Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Picking up a game is always a blast for me. This latest one was even more fun for a few reasons....

- It has been waaay to long since I have picked up a game
- It came out of the blue, a phone call from an old buddy I haven't talked to in years..."hey, do you still mess with that pinball and arcade stuff?" LOL :)
- I knew little to nothing about the game I was picking up.

As you can see from the pics, it's Ninja Gaiden. I'm an old fart, so it came out a little after I had stopped going to the arcades every waking minute of my life. Never played it and really don't remember it. It's in decent shape and it fired right up when I got home. My buddy was concerned about it working because he said it sometimes wouldn't start unless the back door was really pushed in tight (wink wink...we all know what that means). I tried to pay him for it but he said he picked it up for 100 bucks way back in the day..."just take it, I need it out of the house". Man I wish I was into this back when those deals were flying around!

Anyhoo, I was excited to get this home and fire it up. It seems to work fine, fairly clean, and the controls all work. Based on what my friend told me, they never opened it up. I drilled out the look and was tickled to see the envelope with all the original manuals and stuff in there. To my surprise, this was a Joust in it's former life! I know lots of you folks would have known it on the spot, but I'm still not able to identify all the different cabs right away. I can only guess the original operator did the conversion, closed it up, and it's never been opened since. The original buttons they took out are still in the coin bucket!

Now of course, I face the age old dilemma. Clean it up and make sure everything works...then enjoy it, or take on the task of changing it back to a Joust. I know Ninja Gaiden was a conversion kit, so I suppose I could move it to any generic cabinet.

This kind of got my pumped up about working on my games again, so I wanted to share. Cheers!
Back
Top Bottom