Pinball machines and retro video games have become big part of Phone Medic’s business in mall

A person interested in playing a variety of pinball machines in Grand Junction would likely look to bars and arcades (good luck finding the latter).

And Pinball Map’s website, pinballmap.com, yields the names of bars Wrigley Field Sports Bar & Grill and Scallywags Bar and Grill, each with four pinball machines, plus Arcadia in the University Center at Colorado Mesa University, where it lists three pinball machines.

That makes sense.

Would you look for them at a phone-repair shop? Of course not.

Ah, but you should. At least in Grand Junction you should, because that’s where the motherlode is, as Phone Medic’s location in the Target wing of Mesa Mall added a half-dozen pinball machines since mid-November.

Most of the machines reside in a dedicated area in the rear of the store, but it’s becoming more obvious pinball is a burgeoning part of Phone Medic’s business.

Phone Medic recently placed several at the front of the store, drawing eyes to them. Then, a deeper look into the store reveals a line of pinball machines along a back wall – store employees officially call it Stern Pinball Alley – with a mix of current machines from Stern Pinball and Jersey Jack Pinball and vintage machines, such as the 1992 Mario Bros. machine that Phone Medic owner Tyler Butterfield recently brought into the fold.

The pinball themes represent pop-culture phenoms: Marvel comics staples such as The Avengers, X-Men and Deadpool; Star Wars, be it the original movie or more recent series The Mandalorian; Harry Potter; Dungeons & Dragons; King Kong; Jurassic Park; and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The pinball-machine count at Phone Medic in the mall stood at 14 as of Dec. 23, and it’s joined by vintage video games and consoles as a new and different business element for Phone Medic, which also has a store at 1210 North Ave. The North Avenue store is much smaller than the mall store, but it still has room for two pinball machines of its own and a selection of vintage or retro video games.

Phone Medic entered 2025 as a business that primarily does what its name suggests. It repairs cell phones. But the sign above the entrance to its mall location now reads: Retro Games by Phone Medic.

The change was born of necessity as Butterfield said its Mesa Mall location was in jeopardy as its lease was set to expire at the end of February 2025. Butterfield didn’t want to go into the gory details, but he negotiated with the mall to keep his Phone Medic location, and it meant he had to limit his cell phone accessories to 30 percent of the store’s space. Something new had to fill the other 70 percent, and pinball and vintage games became the answer.

“I had been going to conventions all around the western United States, doing retro video games, and so I just decided to bring kind of that, that passion of mine, into the store,” Butterfield said. “And it’s been fun. We’ve just been building the store out and bringing in the pinball machines and all the retro gaming stuff.”

The retro revision began with the vintage video games on March 1, because Butterfield and one of his brothers already had a collection of old video games from yard sales and such where they would find old games and “pretty big collections.”

Since then, Butterfield is always on the hunt for more.

“It’s not like a product you can go buy from distributors, that you have ways to get inventory” he said. “You have to go out and find inventory or have inventory, and it’s just difficult. You can’t just call up a supplier and say, ‘Hey, I need this. Can you send me this many of them?’ If I wanted (Nintendo) GameCube games, I’ve got to go find them from either individuals or people bringing them into the store, so you kind of have to create your own marketplace.”

Listing some of what Phone Medic now stocks, Butterfield rattled off, “Dreamcast, Sega, Nintendo, the original NES, Super Nintendo, N64, GameCube, Switches.

“I mean, we have literally everything available. I didn’t have several rare systems, you know, Ataris. We’ve had Nomads – it’s like a really old handheld Sega Genesis – (Sony) PSP, PS Vita, so there’s tons of them.”

A couple weeks after the vintage video games showed up on Phone Medic shelves, pinball machines started arriving. For those, too, Butterfield is ever-vigilant for potential acquisitions.

“I have ones that I like,” he said. “Some of the vendors, they’re making new ones … I’ve got dealers that are always contacting me when the new machines are coming out. … They just say, ‘Hey, do you want this one?’ And if it’s one that I like, then I get it.”

Or, if someone has a request, Butterfield might track it down. That’s what he did for a high school kid, a frequent pinball player at Phone Medic, who wrote him a letter in October and requested Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye.

“I happened to come across that game in my travels, so I brought it in,” Butterfield said. “So, he came in with his dad and was playing it and was really happy.

“For me, it’s just fun to provide some enjoyment, see people enjoy the machines.”

Likewise, Butterfield enjoys the reaction from the video gamers.

“It’s a little bit of history with video games,” he said “There’s a lot of collectors that come in and have different stories and different connections to different games. So, I find the journey is more important than the destination.”

Whatever brings people to his store is fine by Butterfield.

“We haven’t really done too much advertising, if any at all,” he said. “It’s just been word of mouth, but we have quite a few regulars that come in and are playing quite a bit of pinball. So, it’s been fun.”

Tyler Butterfield owns four Phone Medic locations. In addition to the pair in Grand Junction – 1210 North Ave. and inside Mesa Mall, 2424 U.S. Highway 6&50 – he has a store in Durango and one in Gallup, N.M.

The North Avenue store was the first in Grand Junction. Butterfield thinks he opened it in 2015, then added the Mesa Mall location in 2019.

Butterfield said he has operated businesses in Mesa Mall dating back to 2006.

The employees want to play

The employees at Retro Games by Phone Medic are glad Butterfield chose pinball as an addition to the store.

“I laugh with my employees, because they all love pinball,” he said. “On their breaks and stuff they come and play. On their days off they come and play.”

Butterfield admits he’s no pinball wizard and said of his employees, “They all can kick my butt.”

Different reasons for interest

While Butterfield likes pinball and vintage video games, he’s not obsessed with either. His interest stems from other things.

For instance, he looks at a pinball machine and likes the art and the mechanical sense of it.

“It’s just kind of a fascination of how it’s put together mechanically,” he said.

As for video games, one of his two brothers was into video games, and while Tyler wasn’t fanatical about them, video games became a way they bonded.

Once he committed to having pinball and video games in his store, it brought out one of Butterfield’s defining traits.

“When I do something, I try and just do it to the fullest extent,” he said.

Will fix anything

Not to be forgotten in the emergence of vintage video games and pinball machines is the phone-repair work that led Butterfield to open his first Phone Medic store about 10 years ago at 1210 North Ave.

He emphasized the repair work is not limited to phones.

“We can fix literally anything: phones; tablets; laptops; TVs; monitors,” Butterfield said. “Honestly, anything we can get parts for, we can fix. We do micro soldering. We can change out charger ports. If somebody’s broken their phone, they don’t have to really throw it away; we can fix it.”

Taking requests

When it comes to vintage video games, Butterfield said Phone Medic is game for tracking down what people want.

“If anybody needs a hard-to-find game or just any game in general, we do a wish list,” he said. “We’re actively searching for those items to bring them in for them.”

That’s if Phone Medic doesn’t already have it, and he said, “Oftentimes we do have it.”

Butterfield likes providing that resource, because customers are “used to just having picked-over stores that don’t really have some of the rare stuff.”

Turning the tables, if people want to sell their games, he said Phone Medic will consider buying them.