Donkey Kong history and serial number question

mbert0

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Donor 6 years: 2017, 2021-2025
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While I've had a basic grasp of Nintendo's DK history, my understanding and curiosity has grown greatly after reading (and following up on some items covered in) David Sheff's Game Over book, along with Jeff Ryan's Super Mario (great books, in particular Sheff's, which intersects well with Blake Harris' Console Wars, and it's fun reading NCL/NOA history from the '90s perspective, but I digress...)

It's my understanding there were 3,000 Radar Scope cabinets (2,000 that shipped to NOA, and 1,000 that sat at NCL), of which the vast majority were converted to DK. Immediately following the DK "we have a hit on our hands" moment around 4,000 blue cabinets were produced in Japan, and shipped to NOA.

My blue cab, serial 2997... did they start a new serial numbering at 0 when the second (and first blue) batch shipped from Japan, or is cabinet possibility one of the 1,000 they hadn't shipped yet, and color was changed in factory? How do you (by model and serial) ascertain whether a cabinet is a Radar Scope convert, or "first blue batch"?
 

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These vin#'s are allover the place.

Seems to be no rhyme or reason....good luck. lol
 
These vin#'s are allover the place.

Seems to be no rhyme or reason....good luck. lol

I talked to someone who worked for Bally/Midway in the 70's and 80's. He told me they had multiple boxes of serial number plates that they would just pull plates from randomly to install - printed up a thousand or so at a time. They weren't applied in numerical order.
 
I talked to someone who worked for Bally/Midway in the 70's and 80's. He told me they had multiple boxes of serial number plates that they would just pull plates from randomly to install - printed up a thousand or so at a time. They weren't applied in numerical order.

This sounds about right from what I've seen so far in my limited arcade hobby time....
 
This sounds about right from what I've seen so far in my limited arcade hobby time....

One thing you got down already is posting...

You have more posts in a week then most people I know on here do in a year.
 
The Radar Scope conversions are TKG2. All of them are red. Many early TKG3s are also red but started life at the factory as Donkey Kong's. Before long you'd start to see blue TKG3 cabs interspersed in with the reds. By the time they revised to TKG4 (the 2-board stacks) all cabs we're blue.
 
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