No fees that I recall, other than a license to operate the games and an annual registration sticker for each game operated (1985 onwards). Dad imported his own machines for his own company. Initially, he built coin operated games like Foosball Tables, Bumper Pool and Billiard tables in the late 50's right up to the early 70's. I have one original Bumper Pool, Foosball and Billard table from this period that he restored in the late 90's to keep in the family. He was importing woodrails direct from the USA, and he continued up to 1990 ish. While I was doing my HSC in 1986, we built over 20 cabinets, and he fitted them out with new CRTs and he developed his own " Universal " wiring convention - pre jamma. This meant he would put any gameboard in any cabinet as long as the screen orientation was right.

Operator Turf Wars ? None of that. You had a machine on a location and that was it. Being Italian, he had machines in almost every coffee shop in Melbourne. Especially Bingo machines. Early days he operated machines as far north as Woollengong in NSW. He got sick of traveling so far, so he left a lot of machines up there. There's a few operators / dealers that my old man helped out in the early years. He bought out struggling operators in the 70's.  An interesting fact was he was approached by Zaccaria to be the sole australian distributor. He didn't like the machines, so he rejected the idea and LAI picked it up.

It was VERY cool growing up around the machines. I was chatting to Greg the other day, and he mentioned something to me that I hadn't thought about - "You have pinball literally in your blood. You have always had amusement machines around you". My son is the third generation, and he LOVES pinball. Cool. I do feel lucky, and I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the hobby to lean on.