All the Places I've been Picking up Games

[jeffradon2000]

I was bringing a game home today (it's a secret to be revealed 1 year from now) and I thought what fun it would be to describe all my experiences picking up arcade games from random weird people like me. 

Fast Draw
My very first pinball machine. Fast Draw was an EM (Electrical pinball) from 1975. This was my first pinball I bought after getting the big pinball bug, back in 2012. It was not working and I thought with my experiences building computers and recently an arcade machine running MAME that I could totally figure this out. Boy was I wrong. I bought it off a guy in Jacksonville. It seemed pretty normal, he also had a puck bowler he was trying to sell me too. I didn't know how to read the wiring diagram and couldn't figure out what was going wrong as there were multiple problems. I ended up paying someone to come fix it for me. He was a very old deaf guy who had his own EM pinball repair business. He came by, picked up the game, and brought it back a few weeks later. It was fully working and he even repainted parts of the playfield! I don't think he's around anymore. It was certainly an experience trying to communicate with him. Also when I got my game back there was one solinoid locked on and buzzing very loudly, of course he might not have noticed something being really loud... We had fun with this game for a while in the Whiskey Lounge until I traded it for my next game.

Meteor
I didn't actually travel for this one. The guy brought it to my house. He really wanted my Fast Draw and was willing to trade with this game that was definitely worth more. This game was cool and sometimes I kind of wish I still had it. At the time I didn't realize I could actually have more than one pinball at a time and I really wanted a game with multiball and modern features. I sold this game to a guy who was starting a barcade in Edwardsville. I remember this guy insisted on not taking the backbox off and we carried it up my  basement stairs that way. It was very heavy and awkward and he fell down and skinned his hands up real bad. I don't think his barcade lasted very long and I'm pretty sure this same Meteor was in the Neighbors barcade which popped up in town later on.

Jurassic Park (DE)
After having Meteor a while, I created a weight loss goal for myself and the prize would be a nice pinball machine. After about 13 months I finally lost 61 pounds and got Jurassic Park. I picked it up from a nice house somewhere in the Chicago area, nothing too crazy there. I had this game for a while but eventually got bored with the linear modes and bad sound quality. However since I sold this game all of those problems can now be fixed with updated code and sound hardware, so I'm definitely up for getting this again someday. I ended up selling it for a profit although the guy who bought it talked me down when he arrived since he stopped by the casino on the way to my house and lost some of his money. He also brought a giant uhaul truck to transport this one game.

Pinbot
I was getting bored with my current arcade, Jurassic park and a mame arcade cabinet, and I sold both of them and got Pinbot. This is the only game I ever bought on Ebay. I picked it up from a guy in Chicago. It was kind of an upper middle class subdivision home and on the inside it was wall to wall games in every room. I had to sign a paper in the guys office, which had 80s rock band photos all over the place and guitars. He had huge rings on his fingers and was telling me how he played guitar with some of these bands. I can't remember what bands, but I want to say Motley Crue and Poison were mentioned. You could tell this guy was a big talker and it was hard to tell if he was just pulling my leg. Pinbot was definitely not in the shape as described but I was too much of a wuss to argue about it. At least we've improved it a lot over the years, as my Cat wife spent a lot of time painting the playfield. I will probably never sell this one as Pinbot was the first pinball I loved playing as a kid.

Galaga
Since I had sold my mame arcade cabinet, I wanted to get something original. Chris Gungadin offered to let me borrow his Galaga machine. Kevin Blacksheep helped me load it. It was mostly not working although sometimes you could get some of the game to appear on the screen. The cabinet was also in rough shape. I worked on it for a while until I gave up as I am not good a PCB repair and old namco boards are really hard to work on according to the internet. So I slapped in a 60-in-1 card instead. I painted it and put all new decals on it. It does still have the original monitor. Every December I send Chris a reminder that I still have his Galaga machine since it's still technically a "loan".

Updates 9/7/2021:

High Speed II, The Getaway
This is when things started going to the next level. Up until this time I only had 1 pin and 1 arcade machine at a time. I had decided that I could fit a second pinball machine in my basement which turned out to be The Getaway. I happened across a great Craigslist deal. I bought it off a guy who was selling it out of a storage unit in St Louis. I could see the arch from where we were. It was weird as this pin was the only thing in the storage unit. I don't know if this guy buys and sells things normally using this unit, or if maybe he was the storage building owner and needed to unload something? He didn't know anything about pinball and this game was clearly not working as described. I pointed out to him what was wrong as mpu was toast from battery corrosion. When we started breaking it down, I found out the hard way to always bring all my tools when doing a deal. I brought my socket set, but the leg bolts also had nuts on the other side (not normal for pinballs unless the leg brackets a stripped, which was the case here). I had to wait on him to go home and get tools so we could continue breaking it down. It was January and very cold outside and my fingers felt frozen from trying to fiddle with the nuts and bolts. Eventually we did get it done and I got it loaded. I was in luck that the only thing it needed was a new MPU board and a few little tweaks. It was a pretty cool pin, played ZZ Top music, and I brought it to Audiofeed. Around this time my arcade was up to 4 games: Pinbot, Getaway, Galaga and a Street Fighter 2 multicade running a pandoras box (not the same one as now).

Star Trek (Stern, Pro)
After getting bored with Getaway I started getting the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could actually get a modern Stern machine from the last 5 years. The idea seemed crazy as that was way more than I had spent on a single game to date. It certainly helped that I was able to sell Getaway for a juicy profit, and I sold that sf2 multicade as well (I didn't make a separate paragraph for that one, it was too boring). I put all my money together and found a Star Trek Pro in a basement in St Charles. Nothing too crazy about this transaction other than these guys were serious pinball nerds and showed me how to wrap up a game in plastic for transportation, which I've done ever since. They also told me about Padavan's, which Matthew and I checked out during the trip. At the time, this place was pretty great as they had all the new pins, including Dialed In. This was a time before CP Pinball got every new game as soon as they are released, so it seemed more impressive. 

