Great reading about everyone's jump into arcade collecting, good question!
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LONG STORY SHORT, 4 years ago the first one was a CL Ironman Offroad 3p I had to load in my upstairs apartment! Enjoyed that machine with my friends and alot of beers!
I started lurking on KLOV... Checking out gameroom pics and repair threads.
Scored a well paying job, moved from an apartment in town to a 3 bedroom house out in the middle of nowhere... had all the room in the world (so I thought) at this point.
Found a NARC machine at a garage sale, dead $10, brought her home...
Registered on KLOV and posted that I had a dead NARC machine, what should I check and does anyone have parts? Jethrokiller hooked me up by selling the parts I needed to fix NARC and I realized that indeed I was able to figure out basic repairs and get a dead machine working again, had to change my undies after playing my first arcade Narc in 15 years!
I started coming down with a bug, a sickness, a cancer, it was COIN OPERATED ARCADES!
3rd machine I pulled the trigger on EBAY, $357 for a Mario Bros. widebody, solid and played good.
4th was a dead Asteroids right after that off of Craigslist that I probably overpaid for but it was a clean cabinet and I knew that was an ultra-classic that I HAD to have as a keeper.
AFTER THIS I WENT NUTS AND WENT THROUGH WELL OVER 150 CABINETS WHITTLING DOWN KEEPERS GAMES DRIVING ALL OVER THE WEST COAST AND MEETING HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN MY TRAVELS...
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THE LONG STORY OF MY FIRST MACHINE AND DESIRE:
When I was in my early teens our local Fun-N-Games @ Northgate Mall in Seattle was closing up so they put pricetags on everything! Pigout was $650, Smash TV was the same or maybe a little more, and I remember a conversion Magic Sword priced near $500. Me and my best friends wanted a machine SO bad but our paper route and lawn mowing job money wasn't enough between slurpees and quarters being pumped into games, let alone greasy pizza and used Nintendo NES games... I vowed one day to have a couple arcade games when I "had a place of my own"...
I spent the next 10 years collecting console games and had over 500 NES games (what I mainly loved to collect)
Then almost 4 years ago I was a bachelor living in an upstairs apartment in Seattle, had the place pimped out with console game madness and lots of couches but something was missing... I was searching craigslist one day for Dodge 4x4 parts and something "offroad" and up popped an Ironman Offroad 3 player arcade machine about an hour and a half away for $300! It was a few days old but I emailed on it asking more about the machine and confirming that it worked. It was pouring down rain the next night so I borrow a NAPA Autoparts van from my boss so I could "move furniture had to do it tonight" (Worked there 6 years so he let me do it!) Me and my buddy Jason drove out in the NAPA Econoline van during a psycho stormy night and went way the EFF out in the middle of nowhere (about 10 minutes from where I now live ironically) and I scored my first game, Ironman Offroad 3p for $3 Benjamins!! On the way home me and my childhood friend Jason are going on and on about all the games we used to play at the arcades and how dope it was that I got an Offroad! Get home safely, BUT, getting up to my second floor apartment was a MOTHER EFF and with four guys we got it ALL the way to the top of the stairs and found it couldn't make the turn!! (I didn't know how to remove control panel!) We actually the damn Ironman 3p over a balcony rail where if we dropped it she would have dropped 15 feet! We were struggling, slipping, not sure if we would get it over the rail without dying or dropping it, and out of nowhere my Hispanic neighbor hears us outside barking and comes in with the gansta' muscle to help us get it inside! After that and he helped us put it in my house I smoked him the fattest fatty with my friends and their help and couldn't believe it actually made it into the apartment!! Must have played Ironman Offroad for 3 or 4 hours the first night, and nearly every night for a week at least!