Now his arcade is in jeopardy. His landlord has given him a two-year lease that cannot be renewed and the local community board has approved a resolution supporting that lease. A plan for redeveloping Times Square has lumped pinball arcades with pornographic movie theaters and ''sex-related shops,'' which planners say would all disappear from the area when the project is completed.

While the arcade is actually north of Times Square, there are concerns that the arcade would attract riffraff on the run to its increasingly upscale neighborhood.

''This hurts,'' said Mr. Epstein, who grew up in his father's pinball arcade, became a manager at 14 years old and considers pinball something of a sport, a science and a religion. ''I believe in pinball,'' he said.

He believes in such things as pinball's power to relieve stress. He believes that he could design a video game as a psychoanalytic tool, and he has done a year of graduate work in psychology toward that end.

The Broadway Arcade recently moved one door south on Broadway because of remodeling in the building and because of a large increase in rent. The new arcade is smaller, with only 63 machines instead of 150, an unusually high percentage of them pinball machines rather than video games.

''Being an institution,'' said one player, a salesman who spends several hours a day in the arcade and asked that his name not be used, ''this place attracts a lot of traditionalists who prefer pinball to video.'' Industry experts say there is a return to the popularity of pinball machines.

Mr. Epstein will be selling candy and nuts at a counter at the front of the parlor, just as he did at the previous store, to help pay the rent. ''I suppose I could move,'' he said, ''but once you have had the premiere place on Broadway, once you have catered to people like Paul Newman and Ed Sullivan, how are you gonna open a place in the suburbs?''