Sir Kongsalot
Member
To me one of the most interesting questions in this hobby is to consider how many of any given arcade game remain in the world.
You're definitely never gonna get anywhere close to the real number, but it's fun. Maybe more than just fun though. Like endangered species, the number becomes more and more important as it falls.
There's a lot of issues with doing such an estimate, maybe number one of which is that there's a vagueness to what counts as a "game." Stuff like, do you need a full, intact cabinet to count one, or does just a working PCB count? (After all, there are plenty of games that existed mostly or even entirely as kits, and rarely/never as dedicated cabinets.) If somewhere there is an intact Pac Man cabinet running a 60-in-1, and somewhere else there is a working Pac Man PCB... can we add them together and count that as one Pac Man, even if it's just a "potential" Pac Man?
I myself just reunited a Donkey Kong PCB with a DK cab that had been converted to Jr.... so did I just add one to the existing numbers of DKs?
Anyway, let's go with Donkey Kong for now, because that's the game I know most about.
How many original, dedicated machines can we suppose are left?
My estimate is that there are probably less than 1,500. [EDIT: I realized that a number this low was a little foolish, after sleeping on it]
Here's how I break it down.
DK's KLOV profile says:
"There are 717 known instances of this machine owned by Donkey Kong collectors who are members. Of these, 599 of them are original dedicated machines..."
So that's 599 that we know about for certain. Let's just round it to 600.
There are almost certainly more DK machines now in private collector hands than in commercial/arcade settings. Between us, we could identify a bunch of machines "in the wild," but even if every single member were to report in with all the known public Donkey Kong machines, I doubt that we could crack 200. But let's be generous and say that it IS 200.
That takes the total to 800.
Now, out of the non-public/collector-owned DKs, how many have been counted by KLOV? That one's tough, and even trying to answer it relies on some bigtime guesswork. However, I do think that it takes a bit more than just a whim to own an arcade machine (and especially to keep one running). It's not at all the same thing as having a boxed up Super Nintendo in your closet. Any particular title will have been produced in very low numbers relative to a consumer product (other than perhaps a car model), and owning one of these takes space, foresight, and I would say passion. If you have that passion, it's likely you'd be a KLOVer.
Therefore, I would estimate that at least half, and probably as many as three-quarters of the DKs in collector hands have been counted by the census [EDIT: That's where I made my big mistake... it's probably less than 20%]. Going by that supposition, it would mean that 150 to 300 are owned by KLOV non-participants and aren't counted in the census.
So, if we take my max (300), we're up to 1,100.
We'll tack on a margin of error of 400 or so, and there ya go: out of the 80,000+ machines produced, I propose that there are likely 1,500 or less existing original dedicated Donkey Kong machines.
What do you think?
You're definitely never gonna get anywhere close to the real number, but it's fun. Maybe more than just fun though. Like endangered species, the number becomes more and more important as it falls.
There's a lot of issues with doing such an estimate, maybe number one of which is that there's a vagueness to what counts as a "game." Stuff like, do you need a full, intact cabinet to count one, or does just a working PCB count? (After all, there are plenty of games that existed mostly or even entirely as kits, and rarely/never as dedicated cabinets.) If somewhere there is an intact Pac Man cabinet running a 60-in-1, and somewhere else there is a working Pac Man PCB... can we add them together and count that as one Pac Man, even if it's just a "potential" Pac Man?
I myself just reunited a Donkey Kong PCB with a DK cab that had been converted to Jr.... so did I just add one to the existing numbers of DKs?
Anyway, let's go with Donkey Kong for now, because that's the game I know most about.
How many original, dedicated machines can we suppose are left?
My estimate is that there are probably less than 1,500. [EDIT: I realized that a number this low was a little foolish, after sleeping on it]
Here's how I break it down.
DK's KLOV profile says:
"There are 717 known instances of this machine owned by Donkey Kong collectors who are members. Of these, 599 of them are original dedicated machines..."
So that's 599 that we know about for certain. Let's just round it to 600.
There are almost certainly more DK machines now in private collector hands than in commercial/arcade settings. Between us, we could identify a bunch of machines "in the wild," but even if every single member were to report in with all the known public Donkey Kong machines, I doubt that we could crack 200. But let's be generous and say that it IS 200.
That takes the total to 800.
Now, out of the non-public/collector-owned DKs, how many have been counted by KLOV? That one's tough, and even trying to answer it relies on some bigtime guesswork. However, I do think that it takes a bit more than just a whim to own an arcade machine (and especially to keep one running). It's not at all the same thing as having a boxed up Super Nintendo in your closet. Any particular title will have been produced in very low numbers relative to a consumer product (other than perhaps a car model), and owning one of these takes space, foresight, and I would say passion. If you have that passion, it's likely you'd be a KLOVer.
Therefore, I would estimate that at least half, and probably as many as three-quarters of the DKs in collector hands have been counted by the census [EDIT: That's where I made my big mistake... it's probably less than 20%]. Going by that supposition, it would mean that 150 to 300 are owned by KLOV non-participants and aren't counted in the census.
So, if we take my max (300), we're up to 1,100.
We'll tack on a margin of error of 400 or so, and there ya go: out of the 80,000+ machines produced, I propose that there are likely 1,500 or less existing original dedicated Donkey Kong machines.
What do you think?
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