball Bat Man cabinet around the same time, but back then it was just a deeply weird but oddly compelling TMNT clone, not an overlooked gem of the era or whatever.