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Arcade: One time, when I was in band camp..
Thu, 17 May 2007

This memory came up in IRC, so I thought I would record it here for the longer term.

Back when I was a fairly motivated coin-operated-machine collector, I knew a lot of folks either in the industry (bar owners, arcade operators, etc) or other collectors. It can be a strange hobby since you're either a leach trying for the cheapest price at an auction or lording over a destitute and bankrupt former-bar-owner. That or driving all over the countryside looking in shitty shops with rusty Coca Cola signs for filthy machines featuring silver ownership stickers with phone numbers you can call^h^h^h^hharass. Or bumping into 12 year olds whose cool old Dad had given him a rare Joust 2 machine worth thousands but finding out the kid painted black over the artwork and put a copy-board of Street Fighter 2 in. Anyway, thats another story, but suffice to say you call and bug people enough, and eventually you find some cool old codger with a 20 year old junked motorhome half buried in his backyard, stuffed to the brim with PCB-gold.

This one old fellah I used to bump into regularly at the local coin-op auction had a whole farm of treasures; he claimed to have hung around with The Beatles back in the day, and sure had a party bus buried in his backyard stuffed with one armed bandits and other awesome junk. His whole house was decked with classy gadgetry, but that too is another story.

My tunnel vision, after side-stepping his muddy guard dogs, focused clearly on his Barn. An entire barn stuffed with arcade cabinets and gear from when he ran a route and collected from the auctions over a decade or two. GOLD. The entire main floor were just cabs, as he was fond of removing the PCB (the game gutts) or collecting original cabs and putting PCBs into them. These weren't "generic cabs" but "deds" (dedicated cabs). (A Pacman machine had a Pacman cabinet, where as many later games were just generic cabinets with the decals laid on.) There was no space to walk, and everything was covered with a sheen of dust, and you could smell the .. musty barnyard odours everywhere. It was awesome, like Indiana Jones laying eyes on the gold idol. Wtih so little space, to get around one climbed up atop the machines and worked slowly across by hopping machine to machine, and as anyone whose every been to an arcade can remind you -- the tops are not flat. I distinctly recall loosing my footing and nearly falling through between a swift (?) of Star Trek (a classy vector game IIRC) cabinets.

Anyway, we worked our way across the mosaic of cabinets until reaching a wooden ladder for climing up to the open second floor, where a hill of PCBs (the game brains) lied piled atop each other willy nilly. Being a geek I tend to keep my work area orderly, and my electronics far too clean. (Ask anyone with greasy palms who goes near my PDAs and game consoles..) Seeing a stack of hundreds of PCBs just lieing around in the open air hurts the soul. After taking it all in, with rays of light piercing through holes in the wooden ceiling, I noticed a distinct pile aside the others, all neatly in a tower. They were just Atari vector PCBs (which are unmistakable to any who've seen them.) A stack of some 20 or 30 of them. Now, I mention all of this since it is burned ito my mind -- if you can see your way, lit by holes in the ceiling, you already know that the rain has been in. All of these PCBs were seeping a nice rusty puddle and surely most were ruined.

Brutal.

Anyway, he did have mounds of cool stuff that functioned, so I had picked up a dozen various game PCBs for my collection; he even somehow foisted a box of unknown boards on me so I could rip out the chips and find out which games they were. (Like fingerprint reading from the code on the chips.) Fine. He wasn't cheap either since he knew collectors were interested in this stuff, but he gave me an alright bulk deal.

The reason I write all of this is here; I don't recall if this event was the same day or another day, as I did drop by a couple of times total, but nomatter. This one occasion, he (call him Bob, since that was his name) asked, friendly-like -- "Any particlar game you've been looking for and not found? I've probably got it..."

So, says I, "Quartet." Its not really rare, but its certainly uncommon and over all the thousands of boards I'd seen I've never encountered one in the wild.

Bob, without even breaking eye contact (this is how I remember it ;), reaches over to his right into a set of slots on the wall (a customized PCB breeding area I'm sure) and draws out a mint condition Quartet 2 game PCB.

It was gorramned Kreskin.

The best, the absolute best, was the shit eating grin he had. Knowing I'd just driven an hour into the farmland boons and cralwed around a filthy barn, and he had a game he knew I'd searched for on and off for a couple years. He thought he had it.

Well, fuck him I thought; I had a game he'd been looking for a couple years for too, and it was dirt common and he didn't know that. Asshole wasn't going to give me a reacharound that day.

But for a minute, he thought he was The King.

But I was the sandwhich.

Later, he showed me where he got rid of the machines deemed to be of no use.. no value for resale, or too much trouble to fix or move. He'd fire them. He was more businessman than collector, like I, so it hurt.

We were negotiating the value and price of the things I'd picked from his Unibomber-like stockpiles. He had the advantage, for while I was the greasy sammich of his destruction, he was the guy with a Space Duel cabinet on fire, burning away behind him while I merely looked on over his shoulder.

That was my #2 game, that I'd always wanted.

Asshole.

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