Remember the day you started collecting?

playpin35

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Do you remember the day when you bought your first game? For me today marks 18 years of collecting games and it all started with a $100 gorf upright. Including vids, pins and em's, I now have 60. How long have you been collecting?
 
I remember the first day. I picked up a Donkey Kong on 3-7-2009 so just over 2 years ago. I just though I'd have the one, I didn't realize it was a disease. - Barry
 
I was promised a Neo-Geo if I got good marks on my final report card, last year, and I did! It all went downhill from there! :)
 
I got ripped off on my first game. $500 for a water damaged Jungle King back in summer '09. Still have it and it works great, along with the 20 other games I have. At least I didn't buy the POS Pac-Man I saw the day before for $900.
 
I don't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

But luckily, I can go back through jpgs/photo 'albums' and figure out when I 'started'...

12/02/04 Was the beginning of the sickness, I built a MAME cab from scratch.
12/11/06 Was my first purchased 'real game', my Pole Position II, although it was just an empty cab.
11/14/2009 Was my first complete working game, Joust.
 
I remember, my wife's uncle called and said an operator was going out of business and selling jukes cheap. We bought a Seeburg for $500 bucks, that was 1990.

Technically my first coin-op was that juke, but my first game was an Armor Attack at one of Crazy Frazee's auctions for $35 bucks, working, back in 1993.
 
February 2009. Traded a bass amp, goped and couple of guitar pedals for a beat up DK that I restored to minty form. She's my baby. I named her Pauline.
 
My neighbor was actually an OP and getting out of the business..EONS ago...I was prob 15 or 16...I stood in the back yard with my jaw on the ground watching him bring trailer after trailer of games into his garage (to sell). He gave me two that I had to haul across the yard with our lawn tractor and trailer....a Mania Challenge and a Nintendo Slalom in a Galaxian cab. I got both working and Mania Challenge made its way into my basement. We played the hell out of it...one...twoooo...threEEeEeEeEeeEee.

Slalom eventually got sold to TNT, and the Mania Challenge went to a local social services school.
 
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In 95-96 i borrowed my dads f-150 and went to my first arcade auction.I scored a dead robby-roto and a dead 1942.It was about $100.00 for the pair, robby-roto never lived again and 1942 was a power supply issue.It has been up and down since then.All these years and never a house with a basement.I'd be dangerous if i just had some room lol.
 
I believe it was the summer of 2003. It was sometime around then that I just realized one day that I was old enough and had a decent enough job (paycheck) to buy these games I loved so much as a kid. I don't know why it took me so long. Anyway, I looked and looked (I was new, so I didn't really know where to look other than ebay) and all I found was a Super SFII Turbo board which I ended up getting.

It wasn't until early 2004 (hence my start date here) that I found a cabinet to put it in. I haven't had room for any more cabinets, but I've gotten tons of jamma boards and Neo Geo carts to go with it until I have more room.

I guess I'm way behind most people, but we should have a house this year, so once that happens, T-Mek is back on the radar for me :D
 
don't know the exact date, probably sometime around 86(would have to dig out my atari st to find the orignal email I posted on usenet).

I found a food fight at the san jose fleamarket. Guy said it was broken and he wanted $40 (might have been $60). Bought a new pcb and repaired audio reg and it was working.

Next find was a few weeks later... My original grail game.. space duel cocktail with a spirit of 76 cocktail for $150 at the cow palace fleamarket. Both were working.

After I got the space duel, I started to seriously looking for arcade games.
 
Tomorrow will mark my one year anniversary posting on KLOV. My first machine came I think about 1 week earlier. It was an original ms. Pac. Very solid machine. But as many others here it was just the beginning.
 
i started about a year ago. all i was looking for was just a shuffleboard table an old one say about 12'-14'. bought a puck bowler then a pinball then........20 games later. i still dont have my shuffle board table
 
Been about 6 years since I got my first game. What is most memorable is that as I was bringing it home, a dude in a new Porsche 911 almost rear ended the car in front of him because he was trying to see the game in the truck and didn't see traffic stop in front of him.
 
High Impact Football and Eagle shot golf. I paid $175 for the pair, both worked great but had Impact had "mouse" damage to the cabinet. I think it was 2002ish. I had never played or heard of either of them and bought/paid for them before I even saw them. I remember thinking since Impact was a williams game I should be able to pop a Defender PCB in it right? Well, thats when I learned what JAMMA was and how arcade games work :)
 
2002 i bought my first pacman for 500 bucks. bout a year and half ago i was looking on C.L. and found a super pacman for 100 bucks. thats what started it for me. i am hooked now!!!
 
In July of 2000, one of my buddies and I were sitting around and on a whim, we decided to drive into Denver (about 3 hours) and see if we could find arcade games to buy. I got a Final Fight in a Phoenix cabinet ($275) and he got a SF2 in a Super Pac cab ($475). He got ripped and I probably did too but we didn't know that. That was a fun time, hard to believe it was almost 11 years ago.
 
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