Joust
I was missing having a second arcade cab but I specifically wanted classic williams games like Joust, which is one of my favorite arcade games of all time. I found an arcade cab on Craigslist to convert to a multi-williams machine. The interesting part about it is it was working with its current game already, which was Blockout. Blockout was a Tetris ripoff where they attempted to do Tetris in 3d, it's got a weird 3D face that talks to you and is very creepy. I kind of wish I had saved the hardware from it so I could possibly put this on a machine someday... It's rumored Blockout was the actual game behind the Polybius arcade myth. If you're not familiar with all of that, then you've got some googling to do. When I started refitting this machine to run a 19-in-1 card, I also found this cabinet was originally a P.O.W. So don't worry, no great games were destroyed in the making of the Joust machine we have today. It does explain the unique button layout of the machine as that is how POW was setup. I also kept the original arcade monitor in it but it started acting wacky after a few months, so I replaced it with a LCD monitor. I run the jamma card through a scan line generator to give it that authentic arcade monitor look, btw. Also in it's first year of existence, the baristie boys bottled cold brew for a Whiskey show with Joust themed labels. Anyone who still has one of those has a piece of history for sure.

Updates 10/27/2021

Space Odyssey
At this point in the Whiskey Arcade, I wanted to really pile on the games and go big! But I didn't quite have the budget at the time, so I was looking for deals on games to just fill up the space. The first one to come along was this EM game. It was the second EM I've ever owned and not too bad either. It had an interesting feature where there were ball kickers next to the flippers so you could just let the ball fall into the kickers and they would send the ball up to the moving target in the center of the playfield. I also really liked the artwork on this machine as you might have guessed by now that I like space themes on pins. I got this pin from a moose lodge in the st louis area. I've never been inside of a lodge like that. People were just drinking, shooting pool, and doing their thing like they probably do any other day. The operator was there and we worked on getting the game into my car. He was in a big hurry and he was trying to get his pinball dolly to work and it had really bad flat tires that obviously weren't going to hold air. Luckily I already learned by this point to bring my dolly or make real sure the seller knows what they're doing. Other than that nothing real big happened. This pin had some interesting mods. The operator only dealt with EM games, and he modded them so they had timers inside where they would shut down if not played for 10 minutes, then they would turn back on if you pushed the start button. It sounded like he had games all over the place, and this allowed him not to worry if people left the games on all the time. This is kind of cool except during shows it just looked the game was broken all the time and I had to constantly walk by and press the start button so people would know they could play it. He rewired a bunch of stuff inside the game and I didn't feel comfortable undoing it and making it work like normal so I left it alone. Other than that I didn't really have any problems with it. I had this machine up until I sold it to raise some cash for starting my new arcade at Dumb. I mainly didn't want to keep it due to the weird mod.

Hook & Genesis
This is the first time I ever got more than 1 game at the same time. I was still looking for deals on budget games to fill up my space and this was the perfect deal. 2 games on my list and I was able to get a steal on both of them. Of course they also both needed work. I got these 2 from a barcade in Evansville, IN called the High Score Saloon (this place will come up again in a future story). I didn't actually buy these from the bar, but at the guy's house. He had a house full of games that were mostly broken or in pieces. These 2 had been in the barcade and had been rotated out. They both needed stuff fixed. The guy was cool about everything and we got to talk a lot about pinball and stuff. After picking up the games I went to check out the barcade and then head home. It was kind of a long trip, the longest I've driven at the time to pick up games at about 7 hours round trip, but that record will definitely get broken later on.

I got Genesis up and running first. I was going to tackle these one at a time. I kept Hook folded down under a sheet. Genesis was really tough to work on, it needed all kinds of random things and even after I got it all working, it still was fiddly all the time with switches not registering and crap. I thought this was going to be a really cool game but I had never played it. After playing it, it looks and sounds cool, but doesn't play well. The ramps are really hard to hit as the flippers just feel under powered, no matter what I tried to do with them. I liked the idea of completing the body parts and then the big robot reveal under the playfield. It was frustrating tho because it was really hard to actually complete the robot and when you did, you had a 50/50 chance that the reveal mechanism actually worked right. I had to constantly adjust switches to try to keep things working on it all the way until I finally sold it. Even the day I sold it the ball trough switches stopped working and I had to fiddle with them right in front of the buyer. This is also how I learned that Gottlieb SS games are just crappy to work on, especially reading other people's stories.

I was especially excited about Hook as I love this movie so much, since I was the target age group when it came out. This game is usually priced cheap because most people don't like the theme. I liked it so much that I setup a Whiskey show completely around it. I had the movie playing in the corner of the basement and setup a contest so people could win VHS copies. Also the guy who sold me hook also gave me a kids bedroom curtain that was Hook themed as he also loved the movie so much but felt like the curtain should go with the game. I however kept the curtain when I sold the game... Unfortunately after playing this game for a while, even with the updated ROMs, it got old. I was especially frustrated that the scoop shot on the right to start modes was really hard to hit. I usually only hit it on accident. It would reject direct shots like crazy, which I think was just how it was designed. The big spiral ramp in the middle was cool, but not cool enough to keep the game fun over time. The game was a bit harder than it should have been and I noticed it didn't really hold other people's interest either. Selling this game was one of the weirdest selling experiences. When I had a buyer lined up, I  noticed an Ebay ad went up the same day, using the exact same pictures from my ad and the price was about double what I was asking. When the people came and got it, they didn't seem like they knew anything about pinball. I had to show them everything about how to take it apart and how to put it back together. I'm not sure if they even knew how to start and play a game. They were just really eager to get the game and leave. I didn't ask them about the ebay ad because I was too chicken and didn't want to spoil the deal. It didn't really make a difference to me. If they were trying to flip it, at least I got what I wanted out of it and it was a still a bit more than I expected

