If any place would be appropriate to bring back the pinball machine, it would be somewhere on the Route 1 corridor.

After all, the heyday of the pinball era was the 1950s and ’60s — the exact time when the old highway passing through College Park toward Hyattsville and into D.C. was at its peak.

Now, MOM’s Organic Market in College Park is bringing the pinball arcade back.

As part of an expansion that tripled the organic grocery store’s size, MOM’s has added an honest-to-goodness pinball arcade in a designated space within the store featuring some 29 refurbished machines with such themes as “The Twilight Zone,” “Flash Gordon,” AC/DC, “Game of Thrones” and “The Simpsons.”

The pinball machines come from the personal collection of MOM’s founder and University of Maryland graduate Scott Nash.

It’s not his first move into the arcade business. In 2016, he started VÜK, a pizza shop and pinball arcade in Bethesda’s Woodmont Triangle, telling Bethesda magazine “I’m not here to make money, I’m here to spread the joy of pinball.”

The arcade area at MOM’s includes a lounge where relatives and friends who are not yet pinball enthusiasts can patiently wait. There’s also a change-making machine so you never run out of quarters.

A sign in the arcade explains pinball etiquette, including rules such as not talking to players or putting food and drinks on top of the machines. “A pinball machine is a work of art, treat it with respect!” reads the final rule.

But a more apt sign over the entrance to the pinball area quotes Dante’s “Inferno,” warning “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

First popularized in the Depression era, pinball hit its strides when the Baby Boomers were teen-agers, then had a renaissance with the addition of new electronics and tougher gameplay in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the industry hit a wall by the turn of the millennium, as home videogames became more popular than arcades. Today, it’s mostly a niche market, with hardcore fans like Nash keeping the spirit alive.