^ so true. these games are the highest offenders, these are the donald trumps of the hobby:

avg price: $5000+: cosmic chasm, man eater, varkon, warrior, and zektor.

avg price: $3000-5000: aztarac, badlands (konami), blaster, boxing bugs, chiller, demon, discs of tron (EDOT), snake pit, sundance, and computer space.

avg price: $1500-3000: 720 degrees, black widow, chicken shift, crazy climber, darius, dark planet, death race, discs of tron (upright), dragons lair, electric yo-yo, eliminator, firefox, food fight, gravitar, i robot, ice cold beer, journey, kosmik krooz'r, kram, lunar lander, mad planets, major havoc, monster bash, nibbler, panic park, paper boy, peter packrat, quantum, reactor, solvalou, space ace, space dungeon, space fury, speed freak, splat!, star wars, tac-scan, tapper, thayers quest, three stooges, time traveler, war of the worlds, warlords (cocktail), zeke's peak, zoo keeper, and zwackery.

avg price $1000-1500: alien syndrome, baby pacman, cheeky mouse, cloak & dagger, dragon spirit, flicky, forgotten worlds, frontline, ghosts & goblins, indiana jones, juno first, killer instinct, liberator, marble madness, monkey ball, mr. do!, new york! new york!, night stocker, pac mania, pepper ii, pigskin 621 ad, pong, pooyan, punchout!!!, q*bert, road runner, robotron 2084, satan's hollow, sinistar (upright), slither, space harrier, super punchout!, t-mek, TMNT, tempest, tin star, tron, turkey shoot, venture, victory, wacko, and probably many more.


That's the thing. And I know I might offend someone.... for me, I don't think any arcade, and I mean any, is worth more than $1500. Hell I might even say no more than $1000. These aren't pins. Most are cheap wood with a tv and a pcb. Obviously people pay more but that's out of my budget. If I'm north of 800 it better have flippers and coils.
 
That's the thing. And I know I might offend someone.... for me, I don't think any arcade, and I mean any, is worth more than $1500. Hell I might even say no more than $1000. These aren't pins. Most are cheap wood with a tv and a pcb. Obviously people pay more but that's out of my budget. If I'm north of 800 it better have flippers and coils.

I think there is a divide here. You have the rarity, flavor of the month/year and just popularity of the game.

I'll tackle the rarity aspect first since I'm very familiar with this side of the hobby. You're always going to have two sides here - is it rare and it's good or does the game suck. (Of course, that's contingent on the individual.)

I don't have that dude's list in front of me. If I recall he had Splat up there. I can easily see that game going north of 5k. I know there some die-hard Williams' completionists here and not on this site (believe me, there are a quite a few), that would be dueling out - hence that price. But you hav e games like Electric Yo Yo and New York, New York. *To me* these games are not very good. On the first game, the Taito collector in me (and the select few), I would pay over a grand for a complete one.

Now the others (I'll group that latter category) are sometimes head scratchers.

The 720's, Paperboys and Zookeepers... I really don't get the rapid price escalation. I recall when ZK's used to be a 3 bill game and Paperboy around 5. And they're really (to me) not uncommon:confused:

I see this pattern here within the last few years. Someone mention a game they love, discussion evolves, he/she is one the lookout for said game, Tom, Dick or Harry come out of the woodwork and suddenly are looking for one, competition ensues - prices suddenly raise. Just a mild observation...

This is not a knock on here at all. I've been on here and RGVAC for a very long time and met some collectors I consider good friends. I've seen this trend as of late on a pinball forum as well...
 
I think there is a divide here. You have the rarity, flavor of the month/year and just popularity of the game.

I'll tackle the rarity aspect first since I'm very familiar with this side of the hobby. You're always going to have two sides here - is it rare and it's good or does the game suck. (Of course, that's contingent on the individual.)

I don't have that dude's list in front of me. If I recall he had Splat up there. I can easily see that game going north of 5k. I know there some die-hard Williams' completionists here and not on this site (believe me, there are a quite a few), that would be dueling out - hence that price. But you hav e games like Electric Yo Yo and New York, New York. *To me* these games are not very good. On the first game, the Taito collector in me (and the select few), I would pay over a grand for a complete one.

Now the others (I'll group that latter category) are sometimes head scratchers.

The 720's, Paperboys and Zookeepers... I really don't get the rapid price escalation. I recall when ZK's used to be a 3 bill game and Paperboy around 5. And they're really (to me) not uncommon:confused:

I see this pattern here within the last few years. Someone mention a game they love, discussion evolves, he/she is one the lookout for said game, Tom, Dick or Harry come out of the woodwork and suddenly are looking for one, competition ensues - prices suddenly raise. Just a mild observation...

This is not a knock on here at all. I've been on here and RGVAC for a very long time and met some collectors I consider good friends. I've seen this trend as of late on a pinball forum as well...