Updates 11/23/2021

Firepower II
Looking over the dates of my collection on Pinside, I realized I went out of order here. I had picked up Firepower II prior to Hook and Genesis, oops. But still these were all added pretty close together. Firepower II has been the only game I've purchased through Mr. Pinball Classifieds. This was the site to go to for buying and selling pinball before the days of Pinside. This site is so old, it might even pre-date Craigslist. I believe this brand of site is also called a listserv, an Internet 1.0 thing. To sell your game, you have to email them and they add it to be published the next day or so. And you can sign up to get an email list of every game added for sale. I still get an email update every morning, but it's mostly for amusement as no one seriously does business there anymore except maybe a few old timers. Also there are no pictures, which really makes it hard to actually know what a game is going to be like. Anyway, I saw an ad for this game that felt like a good deal. I contacted the guy and we arranged a date. I drove to Rockford to a guys house, which was yet another case of a single guy in a normal house where every room has been filled up with arcade and pinball machines. No matter how obsessed I am in this hobby, there are loads of guys out there way more in it than I'll ever be. So I went to play Firepower, test it out and such, and I immediately find all kinds of issues even tho it was advertised as fully working. At least the playfield wasn't all worn out as usually happens with this era of game. I could tell he was nervous as I knew about pinball, but at the same time I really didn't want to come home empty handed. So I got him to lower the price and I took it home. Fortunately for me it turned out to be easy fixes to get this game fully up and running (The downside is that in the future I'll be buying a game also of this era and I'll be real cocky that I can fix it easy and become pretty humbled in the process). Firepower II was pretty good, I loved the retro williams sounds, and it was in the Whiskey arcade lineup till the end. I wouldn't mind owning it again someday, although I may want the original Firepower more.

Medieval Madness (Remake, Standard)
After enjoying a really full lineup in the Whiskey Arcade, I decided the the next step was to get the #1 pinball machine of all time, and also my favorite. This would be the most expensive pinball I ever bought, and technically the newest at the time (even tho it was a remake of a late 90s game). At this time, the remakes were saturating the market, as people who had bought them were now selling to make room for new machines. This brought the price down to its lowest point of $7500 on average for one of these babies. Still expensive as heck, but I knew it was probably going to be the best chance I'll ever get. After they stop production, the price is going to go back up for sure. I sold Star Trek and Genesis in order to get some cash together to be able to afford it. It took a long time to sell Star Trek, people were not so hot to get used stern pros. But by the time it was finally sold, the perfect MMr came up in a small town around Litchfield (can't remember the name). I took my buddy Matthew with me and a huge wad of cash. We showed up at a guys garage. Other guys were milling around. They all seemed to be car or motorcycle guys. This guy only had one pinball in his garage as he obviously used the garage to work on his cars. I gave him the most cash I've ever held at one time and the transaction was nice and smooth. Even tho he didn't fit the mold of a pinball nerd, he knew a whole lot about pinball and even gave me tips I didn't know on transporting pins, even tho I've already transported so many by this time. I also think it was a bit ironic that soon after I got this, I was asking Brian what it might be like to put it in Dumb Records for a few months when I wasn't having Whiskey shows over the summer. He was definitely not into it.

No Good Gofers
This was the last pinball I purchased in 2019 before climbing aboard the Dumb train. I was ready to buy my next pin when this popped up as a super good deal. I never really cared for this game, but it was one of my wife's favorites. Also pin nerds will point out this was the last game Pat Lawlor designed for Williams before they shut down in the year 2000, and that it has one of the best shots in all of pinball (the hole-in-1 shot with the slam ramp). The pin definitely had issues, and I expected it had more issues than what the guy was describing, but it was still worth it for the money. It was a pinside deal but the guy kept changed his username and profile. It definitely felt like something was off. Since it was St. Louis I figured it was too good of a deal to pass on and I wasn't going super far away if it turned out to be a bust, plus at least I was able to talk to him on the phone. When I got there, he had a large basement full of really nice premium games. He had a lot of new releases at the time like Munsters, Black Knight SoR, and Willy Wonka. He was telling me he was changing his profile and such as he's been blacklisted or something over a disagreement with local pinball tournament people. You know how pinball tournaments can get to be pretty serious business, right? He also had a few games that he was working on, but it seemed like he did not want to spend time on this NGG pin. The playfield had a lot of damage for a 90s pin, especially around the inserts. Also the game kept shutting down and resetting when I tried to play it. Still the price was right so I took it. I also learned that this used to be at the Silverball Room in the St Louis area, probably where it got beat to heck. It took quite a while to get it all running. I had to replace the mpu board in the process. I coudln't fix all the cosmetic issues on the playfield but it was still playable and good enough for my needs. I didn't have very many Whiskey shows after getting this pin but at least we got to enjoy it in the first few months of the Dumb Records arcade.

That's it for the Whiskey Lounge Arcade era, coming up is the move to Dumb Records!

updated 3/4/2022

Asteroids, Street Fighter 2, Ridge Racer
So after I made the big move over the Dumb Records and things were going a little bit better than I planned, I thought it might be a good idea to round out the upcoming Dumb Records Arcade with some affordable arcades. Wouldn't you know it, I found an ad with 2 games on my shortlist, Asteroids and Street Fighter 2 multicade. Asteroids always has a special place for me as I remember playing it as a kid in a campground arcade in Arkansas for a few summers. I was also thinking it would be cool to have a SF2 cabinet with the original purple graphics. So I guess it was my lucky day that I could get both as long as I also picked up our first Racing Game (tm)! For this haul, I rented a trailer to tow with my van and I moved all 3 machines at once from somewhere an hour south. I forgot what town these came from. I do remember it seemed like some sort of antique mall that had been emptied out. Someone was using the back of it as a mechanic garage and had a few vehicles torn apart. I got a pretty good deal on all 3 and was definitely the most I have ever hauled with just my van. I had to stop quite a few times on the way back to make sure the machines weren't going to tip over on the trailer as I was real nervous all the way back. I stored these machines in my basement until it was time to move everything over to Dumb.

