What inspired you to get into this hobby?

This hobby is a combination of nostalgia and stupidity. I should have stopped with 3 maybe 4. Now with 26 and a bunch of money invested in obsolete technology I wonder what I am doing, and why I spend hours searching online for parts and then spending good money after bad.

I started after I got a pool table after I finished off the basement. I remember my ex brother in laws parents had a great basement with a pool table and a Japanese slot. It made such an impression on me that 20 years later I wanted to have something like that.

I discovered a broken pinball for sale in the paper and bought it... I guess the bumpy ride on the way home fixed it. I was hooked.

I later went to a super auction and grabbed a couple of crappy games for a hundred a peice.

Now I am searching for the classics and the coolest looking cabs... buying..selling and trading my way to the ultimate collection that is never attainable.
 
I just thought it would be fun to spend 100's of quarters on a game that I would normally only spend a few quarters a year on.

Look at all the money I've saved!

Honestly, I'd always wanted an arcade machine... it wasn't until about 7 years ago or so when my room-mate, at the time, came home with a Killer Instinct machine. Then it just seemed more and more like a "good idea" to get a machine. I went off, joined the military, came back... got home... and got a free empty Tron cabinet. Rebuilt it, and now... well... see the sig.

I think this hobby is a perfect combination of having no idea how much money it takes when you get started, the unwillingness to admit that you have better things to spend your money on, and the need to have a room full of 30 year old cabinets that weren't meant to last more than 9 months... ... and the ability to sit back, enjoy life, and ignore the fact that the room is full of fire-hazards that are either broken, in the process of being fixed, or recently fixed and the in the process of breaking again.
 
I had been lurking on this message board for several months. One of my friends and I had a bright idea. We decided to go to Denver, CO (only a few hour drive at the time) to see if we could find somewhere to buy arcade games (still only dreaming that this was actually possible). I ended up with a Final Fight (Phoenix cabinet) and he took home a SFII (Super Pac cabinet). It was the first time I went to a game warehouse. The first several rows of games were easy to get to but after that it was packed game to game to the walls. We dug through 10 rows of games (climbing on top of some of them) to get to the one he wanted. I paid $275 for mine and he paid $450. We didn't really know much about games or pricing back then but it was a lot of fun.
 
I've always been a sucker for nostalgia. I used to be about this that were before my day but now as I'm getting a bit older and the places I remember as a kid are gone for good. I wanted to try a build a little place I can drift back in time in. For me it is less about the games and more about the atmosphere.
 
When I was a kid in the '80s I vowed that I would own a Punch-Out and/or Super Punch-Out machine one day. So playing the games inspired me to be in this hobby, years before I had the means to actually be in this hobby.
 
IvanTT said:
... For me it is less about the games and more about the atmosphere.
Click to expand...

...please tell me you already have the "Arcade Ambience" MP3s... :)

I always play them when I'm playing one of my machines at home. Adds a whole new dimension to the nostalgia for sure! The only thing better would have been to have a real recording from Golf n' Stuff with announcements about the go-kart track, and parties ready for their putters. :D
 
For me it was consoles/Computers constantly offering up better versions of the classics..

The chase of the best pac-man, DK, asteroids.. ect ect from system to system. Well, MAME was perfect, no need for the chase.. Finally I could rest.

Well, Ebay showed that I could get artwork, and flyers, and GAMES! It never dawned on me I could OWN a REAL game!

REAL versions, the way they were supposed to be. not roms on a HD! No DOS command lines needed! just a quarter and a credit given!

So!

I bought a Magic Sword on Ebay for around 225.00, loved it. Capped it, placed all new art on it. Then discovered it was a Robotron Conversion. Well that wouldn't do!

Sold it, and have had a complete dedicated collection(except for some bulk buy cabs) from there..

Oh yeah, Super Auctions didn't help either.. jerks! lol

I still tinker with mame, actually I have had mame on my HD longer than I was married..hrmm..
 
Mame is the way to go on this thread......Myself and my buddies would play track and field on the keyboad for hours, then branched out to galaga, mappy, etc. Then, I thought, I could build one of these machines. The rest is history. Being a child of the 80's doesn't help either. All my newspaper delivery money went into these machines.

LPZ
 
I start collecting Atari 2600, Colecovision, etc. carts and systems. Then I saw an opportunity to buy a Scramble machine for $200. After that first machine I bought more machines at Auctions in NJ and at operators and did some bulk buys of PCB's from different operators. I started back in 1994 or so and was active in the newsgroups. Rick Schieve and others were very helpfull to me back then and I hope that they are all doing well.