If I'm over 800 it's either mint, or a good restore. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree about some of the rare titles causing price increases. I guess this also speaks to your budget. If you have fuck you money then dropping $3000 on a restored discs of tron is no big deal. 5000 for cockpit missile command? It's an effing missile command that was always no better than just an "ok" game. I would rather buy a used car. Fuck for 5 grand I could probably buy 2 terminator 2 pins. Then I would sell one or get two or three arcades in trade for it.


I think some arcades might hold value in the future. But I think at least half (after my generation passes) will be worth shitall. Hot take!
 
Mappy, I played it a couple of times on my 60n1 and can not even get past the first level.

My daughter and I both started playing Mappy a year or two back and really like it. It's all about the sequence you pick things up. We both read a Mappy tutorial and that tripled our high scores and we can now get 4-5 screens in on one quarter.

We still have a lot to learn though.
 
There were some games bitd that I thought were too cute or something. So I didn't bother playing. Mappy and kangaroo and pengo were all in that category. I was too busy raging on tempest and omega race. I find games that I still love (time pilot) I had a few hours dumping money into the same game for hours.
 
The reason to hate Dragon's Lair isn't the terrible gameplay. It's the fact that it's arguably, single-handedly responsible for the arcade crash that happened in 1982.

Operators thought it was the future and stopped buying non-laser games and put their money into Dragon's Lair machines. Cinematronic's couldn't meet the demand and then the laser disc players started breaking. Add that to the fact that people bored of laser games quickly.

Little of this is true.

So you're saying that the reason you hate the game is because it caused the crash??? Even if that were true, why would that make a someone other than an operator hate the game?
 
That's the thing. And I know I might offend someone.... for me, I don't think any arcade, and I mean any, is worth more than $1500. Hell I might even say no more than $1000. These aren't pins. Most are cheap wood with a tv and a pcb. Obviously people pay more but that's out of my budget. If I'm north of 800 it better have flippers and coils.

The beauty of economics is that it doesn't give a shit what any individual thinks any particular game is worth. That has virtually no bearing on what a game is actually worth via the supply and demand model. I would love a Varkon, but I'm not paying $10K for one, which is what you'd have to pony up for a nice one. We can all get lucky and find great deals, but that is not representative of the market value of a game.
 
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Except, those video games are drastically different. Yes, it can be boiled down to "stay alive as long as possible", but in those games the method of doing so is completely different. With pinball, the method of "staying alive" is always the same.



I know all of that, but that can be completely ignored, and your score will still rack up as long as you keep the ball in play. It may not rack up as fast as it would for someone who has learned the ins and outs of that particular game, but it will rack up nonetheless.

A skillset for any given electromechanical flipper-based pinball machine is highly transferable to any other electromechanical flipper-based pinball machine, because it is always based on reacting to the real-world physics of a standardized steel ball on a ramp. With video games, being good at e.g., Pac-Man isn't any help at all when playing Donkey Kong or Street Fighter II. Even among video games that are very similar, such as Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out, the skillset doesn't have a high degree of transferability. For example, I was already decent at Punch-Out (I could beat the champion, Mr. Sandman) when I first played Super Punch-Out, but I lost to the first guy. Show me someone who can marathon one pinball title, but can't last more than 30 seconds on a different pinball title the first time he plays it.



I would like to see a survey done with random people on the street, asking them to name a famous pinball title and a famous video arcade game title. My prediction is: lots of blank and confused stares for the pinball title question, and lots of "Pac-Man", "Donkey Kong", "Space Invaders", etc., answers for the arcade game question.



Yes, as I said, certain conditions had to be met in order for it to catch the ball. It was basically just a bar/rod that stuck up through the playfield, and the rod was surrounded by a plastic housing (shaped sort of like I drew in my previous post, as viewed from the top) that was open in the front and back. The bar being up, combined with the housing, would catch the ball. When the bar wasn't up, the ball would just roll through that housing and out of play. I believe the housing was just a piece of plastic mounted on 4 risers/standoffs. In addition to the rod that could be either up or down, there was also a mechanism for ejecting the ball back into play when it was caught in there.

One other detail I remember: at the top of the playfield, i.e., in the area the ball shoots to when you first release the plunger to put it into play, there were 4 paths, parallel to each other, that the ball could roll down through. Each time the ball went through one of those paths it would turn on a light embedded in the floor of the path, or turn the light off if it was already on. If you could light up all 4, something would happen (I can't remember what, though I'm thinking it might have put an extra ball into play).

I think the game you are referring to is Silverball Mania.
http://ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2156&picno=36194&zoom=1
 
I think the game you are referring to is Silverball Mania.
http://ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2156&picno=36194&zoom=1

I looked up some pictures and watched a video of that game, and the ball-catch mechanism behind the flippers works the way I remember it and its housing has the right shape; it's even on 4 risers/standoffs like I remember, but I don't remember the top of the housing being clear plastic. I remember it being white or whitish plastic (you couldn't see much of the ball when it was in there). Also, nothing else about it looks familiar, especially those busty naked chicks, which I'm pretty sure I would have remembered.

Are there any other pinball machines from that era which used that same ball-catch mechanism behind the flippers? Because that part is dead-on to what I remember, aside from the color of the housing.
 
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