Daytona
Well we just barely had Racing Game (tm), but I was already ready to trade it out for a more legit racing game. Our Ridge Racer machine was a really weird setup with a computer monitor instead of a regular arcade monitor and was running off a pc which seemed real sketchy. I was glad to get rid of it for a real racing game. Originally when I got Daytona I was thinking about eventually converting it to a racing multicade, but after getting it I decided that would be too tricky to keep running with everyone messing around with it. So I drove to chicago area to pick this up with my preacher. He wanted to talk to me about some things and that was the only time it worked out. We had a pleasant conversation there and back, too bad he did stuff later on that made me leave the church, but that's another whole deal. Daytona is definitely the heaviest game in the arcade with its solid metal construction and giant monitor, probably around 500 pounds. We brought it in as 2 pieces, which really it doesn't come apart easily. I'm not looking forward to the day when we need to move it out of the arcade.

Blackout and Trizone
Now we're rounding out the original Dumb Arcade lineup at this point. I was able to squeeze in another pinball and then I thought, why not 2? I found a Blackout and a Trizone for sale from 2 different places in the St Louis area. I arranged to pick up both in 1 trip. Blackout came out of some guys upscale apartment. He had some nice machines and some other really expensive toys, definitely was living the high life. It was in very nice shape as he paid close attention to detail when playing his games. He had a Total Nuclear Annhilation which he let me play, and he couldn't stop telling me everything I was doing wrong the whole time I was playing it, even tho we played a 2 player game and I beat him. I expect he must be really fun to hang with. I thought Trizone was going to be a steal, bought it from a family's garage. After my experience fixing up Firepower, which is from the same era, I thought I knew what I was doing. Boy was I wrong. I struggled to get TriZone working the whole time it was here and kept having to listen to Brian whine about how lame it was the whole time, too! I was glad when I finally got it mostly working and sold it before it could break again. Blackout was solid the whole time until it was finally sold to a man with very inappropriate bumper stickers. I feel Blackout was the first game I ever sold where I wasn't completely tired of it but needed to free up space to freshen up the lineup.

updated 3/11/2022

Stern's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Wow, can't believe we're already up to this point! I guess the next game to appear in the lineup is TMNT. This was a big deal for me as it was the newest game I've ever owned. I bought it the same year it came out, even! When I first thought of getting this,  we were all locked up during the pandemic. Jack Danger introduced the game to us on the internet and made it look so cool. I was lucky to find one for sale used just months after it came out of the box. There are definitely bigger pinball nerds than me out there who always buy the newest games and then resell them as soon as they get bored. At this time it was the farthest I've ever driven to get a game as it was just across the border in Wisconsin. The guy had pinballs in a bedroom of his house, it wasn't a very big house and may be considered a pretty "budget" home. He only had brand new games that just recently came out. He did little mods to it to make it even nicer, so really I was getting better than brand new for probably $1000 less than if I had bought it new and paid tax. I will say this pin did not disappoint, too much. There was plenty of things to do on it between the pizza spinner multi-ball and the turtle van. However it was definitely very fast and unforgiving. I thought it was definitely too difficult for a game with a kid theme like this. I would say in today's market I would not get a deal like this again as now new gently used games are going well over msrp. We had fun with this game for a good while until I traded it for Shrek. Also Trizone was sold to make room for this in the arcade. It was also fun when we introduced this game and had the downtown pinball tournament winnner be the first person to officially play it, and Rob really hasn't left our store since.

Fish Tales

This will be the last game to enter the arcade in 2020. No Good Gofers was sold in order to get the money and space for this game. I was getting leary of having to fix gofers all the time and how finicky it was being. Luckily Brian had an acquaintance who really wanted it so that made it easy to unload. I picked this up from my old barcade friends in Evansville, IN, the same guys I bought Hook and Genesis from. They were ready to get rid of this and gave me a really good deal on it so they didn't have to spend a lot of time fixing it up. Brian and went over there and got to play in their 2 arcade locations for free and they even gave us free food. I think they were getting impatient when we wouldn't stop playing their games for hours. They're doing some good things over there with High Score Saloon and High Score Player 2. At the time of this writing they've been teasing a new location for their operations. Unfortunately I think my deals coming from them have probably dried up as the market has changed quite a bit and I doubt they would be willing to give me a hot bargains these days. Once we got Fish Tales, we had to shut the store and arcade down again due to the pandemic getting bad, so there were a couple months where we had a new pin that no one else had a chance to play yet.

updated 4/22/2022

Dolly Parton and Time Crisis 2

Starting out in 2021, I think maybe February? I wasn't really on the hunt for any particular game however I noticed Dolly and Time Crisis 2 on market place. Dolly was near Quincy and TC2 was in Peoria if I remember correctly. IN past years I never really gave Dolly pinball any attention. It used to be at CP Pinball but I never played it. Now that I own a record store it makes a lot more sense to have it and it was the right price. As for TC2, the guy seemed eager to be rid of it and gave me a very good deal. I made plans to pick them both up on the same trip. Of course TC2 is a huge game, however I saw how it could be taken apart and I measured all the pieces and did a layout on my handy design app to make sure I could fit it all in the van, which it all could with inches to spare. I picked up Dolly first. This guy had it in his garage workshop. He had various games laid out that he was working on, seemed he kept himself busy working on games all the time. Also the ceiling of his garage had rows and rows of banana seat bicycles. I'm betting he probably had about 100 of those things. Dolly was priced right for what it was as it was very dirty and some of it wasn't working quite right. Fortunately just a few easy fixes is all it needed and a good cleaning. I also updated it to LEDs to really make it pop. As for TC2, i picked that up off yet another guy who had a pretty small modest house with arcade machines in every room. I figured out pretty quick why he gave me such a good deal as it took up a good chunk of his living room and it had monitor issues. Once I got it back to Dumb and set it up, the monitor was just barely working. I spent a couple weeks working on it and it's still not quite right. The trouble with that style of monitor is they get really hot and damage the transistors, which is why a lot of these games don't have the right colors.

