This hobby is a disease. How many times have you relapsed?

scottmaggie

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This hobby is a disease. How many times have you relapsed?

My name is Scott and I am an addict. My current collection is the 3rd time I have been through this addiction.

The first time I got the fever was in 1993 when I happened upon 3 games a closed business was tossing out. Tempest, Ms. Pacman and Mario Bros. 2 years and 20+ games later I sold off everything when my parents retired, leaving Long Island and I had moved to a small apartment. I was sad but the time had come to move on.

The second go around started in 2000 when a buddy calls me up an says he just bought a Centipede off eBay for $200 and there is a whole games section on there. Within 2 days I had an Asteroids Deluxe in my 2 bedroom NYC apartment. By 2003 it was again 20+ machines. Yes all in a NYC apt! I also infected 2 friends and they had 20+ each in their houses. We bought literally several hundred games off operators, kept a few each and sold off the rest. Due to a career change at the end of 2004 I sold off everything except Asteroids Deluxe and moved to PA. One friend sold off all of his and the other (the one with the biggest house I might add, still has all of his but isn't active in the arcade community).

This brings us to relapse #2 - current generation. If the first outbreak was caused by luck and the second by eBay then this can only be referred to as the Craigslist strain of the disease. One day in 2009 while looking on Craigslist I see a free Pole Position. Oh man, not again! Here we are at Feb 2012 and yep you guessed it, 20+ machines in my basement, a garage full of parts and a dire need for somewhere to put more games.

I keep telling myself that if I sell any the money will just get spent on other stuff. Clearly rationalizing is a symptom of this disease. So is long nights with smoking solder, the 4AM might as go all night mentality followed by the 5AM can't see straight smoking of a chip you put in backwards and set yourself back a week panic. Finally there's next day hangover where you promise to never do it again (last part lightly borrowed from comedian Larry Miller)

Where does it end? :0)
 
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I havent relapsed in the sense of selling and coming back, but I relapse in the sense of playing the games. ill play and be all about games for a while, internet searching, buying and trading. then I stop. look at the games and never play, and then go back to full on into it a couple months later.

but hey, there not drugs. so I could be a lot worse
 
Never relapsed, but that day I googled Donkey Kong and discovered MAME at version .33 was a game changer!
 
My name is Scott and I am an addict. My current collection is the 3rd time I have been through this addiction.

Where does it end? :0)

It ends whenever you say it ends. So do you buy games because they are games you enjoy playing, you like working on them, or to flip, etc.?

Each time you relapse, do you buy some of the same games you sold off before?
 
addiction...

StreetzKing - agreed very glad it's not drugs and I do the same as you. I play a lot, stop awhile, play a lot, stop... Tends to coincide with finding a new game. Every time I get a new one I go back and play the others too.

TOK - I left MAME off my write up altogether. I was also on it from a very early version like you and built one of the first mame machines. This was long before keyboard encoders and usb trackballs. That's another whole story there but here's a taste: I took a day off work when I first discovered MAME to download all the roms on a dial up modem.

Xarcade - Yea I know it ends when I say it ends. The whole write up is mainly to be silly and get stories out of everyone. I love this hobby. It's fun and it don't have to cost a fortune though it does take up a ton of space. Also, yes I somehow end up with a very similar collection each time - dedicated games from 80-83. No jammas or later.
 
I have been hiding my affliction for years; Keeping it under control, but only just below the surface. One night I watched the movies "Fist Full of Quarters" and "King of Kong". The disease surfaced with a vengeance. I called my cousin who had a DK Jr. in really sad shape and just sitting in his garage collecting dust till he had time to fix it. I thought to myself if I could restore this game I could become the next "King of Kong!"

Well, 9 games and 2 years later, I have restored the DK Jr. game, and I am still trying to beat the DK record. Whenever I get the urge to quit collecting games, I sit down and play my DK Jr. and that keeps my addiction just below the surface while playing the game, till the next time I see another $50 game posted for sale..........