I haven't been active in the hobby for about 10yrs but I'm getting back involved and digging through all my old PCB's and trying to get all my machines and boards in working order.
 
Last edited:
jawhn said:
...please tell me you already have the "Arcade Ambience" MP3s... :)

I always play them when I'm playing one of my machines at home. Adds a whole new dimension to the nostalgia for sure! The only thing better would have been to have a real recording from Golf n' Stuff with announcements about the go-kart track, and parties ready for their putters. :D
Click to expand...

Yes but most of the ambience comes from 3d arcade on my.... MAME MACHINE (Oh god no!!! Say it ain't so!!!) More or less the same thing. Once I expand there will be no need for "extra" sounds but thats still a ways off.

The Golf 'n' Stuff idea is awesome I may just have to make up some sort of fake announcments of that nature for Little John's
 
Used to play arcade games at TIMEOUT, convenience stores, laundrymats pretty much anyplace that had one. I was really into Street Fighter 2 in middle school so when SF2THD came out on XBOX Live Arcade I had to get it.

I got into playing the game online and played against one guy that seemed to beat me to the punch and counter me on just about anything I did. It was a very close match which I ended up losing. I asked if he was using a wire or wireless controller and he said he was using a home made arcade stick.

Did some research and I ended up building my own arcade stick. While searching for the best place for parts I ran across places that sold machines. That got me thinking about owning a machine so I checked CL. Saw an ad for a Tekken 3 for $400. I was really into this game from playing it on the PS so I wanted it. Called the wife and told her I wanted the game but wouldn't pay the $400 even though she told me to go for it if I really wanted it.

E-mailed the ad poster and offered $200. They said someone offered to give them their asking price but ended up backing out due to being too far. I guess the seller really needed the money because they said I could have it for $200. Picked it up that night. Game was in a Dynamo cab with no back door and an inkjet marquee printed on copy paper. This was 9 months and 15 machines ago. :) It's the game I paid the most for too.
 
I started collecting coleco, intv, vectrex, 2600, 5200, 7800 and 8bit.

One day I saw a food fight at the SJ fleamarket. Happend to ask how much. He said its broken $40. That was pretty much it.. I started looking for arcade games.

A few weeks later I found a space duel cocktail(my favorite game) at SF fleamarket for around $100. After that it was full time hunt for arcade games.
 
I went on ebay and bought my girlfriend this:

P1010144.jpg


When she became my fiancee, I went on ebay and bought her this:

SSL11409.jpg
 
It's cool reading everyone's stories.

For me, I had been really into collecting for the NES. I got up to about 300 games in my collection and just kinda got bored with it as there are so many crappy games that came out for that system and were just sitting on a shelf not being played. So, I started selling a bunch of the crap off when I came across a Playchoice 10 dual monitor on Craigslist about an hour away from me. It was $400 and came with six games. I figured what better to be the centerpiece of a NES collection than this cabinet. So I used some of the money I had saved from selling NES games and picked it up. Spent a bunch of time researching how to do basic repairs so I could cap the monitors and cleaned the cab up a bit. That was just about a year and a half ago and I just took in my ninth and tenth games about two weeks ago. Two of the ten have been sold/traded (Pole Position and Cisco Heat) so I currently have eight working games in my gameroom. I have not had the time/money/energy to do a full restore on any of them yet but am planning on doing at least one if not more of my cabs this winter. I figure I've got the room and desire for at least two or three more cabs before I start having to figure out which of the ones I have I need to swap out for something new. Fortunately, since I got into arcades my father has jumped into the pinball world and wants to build his own gameroom. I am already building him a 48 in 1 for Christmas to get him started on vids so I figure I could use his gameroom as my own personal storage knowing the games removed from my house would still get good use at his. And my parents only live about 5 minutes from us.

Next on my list... either Monkey Ball or a Neo-Geo 4 slot.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

vintagegamer
When you repair other things thx to this hobby.
Replies
2
Views
213
vintagegamer
vintagegamer
vintagegamer
Sometimes I think this hobby wants me to go..
2
Replies
24
Views
861
vintagegamer
vintagegamer
whoamonga
What to turn these 2 Konami Cabs into?
Replies
6
Views
346
whoamonga
whoamonga
mrbill2084
What arcade games had contests built into them or connected to them?
2
Replies
24
Views
1K
mrbill2084
mrbill2084
Atari The Jedi
Who would you like to see come back to KLOV/Hobby?
3 4 5
Replies
91
Views
7K
TheYeti
TheYeti
Back
Top Bottom