Chicken Egg Machine

The next machine I was on the hunt for wasn't an arcade or a pinball, it's Chicken Egg Machine! I have fond memories from seeing these all over the place when we would go on family trips to Branson when I was a kid. I don't remember a single prize I got from one of these machines, it's just the fun of getting the egg is where it's at. I had seen a few of these for sale in years past but not many. I've been watching for an ad to pop up for months and nothing. I finally just put out a want ad for one and I got in contact with a guy in Missouri who has warehouses full of old dusty games. It also turned out this is the same guy who services all the pinball machines and games at the City Museum in St Louis! Obviously this guy was more into EM games. He had 3 chicken machines in his warehouses that he offered to sell me for my asking price for one. Of course none were guaranteed to work. I went to his house and I had just enough room in my van to pick up all 3 and not an inch to spare there. They were all very dirty and missing parts. I was able to piece together a very nice working machine by taking parts of all 3. They also had some eggs left presumably from the 90s with prizes still inside. Nothing too special however, mostly silly bands, army figures and some rings. I was very happy with the machine I created for dumb as it was everything I wanted. After a while I was able to piece together a 2nd working machine which I sold to our buddy record store America's Groove in Effingham. He's having lots of fun with it and is still posting about it to this day. This one was still very presentable but not as good as the 1st machine. Everything was working on it except the chicken sound was a bit off. If I ever come across another one of these machines I'm definitely getting it as I can definitely think of another location or 2 to place one. The 3rd machine didn't have much left, it was basically just an empty shell after I had built the other 2. I gave this away to someone on marketplace just to get it out of my basement. It would have been too costly to try to source all the parts to complete it.

Orbitor 1

For a long time I've had a running list of rare games that I wanted to get my hands on someday. My thinking was that I don't have a very big arcade so I'm going to make it count by offering some of the most unique play experiences. I'll definitely say I've changed my tune on this since. But it was still very fun to get my hands on an Orbitor 1. I bought this off a guy who lives on the Rock Island military base. I took my buddy Matthew with me for the ride. We had quite the experience going through the checkpoint. We had to stop at a building and get background checks, answer questions, and get tags to display while we were there. Once inside we had to drive through a lot of it before getting to the residential area, which looked just like any other suburban cul-de-sak other than most people walking around wore fatigues. They guy's front room had a few pinballs and a jukebox. In his garage he was working on another pinball machine. It took a long time to take Oribor apart as it's obviously a very unique design and taking the backbox off was very difficult with wires running all over the place that had to be unhooked one by one, instead of the usual convenient molex plugs. Plus we had to be careful with the 3D backglass. We got it all loaded and then played games at Round 1 in Peoria which was definitely my first experience in a very long time being at a large modern arcade. I will say this really helped reinforce for me that I don't ever want my arcade to be modern at all. Of course most of those games are focused on tickets, which is not my thing. Although the games are impressive and huge, the actual gameplay is pretty shallow imo. I'll always have modern pinballs of course but I'm going to keep my arcade games retro for sure. Anyway back to Orbitor. I got this setup and we had fun with it for a few minutes until we were all tired of it. Still I really liked the look of this game and watching people's reaction to it. I think this game could have been better if they thought of wittier phrases for the robot voice to say, like Pinbot or Blackhole. I think that would have dialed up the intrigue even more. I'll admit I was also ready for this game to leave even though I was resisting all of Brian's whining about it for months before it finally left. Whoops I almost forgot to mention, this game replaced Blackout in the arcade which was sold around the same time to a bar owner from some other town with very inappropriate bumper stickers on his trailer about women. 

Crossbow

Next in my series of very rare expensive games was Crossbow arcade. I always thought this game was cool but never thought I would actually get one. I think I like the sound effects the most about it. It was the first game with recorded and digitized sounds instead of beeps and boops. It's a shooting gallery game I love the art style and some of the silly ideas in it, especially the big bad guy in the end is just a pretty regular guy's giant face! It takes some getting used to but after you research and play a while you can anticipate what to shoot and when and find the path through to the end of the game pretty easily. I can usually beat it in one shot although I haven't played in a while so am probably a bit rusty. This is probably the longest I've travelled to get a game as I went to Springfield, MO to get it. There is a guy there who has a lot of money and his hobby is fixing up games all the way to mint condition. This Crossbow had a couple of minor problems but the cabinet definitely looks near mint. I had fun talking to this guy and playing some games in his collection. He's also more into pinball than arcades and he had a great pinball collection of only premium games and even had the very rare Big Lebowski pinball. I got to play his Big Lebowski a few times. I will say it was fun but some of the shots didn't feel quite right to me, maybe it wasn't leveled right. On the way back home I stopped by the Uranis fudge shop because why the heck not! This is when I got the sign from there to put in one of our bathrooms. I bought their wackiest fudge for Brian. Crossbow did not replace anything, it was added as the 13th game in the arcade which is the max number of games our space can hold. In fact I think it's a little too full with that many.

Time Machine

This game has been on my wishlist for a long time but I've never had a chance to play one. From the videos I just really loved its 80s style and silly takes on time travel and being a knock off Back to the Future. Of course using actual chimes during the multiball is a great gimmick and I still love it every time. This game replaced Pinbot in the lineup, however I brought Pinbot home and haven't sold it. Pinbot might appear again at some point. I bought Time Machine off of Troy in Jacksonville who is a big wheeler dealer of arcade and pinball games. Basically take the used car dealer trope and apply it to a used games. He invited us over to play all the games at his place however it was very hard to actually play the games as he just kept talking the whole time. His place was impressive with rows of classic early 80s arcades and a nice pinball room. Some of his machines were very nice and some were not working. Almost all the pinball machines had some issue. Troy is pretty quick to say he doesn't know how to work on them. Gosh there were so many machines that just needed a quick fix to be working perfectly. Time Machine was presentable, had some nice colorful LEDs but I could tell right away there were problems. Once we got it setup it took weeks to work out all the problems. It still doesn't feel quite right which I think is a flaw in the design. Either the flippers are too strong and smash all the targets way too hard and the ball drains too quickly, or the flippers aren't powerful enough to get the ball up the ramps. also the big spiral ramp rejects half the shots to it as the ball pops up and hits the rail above it. I don't think there is anything I can do about it. This would certainly be a better pin if it wasn't for those problems. At this point I'm just meh about it, it will probably be leaving at some point this year. It's definitely a game that looks and sounds way better than it plays.