I need help.....not for my addiction, but to pick up and move the newest game I just bought for $50 into my basement.......
 
turn the games outward toward other people, instead of focusing on yourself.
give give give stuff away that you don't really need.
gets easy to break the egocentric / narcissistic tendency that leads to this kind of thing.

everyone I know or related to ended up getting a nicely restored vintage BMX when I finally got that figured out. figured out i liked the project of acquiring and restoration but what do you do with the end project that just takes up lots of space.

:)

I started to get the impulse with pinballs- so I gave one away.
started to get it again recently after selling some toys....so gave the money to my wife to put toward other real life stuff.

give give give. :)
 
This is my 3rd time collecting. Probably my last though. I have way more games this time than in the past.
 
There are guys just like us with all the same passion and more money to spend.
They are called pinball collectors.
Pinball, the sport of kings.
(And Attorneys, Dentists, CPAs, MBAs, etc...)
 
once.


i got my first machine almost 10 years ago, rewired it (original harness was hacked to hell), bought a bunch of boards and just fell off for about 5-6 years....

last January for some reason I got sucked back in. Found KLOV and VAPS and since then i've bought 5 more cabinets (in 12 months almost exactly) and 10-20 boards.

I've also sold a bunch of stuff, met many other Wonderful people, and gotten 1 friend infected/addicted (to vids and pins).
 
You are right, It can be an addiction / disease and it is easy to get overwhelmed and buried in projects. I used to collect arcades to play them, now I'm all about restoring them. Finding them is the other half of the fun! It could be worse though, you could be spending all your money on blow and strippers and have nothing to show for it. Instead, you have a garage full of toys and no room to store anything. I think you are doing fine :)

My name is Scott and I am an addict. My current collection is the 3rd time I have been through this addiction.

The first time I got the fever was in 1993 when I happened upon 3 games a closed business was tossing out. Tempest, Ms. Pacman and Mario Bros. 2 years and 20+ games later I sold off everything when my parents retired, leaving Long Island and I had moved to a small apartment. I was sad but the time had come to move on.

The second go around started in 2000 when a buddy calls me up an says he just bought a Centipede off eBay for $200 and there is a whole games section on there. Within 2 days I had an Asteroids Deluxe in my 2 bedroom NYC apartment. By 2003 it was again 20+ machines. Yes all in a NYC apt! I also infected 2 friends and they had 20+ each in their houses. We bought literally several hundred games off operators, kept a few each and sold off the rest. Due to a career change at the end of 2004 I sold off everything except Asteroids Deluxe and moved to PA. One friend sold off all of his and the other (the one with the biggest house I might add, still has all of his but isn't active in the arcade community).

This brings us to relapse #2 - current generation. If the first outbreak was caused by luck and the second by eBay then this can only be referred to as the Craigslist strain of the disease. One day in 2009 while looking on Craigslist I see a free Pole Position. Oh man, not again! Here we are at Feb 2012 and yep you guessed it, 20+ machines in my basement, a garage full of parts and a dire need for somewhere to put more games.

I keep telling myself that if I sell any the money will just get spent on other stuff. Clearly rationalizing is a symptom of this disease. So is long nights with smoking solder, the 4AM might as go all night mentality followed by the 5AM can't see straight smoking of a chip you put in backwards and set yourself back a week panic. Finally there's next day hangover where you promise to never do it again (last part lightly borrowed from comedian Larry Miller)

Where does it end? :0)
 
I started collecting around the year 2K and never looked back.
As other hobbies have come and gone over the years, the one thing that remains steady is the games. Though I have more games now than I ever have had in the past.
It helps that I enjoy working on them. So I end up gathering a bunch of projects that I have aspirations to fix. But I have yet to gain the knowledge to be able to fix the main PCB boards, so when when one of them takes a shite, it's a bummer; usually an expensive bummer.

