Photos from an old warehouse raid

mnrocketry

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For fun, I've put up an album of photos from my first warehouse raid - way back in October of 2002.

https://picasaweb.google.com/alan.estenson/ArcadeWarehouseRaidOctober2002#

Before anyone gets excited...
This warehouse is LONG GONE.
All the games in it are LONG GONE.
I have NONE of them for sale.

If people start pestering me about it, I'll just delete the photo album!
 
Here's the story of this warehouse raid as I wrote it down about four years ago...

In June of 2001, I had purchased my first two arcade games from a local guy. Eventually, we became acquaintances and then good friends.
In October of 2002, he sent me an email. He was going on a road trip to buy some stuff out of an operator's warehouse. Would I like to come along? Sure! I'd never been on a "warehouse raid" before, but I'd read about them. I put some cash in my wallet, got out the flashlight, digital camera, paper and pen, and dreamed about finding really cool games for very little money…
It was a cool and rainy October Saturday, and we hit the road at about 5am. My friend drove his truck and pulled an open U-Haul trailer. After a drive of many, many, many hours, we found the location – out innamiddleofnowhere – many miles from the nearest town. It was several buildings all attached together – mostly of the "pole barn" or "machine shed" persuasion. One of them was full of sprint cars, race cars, sports cars. The rest were mostly full of arcade games and parts.
Most of the games were broken or partially stripped for parts. There was industrial shelving along the walls stacked with parts, pinball bodies, and other junk. Video arcade games had been shoved in with a giant shoehorn. Pushing them together to pack the available space, very few access aisles had been left. Plus, they were not organized in any particular way.
Still, I was in awe! There were dozens and dozens of video games, pinball games, jukeboxes, new monitors still in the box, arcade junk of all types…
There were tons of 1970's vintage B&W games like Tank, AntiAircraft, Breakout, Pong clones, Stunt Cycle, Night Driver (sit-down), etc. There were some classics from the early to mid 80's. Of course, he wouldn't even consider selling games like Ms Pac-Man. "I've got buyers for those willing to pay big bucks!" Right, we thought. Just as soon as you put monitors, circuit boards, and control panels back in those completely empty Pac cabinets.

Lesson – Operators will complain how they have no room and no time. However, there will always be items that they'll flatly refuse to sell. (No matter how much room they'd gain, cash they'd get, or time that they'd save.) Ms Pac's are a good example. In this guy's case, he also wouldn't sell his (worn, incomplete) Tron because it was "worth five thousand bucks".

If I remember correctly, the operator didn't actually own this storage space. He was also in the process of clearing out another warehouse and transferring its contents to this one. However, he (and the actual building owner) wanted to clear out a lot of stuff from this warehouse too.
The games were packed together so tightly, that eventually I had to resort to climbing up and walking on top of them just to get to the back of the storage space and see what was there!
All kinds of stuff. (A lot of which, in hindsight, I now wish that I'd bought, but I was a noob and didn't know any better.)
Gravitars, Battlezones, Tempests, Tron, Star Trek, Burgertime, Space Invaders, Pooyan, Double Dragon, Asteroids, Joust, etc. And of course, a ton of junky conversions, completely empty cabinets, and countless video trivia machines.
Wait a minute? Tempests? Yes! I had fond memories of playing Tempest as a teenager.
One Tempest was waaaaaay in the back. I walked on top of games again and dropped down into a tiny space in front of it. It looked all right, but I couldn't get to the backdoor to check for monitor boards, and, looking through the coin door, I thought that one of the game boards might be missing. Plus, it would have taken two hours to extricate it.
But, hey, there's another one over there! Once again, I go through a gymnastics routine to get to it. Hmmm, looks fairly decent, all the parts seem to be inside, just the back door is missing. I mention to the Op that I might be interested. "I think that it works", he says, so we feed an extension cord back to it. Hmm, it does come up, it plays, but it isn't working quite right. Some of the graphics are funky. Still, I'm interested. "Tempests are worth a lot", the Op says. Great, I think, now the fun begins. To cut the story short, I eventually got my friend to bargain for me, and we settled on $300 for the game.
To get it out, we had to rearrange about 15 other games. Once out, I was disappointed to see that the sides of the cabinet were in poor condition at the bottom. It had evidently been moved around a lot since the leg levelers had disappeared years prior. Hmmm, but there was an excellent condition Tempest cabinet in the same area. Of course, it was dead and had been converted to a Universal "Eggs" game. (#sigh#) After some more bargaining, the Op offered to throw in that cabinet on the deal. We just had to remove the circuit board, monitor, and marquee for him first. OK! We had that done in under 10 minutes. As an extra bonus, there was a full set of Tempest manuals and schematics lying in the bottom of that converted cabinet.
My friend and I also ended up helping to unload a big truck full of stuff that the Op had cleaned out of another warehouse. (He wanted to look at a pinball that was in the truck.) Well, there in the truck was a complete Tempest control panel. I asked the Op about buying it, and he gave it to me in thanks for my help unloading his junk.