Shrek

At this point we had TMNT pinball for over a year and I was kind of bored with it as imo it's too fast and unforgiving and not what I want in my arcade for casual players, especially for a premium game. I wasn't really looking to replace it just yet however but a trade ad for Shrek popped up. Shrek is a very rare game as it's the same exact game layout as Family Guy, just rethemed for Shrek. Less than 600 were made and many of those went to Chuck-e-Cheese locations, which were then scrapped after use per their company policy. It's also a pretty fun game. I've never really payed attention to Family Guy pinball as I don't like the show, however the last time I was at CP Pinball I made it a point to play it and the gameplay was actually fun. So when this Shrek ad popped up, I was on it. I assumed it wouldn't pan out but i offered what I had to trade with. It was a guy in the Chicago suburbs and he really wanted TMNT for some reason even tho he already had one. I packed up TMNT and brought it to him and brought home Shrek. Brian was not a fan of this trade but still I came out ahead on this trade as Shrek is definitely worth more than what I had in TMNT. The guy I got it from was obviously a big pinball nut. His garage was decked out with premium games with tons of mods on each one, plus all the toppers. Other than that he was a pretty normal Dad type. This was the last game to get added to the arcade in 2021.

updates 5/30/2022

Galaga - major upgrade

Not really a new game, but a major upgrade to the Glaga machine in the arcade. I've been wanting to do this upgrade for a while but held off as it's pricey. I've always wanted to try out the ArcadeSD multicade card, except that it cost $350 compared to <$100 for a standard 60-in-1 that Galaga had before. It offered a few more games and I thought this would be a good time to completely overhaul the control panel so it could also play trackball games like Centipede. It also took a while to get the new control panel built as including a trackball is not very straightforward. I got it all working and now it's slicker than its ever been. My favorite part of the ArcadeSD is the menu screen looks very polished. I think after this Galaga doesn't really need anything else. The ArcadeSD board seems to be running well. Also interestingly enough its still running its original monitor which I've had no issues with all this time, a miracle indeed.

Cue Ball Wizard

Back in November 2021, Brian and I along with the 2 Grandpas who run the Record Barn all jumped into a uhaul truck and went to the Chicago area. I had worked out a deal to get 4 EM pinballs and 1 more modern pin which was Cue Ball. The deals were so good that it made sense to rent a uhaul so we could pick them up all at once. I don't know if a deal like this will ever come around again, this was definitely the most insane thing yet I've done with my arcade dealings. We picked up the 4 EMs first from a guy who was getting ready to move out of his big house. He had 3 games in his basement and then a baseball themed game in his workout room. We spent a lot of time taking them all apart and figuring out the best way to load them all. 2 of these games were mostly working and 2 were not. I told the grandpas they could have these for the Record Barn. Then we picked up Cue Ball from a different part of town. This was a younger guy, at least younger than me that was living in a dumpy place that looked like it was from a horror movie. The first thing you see walking in was a big rusty wench, which I assume was for boats as there seemed a lot of boat related things laying around, it could have also been for displaying dead bodies, who knows. down the drive there was a bigger dilapidated garage with a few arcade machines and then there was a house nearby as well. The guy comes out and seems like a total college bro, I'm wondering if he's the one who gets killed in the opening sequence of the movie. He's telling me how he spends big money on really expensive games and was rattling off all the big fancy games he has. Of course not at this location, this isn't where he lives. Cue Ball looks like it's had a past life sitting in a dive bar or punk venue where people were scratching in their favorite bands like ACDC and KISS in to the sides of the machine. It sort of turns on and barely does anything. The playfield doesn't look too bad, also there is a chunk missing from the speaker bezel, which is really random. He gave me a good deal on it. We unloaded all the games into my basement so I could start working on them over time. Cue Ball took a really long time as I needed to get a replacement motor that moves the 8ball shooter back and forth and we did some painting on the sides to make it look more presentable. Lots of little fixes and stuff and then of course once it made it to the Dumb arcade it was immediately broken again. It's been a struggle to keep it working but I think it might be fine right now? Cue Ball is surprisingly a fun game, it's sort of silly but the shots feel really good, especially after I rebuilt the flippers recently. 

Godzilla Premium

Well here goes the deal of a lifetime. Just about 2 weeks before all this happened, I was telling Brian how it might be time to trade Medieval Madness for a Godzilla Premium. Of course MM was still the hottest game in the arcade, but it kept having fiddly problems. We weren't really playing it much either. I thought I would never get rid of this game, but my whole outlook on the arcade has really shifted in the past year. Instead of my private collection, I'm seeing it more as a business and I'm more willing to part with some of these all time greats. Also Godzilla had finally unseated MM from being the best game of all time. However pulling this trade off was going to be a major feat. I figured my MM was probably worth about 10k since it's got a lot of play, and that would be after I stripped off the playfield and gave it a very good cleaning and flipper rebuild. Godzilla premiums are going for 12-15k used since that game is so hot and in hi demand. There is no way to get one new in box, you can only get one from essentially a price gouger. Well in walks Troy from Tilt Amusements. He's just checking out our store randomly since we have pinball and he was passing through while servicing his games in Chatham. Brian tells him about our trade idea and he's ready to that trade right now! Wowee! Turns out he kept a Godzilla prem, still new in the box, and was waiting to find someone with a MM to trade. So I packaged up my MM and we drove it over to his warehouse in Decatur and made the trade. While there we got to check out his game collection and play some really rare games like Celts. I also bought some upgrades for it since we saved so much, which were the art blades and shaker motor. I've also got one more upgrade on backorder which will be pretty sweet whenever it comes in. So now our little arcade once again has the greatest pinball of all time.