Oh well, it's worth it, IMO.

Cheers!
 
There definitely is an "Addictive Quality" to this hobby and so long as you stick with some guidelines I wouldn't call it an "unhealthy addiction". I have the following rules to help "regulate my behavior and spending", your mileage may vary:

1) No more than 1 "Project" at a time. I derive most of my joy from the games themselves and the parties and friends interaction with them, not in the restoration itself. So I figure if I don't have time to fix the one, how will I have time for others ? (games breaking not-withstanding).

2) Price / locality / functionality consideration. It needs to be easily delivered / retrieved within a day and needs to be functional / playable when I buy it and I pay cash. The hobby doesn't effect any of the other household bills or spending. If I can't make it work with the cash on hand, I pass.

3) I must have power available to use and play all of my games simultaneously.

4) I will not pay for storage, nor will I crowd my arcade space with machines so it's uncomfortable for a group of people to play them. I have a dedicated space in my basement for the games and if It starts getting crowded / I run out of space then I need to flip something to make space.

5) Look for interchangeable games that work in the same cabs for variety, not necessarily a new cab. Boards are cheaper, easier to store and even if I own say 5 light gun games, it doesn't mean I need them all available at once.

6) Don't spend all your time with the machines / auctions / boards. I have a fiance and son and frankly most of my time in the arcade is either WITH them, or after they are both asleep. Don't let it (or any hobby for that matter) monopolize your time.

Note: 2a / 5a) -> for both the machines and boards I'm also fairly cheap but patient. I've found some amazing deals just by keeping an eye out. For PCBs I generally spend between $30-$60 shipped with tracking and for specific games I'm looking for, and every dollar above that makes me question how much I want it RIGHT NOW, so this also keeps me in check.

So there you go, that's "How I Personally keep things in check" and if I stick with that I can honestly say "I don't have a problem." Again, your mileage may vary... Best of luck.
 
Bah, quitting is easy. Ask any smoker. It is staying quit that is the problem.

If you truely think it is an addiction that is affecting your life, then you need to do what any addiction councellor would tell you to do: you need to get the problem out of your life, make a lifestyle change to get away from the temptations and change the people (the enablers) you hang with.

We'll miss you. :ciao:

............................................Til you come back.

ken
 
get down with the sickness

when you start trading pinball machines for video games, thats when you know you got it bad.
My name is Scott, too.
 
The addiction...

Friends, Romans, Vidiots:

My rant was really meant to be more funny then serious and see what great stories of arcade debauchery you all have. Please don't take it too seriously unless (gasp) I really have a problem? :0)

I love this hobby and riding the up and down waves of finding games, fixing games, selling/trading games. It is totally true that the family should always come first. Pretty sure we all get that.


May the quarter be with you, always.
 
Friends, Romans, Vidiots:

My rant was really meant to be more funny then serious ...

May the quarter be with you, always.

Sorry man, but these things do happen. You ever see hoarders ? Some people do develop a genuine problem with stuff like this. Glad it's all in fun, though.

"May the Code of Konami grant you 30 lifetimes of Happiness."
 
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Twice. After losing my tech support job about 5 years back I sold a ton of projects. Then more recently I was sick of having games clogging up my pad and sold a few + gave a few away.

I realized that I still enjoy the hobby and just really need to get a house, so now I've resumed the status quo and have been tossing new acquisitions into storage for now. Not letting myself get too out of hand though, still basically sticking to games that I consider must-haves (and a set of pinball machines - one B+/A- title from each major manufacturer's heyday). On the plus side I ended up replacing almost all the must-keep games that I sold and ended up with much nicer examples of each so that is nice.

I'd kind of like to ditch my South Park pin yet though. It's cool, but it is very shallow (in that current-era Stern sort of way) and just doesn't do much for me. But I've got so much money into it and not much interest in taking a loss so I think I'm stuck with it.
 
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