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PARKER - Jon Jamshid has a secret. For the past 11 years, he's been stockpiling old arcade games devouring floor space in his home.
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"The only neighbors that know are the ones right here on the corner," said Jamshid, a video game collector.
He owns 56 stand-up style arcade games. Some were built in 1978, but most are from the 1980s. His collection includes titles such as: Adventure, Pepper II, Astro Blaster, Star Wars, Q-Bert, Pengo, Spy Hunter, and Kickman.
"I think it's a way to capture my youth, I guess," Jamshid said. "All of a sudden it dawned on me that there are no more classic games, you know. What happened to them all?"
Jamshid invites his friends over to play any game free of charge. They say they appreciate experience of playing to the older games.
"It's the whole body experience," said Steve MacDonald, a friend. "It's the fact that you're not sitting on the couch with two thumbs [working a controller]."
Jamshid's wife Jenny doesn't play video games that often, but she puts up with her husband's collection because it's his dream.
"The only thing that concerns me is the games are so big and they're heavy and I just don't want him to hurt himself when he's moving everything around," Jenny Jamshid said. "What am I gonna say? It doesn't hurt anybody. He enjoys playing them. [Our] kids like it. It's kinda cool. Everybody's all excited about it."
Jon Jamshid says he supports his habit by "flipping" games. He repairs some arcade machines and re-sells them to pay for other games he wants to keep. He has provided games for movie shoots and his hobby will be highlighted in an upcoming documentary.
Jamshid, who is known in the video game collector's world as "Exidy," estimates he has one of the top five biggest collections of arcade machines in the country.
"We try to keep it under wraps a little bit or else we would have probably 40 kids over here every day after school," Jenny Jamshid said.
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