Mars God of War and pinball

Just yesterday I drove to Chicago and picked up two pinballs from the same guy. They're older pins, made by the same company and of the same series, so they're very similar to each other. Both of them have sound issues, which may not be easy to figure out with this model of pin, so we'll see how long it will take me to figure this out. The guy I bought them from was another guy with a big house and was downsizing as he was getting ready to move. Most of the pinballs he still had were very premium quality. He had subwoofers hooked up to most of his games. He had 90s pins that looked better than brand new. He had the Tommy pin decked out with the actual Who music, with sub, and it sounded amazing. He also had Metallica the same way however he didn't really like Metallica the band so he modded it so it played a bunch of 80s pop and rock tunes instead of Metallica songs. He had an extremely nice pool table and big fancy rhythm game that was shipped over from Japan as it's actually illegal to sell it in the US. It's kind of hard to describe, it has 2 big buttons that can also slide around that you use in different ways to the beat. There's a very large vertical screen. It definitely looks like a modern game that would be at Round 1. All the songs were anime songs or japanese pop and rock songs, I didn't see anything on the song list that I knew. I spent a few hours there as he kept insisting that I play everything. He was excited about his Stern Star Wars machine he had, which I thought was weird as that game isn't very good, but I see whey he likes it after I saw him rack up 1.6 billion points. My game was about 100 million. He's a tournament player and was calling out tournament strategies as he was playing and his nudging skills were insane. He was constantly tapping the game all over the place to make sure ball bounced exactly right every time. This guy is also a Pinside moderator and he had his pinside shirt on to boot. Hopefully it won't take me too long to get these games ready for the arcade. I thought at first I would put one in the arcade and send the other one to the grandpas at the barn, but now maybe I'll keep both for the arcade as I've got a new tunnel idea...

Roy Clark and Judge Dredd pinball

I'm not even finished with the last 2 pinballs I picked up but I just keep itching to get more. I went back north again yesterday and brought home 2 more pinballs. The Roy Clark pin that caught my attention was a music pin in Elkhorn Wisconsin. The guy who owned it turned out to be very interesting. His house was pretty unassuming but his basement was half bar and half pinball projects. He had quite a few homebrew pinball projects in progress. And I guess Homebrew is very on brand considering his specialty is creating pinballs with a beer tap so you can pour yourself a beer if you did well. His work is very professional. He told me he used to work in auto detailing, which shows with his nice hand painted and clear coated machines.  He's also into punk bands and was working on creating a Subhumans pinball machine and had a few other pinball machines in progress as well. Subhumans was extra interesting as he's friends with Scott Danesi who created Total Nuclear Annihilation pinball. He told me how Scott had created the original TNA using a Dolly Parton machine cabinet. The playfield from that Dolly Parton was given for this project as well as an empty TNA cabinet. He also had a few other pinball machines that I hadn't played yet such as Rick & Morty and Oktoberfest. He also had a rare Zaccaria game Robot, but it wasn't working. Also a little cherry on top I learned as I was leaving is that this guy also works for Pinball Life, which is a site I order parts from all the time.

In order to make the trip worthwhile, I also picked up Judge Dredd, which happened to be the same place where I had picked up Cue Ball Wizard last year. It seems it's a couple brothers who keep buying and selling pins all the time. They still had that weird big rusty apparatus in the driveway that made their place look like a horror movie. I asked what the did with it, was it used for boats? cars? dead bodies? He said his cousin works on stone sculptures and it's used for that and there were big pieces of stone nearby, so I guess that checks out. Of course Judge Dredd was pricey being a Williams 90s DMD, but will be taking place of Fishtales eventually and was a fair price. Both the pins I picked up this trip are working very well and I expect we may see them in the arcade in late august or september as I need to sell some games first to make room

Updated 10/12/2022

Surf Planet Arcade

Since Daytona broke down unexpectedly, I was trying to figure out what to do next for a racing game for the arcade. I definitely always want to make sure we have a racing game and a shooting game in the lineup. I almost went after a completely fixed up and premium priced game but I then decided to be more patient. Then I noticed this machine available which I had never heard of before. I don't think Surf Planet is a great game but I do enjoy the pure 90s vibe it gives and it has a great soundtrack of real early 90s rock bands from Spain who have wikipedia and discogs pages. This was a kit game which was used back in the day to replace a game with just enough parts and artwork to make it a new game without having to change the cabinet. I expect we'll have fun with this for a little while until something else catches my eye. I picked it up from a guy in Ewing, IL, which is almost 3 hours south from Springfield. It seemed like a small town in the middle of nowhere but I also noticed while driving in that it was near Rend lake which has some touristy spots. Maybe there was an old arcade or something in the area where this game was at once. It seemed this guy brings in broken arcade games and fixes them up to sell. I will say I got Surf Planet for probably even cheaper than it is to get an empty cabinet, which is what made it all worthwhile, even the long trip.

Updated 10/24/2022

Hydro Thunder

I picked up the next racing game, which is a big sit down cabinet from Troy at Tilt Amusements. It didn't work and he had a really low price to just get rid of it. I thought this game would be more manageable than Daytona since the seat half can be removed for transport. It still turned out to be a larger than average arcade cabinet to move. I couldn't get the monitor half down my basement stairs at first because it was just too heavy. Fortunately it was still daylight and the weather was nice so I spent an hour removing the big heavy control panel and monitor from the cabinet to make it lighter, then I was able to move it. It will be a pain going through that process when I move it again but this may be the last oversized cabinet like this I'm willing to deal with. Pinballs are just so much easier to move around.

Raven pinball

I picked up Raven pinball from Robb from Prairie archives last week. This was the 2nd game he bought for himself after winning our pinball tournament and he doesn't want to spend time working on them and this has some serious issues. I got a decent deal and picked it up and it's now in my basement waiting to get worked on and eventually will come to the Dumb arcade. While there I had a drink in Robb's swanky basement bar from the 60s or 70s. He really has the best ambiance for pinballs with all the wood paneling and furnishings down there. It's also really funny when we were at Pinball Expo there was a guy there signing brochures for Raven pinball as he was the photographer who created the Raven backglass picture. Everyone agrees this era of using real photos for pinball backglasses was one of the worst ideas in pinball, but I have his signature now to go with the machine.

