Pinball wizard targets industry revival

During his childhood in northeast Indiana, Jon Weaver would help his father, a restaurateur, earning 25 cents for every table he bussed. A lot of those quarters, he says, wound up in the family restaurant’s arcade games.

“Unbeknownst to me, my father got back about half of my pay,” he says.

That taught Weaver, 42, a valuable lesson about the allure — and profitability — of coin-operated entertainment, which in turn spurred him to launch Suncoast Pinball & Arcade, a Largo-based company that recently rolled out Cosmic Carnival, one of the first original pinball machine designs to hit the market in years.