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Avondale Estates bar scores with pinball collection
Good Day's Paul Milliken checks out My Parents' Basement in Avondale Estates.
ATLANTA - It’s a bar...it’s a comic book shop..it’s a pinball arcade! Actually, it’s all three and if you’re looking for a place to have a drink and a bite to eat while flipping through the latest Marvel release, My Parents’ Basement is it.
My Parents’ Basement, also known as your friendly neighborhood comic book bar, opened in Avondale Estates nearly five years ago and quickly gained a loyal following thanks to its wide selection of beer, food, and comic books. And now, the local establishment is also home to a growing collection of pinball machines, thanks to Kevin Grillo.
"As soon as I stepped in the door, I saw all the perfect nerd-ery the comics, the gadgets and gizmos, and I was like,‘This is great!’"
Grillo is founder of Atlanta Pinball — but it took time for his appreciation of the classic arcade games to develop.
"I was a kid, in an arcade, playing everything trying to find out what I liked," he remembers. "When I played pinball, it was dingy, it was dark, I couldn’t tell what was going on. I would put my 50 cents, my dollar in, and I would just get destroyed! And I’d be like, ‘I’m moving on to Mortal Kombat!’"
Over the years, Grillo’s opinion changed, and he began amassing a collection a little too large for his own house. That’s where My Parents’ Basement comes in; Grillo now provides a rotating assortment of pinball machines to the bar, all of which he meticulously maintains.
"I used to hate going to Home Depot as a kid," he says. "Now I’ve just got this whole workbench and this collection of tools."
Grillo brings in the latest machines on the market; unlike the dingy dust-collectors of his childhood, these games are big, bright, and feature extremely sophisticated technology.
Monday night, Grillo and the gang at My Parents’ Basement will officially celebrate the debut of the new Stranger Things pinball machine at the bar. But before the big party — the Good Day feature team spent the morning at My Parents’ Basement, feeding dollars into the machines and learning more about why the arcade mainstays are such a good fit for the bar. Click the video player to check out our morning in Avondale Estates!