I mentioned how the operator needed to make room in the warehouse? Well, while we climbed around and looked at stuff, he and his son were going through game cabinets. They'd select a cabinet that was dead and/or empty, and that didn't have any value (at least to them), remove any remaining parts that might be worth saving, then cart the cabinet outside and set it on fire! Jukebox cabinet, old trivia cabinet, they went away… The only one that made me wince was a Gottlieb "New York, New York". I had seen it earlier, and it had caught my eye because I vaguely recalled it being a rare game. It was a nice cabinet, but no monitor or boards. About the only parts left were the marquee and control panel. At least they saved those before the rest went up in smoke.

What did we "score"?
My friend bought a Jurassic Park pinball. (He bought it for parts. It had literally fallen off a truck and smashed the head. He resold it as-is, and the buyer actually completely reassembled it.) He also bought an Eight Ball Deluxe pinball and two classic Exidy shooter video games – Crossbow and Cheyenne. I had the nearly-complete almost-working Tempest, empty Tempest ("Eggs") cabinet, and spare Tempest control panel.

We were there pretty much all day until well after dark. We were tired, thirsty, dirty, and hungry with a long drive home ahead of us. But we had bought some games, and I had been on my first warehouse raid!
 
nice story. lot of good games in those pics. so what ended up happening to the tempest? you still have it?

I "de-converted" the nice empty cabinet from Eggs back to Tempest. I then transferred all the guts over to that cabinet from the complete Tempest with the poor cabinet. Went through and restored/rebuilt everything, and I still have that Tempest in my game room.

My friend still has the Cheyenne, but sold the Crossbow.
 
Thanks for sharing your adventure. I know that had to be fun even if the guy had some unrealistic prices.
 
Thanks for sharing your adventure. I know that had to be fun even if the guy had some unrealistic prices.

Looking back, it was definitely fun. I wish now that I had encountered this warehouse when I had more collecting experience. I look at the photos and think, why didn't I buy that, and that, and that...

It was really only a few games where the Op wanted silly money.
IIRC, for the Crossbow & Cheyenne, my friend paid $75 for the pair! I bet that I could have bought the Gravitars shown in the photos for $50 each. Oh well.
 
You mention all the stuff is gone. Did one person come in and buy it all after yall left? Just curious as that is a lot of games and now way he was going to sell one piece at a time (Esp. at high prices) that fast.
 
Awesome pics! It's like a puzzle trying to identify all the games in some of those shots. :)

Do you have a pic of the Tempest converted to Eggs? I like the game in MAME, but have never seen an actual machine, conversion or otherwise.

Kyle :cool:
 
You mention all the stuff is gone. Did one person come in and buy it all after yall left? Just curious as that is a lot of games and now way he was going to sell one piece at a time (Esp. at high prices) that fast.

The Operator didn't own this storage space. The owner of the space was pushing the Op to clear it out. They were actively stripping games and burning the cabinets to get rid of them.

A few months later, I saw a post on rgvac from someone in the general region of that warehouse. They stated that they had bought out an Op's warehouse, and had a very long list of games that they were trying to sell. That list was identical to what I'd seen in that warehouse. No way that was just a coincidence...

Anyway that you look at it, that warehouse has been gone for 8+ years. Any games that the Op didn't sell, he either moved them elsewhere or lit them on fire.
 
You mention all the stuff is gone. Did one person come in and buy it all after yall left? Just curious as that is a lot of games and now way he was going to sell one piece at a time (Esp. at high prices) that fast.

And I should add, he was only high priced on stuff that he could sell to the general public (Ms Pac's) and stuff that collectors particularly sought after (Tempest, Tron, etc). Everything else probably could have been bought at $50 per game or less. As I mentioned in another post, my friend bought a Crossbow and a Cheyenne for a TOTAL of $75!
 
And I should add, he was only high priced on stuff that he could sell to the general public (Ms Pac's) and stuff that collectors particularly sought after (Tempest, Tron, etc). Everything else probably could have been bought at $50 per game or less. As I mentioned in another post, my friend bought a Crossbow and a Cheyenne for a TOTAL of $75!

Your friend stole those 2 games and you paid a fair price for your Tempest.
 
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