updated on 12/1/2022

Mibs and Suspense pinball

a couple weeks ago I took a trip to Chicago and picked up these 2 60s era EM pinballs. I wasn't really looking to get any more pinballs currently but these were so cheap that I couldn't pass them up. Both of these games have some interesting features. Mibs is marbles themed and has "marbles" that fall into a line on the backglass when you collect them by hitting targets in the game. Suspense has some really interesting artwork for the era as well as dual sets of flippers and a roulette wheel thing. They had been on Markeplace for a good minute and had horrible pictures. I asked about them and they sent me better pictures which showed that despite the games sitting a long time, they were actually in pretty great shape. Their rubbers have deteriorated to the point some have fallen apart, and also the flippers were weak when we played them, but other than that the playfields, backglasses and cabinets look great. They both actually were still playable, well at least they started a game and ejected the ball, couldn't really play a lot with the bad rubbers and weak flippers. These were located in a basement in Arlington Heights. 2 middle aged folks are trying to get their elderly parents to move out of their house so they put these games up for sale as part of the process. I forgot to ask how long they had them but I'm going to imagine they have been down there since they were first made. These games are going to clean up very nicely and I'll make some decent profit out of them, or I should say the old men at the Record Barn will do well with them.

updated on 5/1/2023

Hollywood Heat and pinball

back on January 19 2023, I took a trip to Shelbyville, IN. At the time I was working on Raven, and I happened to see an ad that included a bunch of pinballs a guy was unloading, most being Gottlieb system 80b games just like Raven. They were all advertised as working so I thought maybe I could get a deal and also be able to swap boards with Raven to help troubleshoot what was wrong. The guy had an excellent man cave as part of a barn, which was decked out in all sorts of 80s things, including custom artwork that he made himself which was very well done. He had a lot of 80s horror and saturday morning cartoon stuff everywhere. He had maybe a dozen pinballs and a dozen arcades. He was in the process of selling quite a few games so he could use the money to get one nice grail machine, which for him was a Halloween. It was a fair deal and I came out with 2 gottlieb system80bs. They were already collapsed and ready to load when I got there, although he did send me play videos ahead of time to show they were working. Also at this time Dredd was down for the count in the arcade so I thought I would take one of the new pins directly to the arcade to replace Dredd and bring the other home as it had a few known minor problems. Although actually what happened is I set up Hollywood Heat in the arcade and it was dead on arrival. This game obviously had major issues and this guy definitely pulled one over on me. Fortunately I was able to get it running by swapping boards with my other games so I would at least have one solid working machine. I definitely ended up over paying since this one had a junk mpu board. I did complain to the guy a bit about that so that at least he knew that I knew what he had done. I still have the other pinball yet to be announced in my basement waiting on board repair since I swapped it's parts with Hollywood and Raven, now it has all the leftover junky parts. I sent the junked mpu board off to be professionally repaired since I guess those aren't currently being reproduced at the moment, hopefully it can be fixed.

Wizard of Wor 

I picked this arcade up on my birthday. Jacksonville Troy had a mysterious ad on marketplace about getting rid of a lot of stuff and I messaged him about it and he said he needed to clear out a bunch of games. I went over to talk prices and we couldn't really reach a deal on any pinballs as he's still wanting top dollar for pinballs that have obvious problems, and he wasn't willing to give much of a discount on the junk he wanted to get rid of. Still we did reach a deal that I could work on some games for him over time since he doesn't work on them himself. Troy does have some nice games in his shop as he has buddys who work on his pinballs and make them extremely nice, it's just that most of his games are plagued with minor issues as he doesn't do any fixing himself. So starting with Wor I may be fixing a game, putting it in the arcade for a bit and then getting the next game from him. I really wanted to buy Wor from him as it's one of the coolest arcade machines imo but he wouldn't part with it. It is in really nice shape cosmetically, just has a bad power supply that keeps blowing a fuse. I'll be rebuilding the power supply and then see what else it needs. 

Mousin' Around Pinball

I already told Brian what I was getting, and Jack figured it out, so I'll just let the whole forum know what I got yesterday. Since RSD is over and my bathroom remodel is almost done, I was really wanting to head out for a new pinball. After messaging about a few pinballs on marketplace that turned into dead ends, I landed on this Mousin' that had been on marketplace for months. Typically if something has been sitting for that long it's probably going to be shady, or else the owner is not budging on asking too much money. I was able to haggle a fair deal on it and made the trip to Vincennes, IN. On the way I dropped by Mr. America's house in Effingham to deliver the shirt he ordered in person and got to see his treasure troves as this guy has tons of cool stuff neatly displayed all over his house. This visit with Mr America may have inspired me to start collecting toys. He has a huge collection of Masters of the Universe, maybe I'll start collecting M.A.S.K. as to me that was the toy line I think about the most to this day. The pinball guy I was meeting also had a pretty cool setup. He had a garage that led straight into a basement where he kept his pinballs and toy tractor collection (ok maybe the tractor part wasn't cool). He made it a point to collect all the late 80s Bally games with the speakers situated at the top, such as Elvira, Dr. Dude, game show, etc. He also has a nice assortment of 90s Williams dmd titles. He had a couple gottliebs but they were kept in the garage as they weren't worthy to be in the same room as all the other pins. He was working on a few games that were in pieces as well. I had tried to work in getting his Game Show in the deal but he wouldn't budge on that as he wanted to fix it first, but he may send me a message someday when he's ready to part with it. Turns out this guy had a buddy at one time and they wanted to open their own barcade, which would have been years before there were barcades everywhere, which was the main reason he was collecting pinball machines. They both started having kids and realized they would never have time for their dreams. I told him the trick is he needs to find some guy who doesn't have kids and spends all day and night doing the thing and just put a pinball arcade there. This guy also collects vinyl and was telling me about their local record store which sounds really cool, but was closed Sundays so I couldn't check it out. After I got home I setup Mousin' right away and it was working exactly as advertised. Nothing really wrong, just a couple fiddly adjustments to make and some cleaning. I may rebuild the power supply on it just to make sure it continues operating error free as that's always a good idea. Overall this was one of the most fun pinball pickup trips in a long time, mostly because of my visit with Mr America because he is awesome. Just don't expect to see Mousin' any time soon in the arcade as I have other games that need to make their debut ahead of this one.

updated 5/9/2023

3 ? Machines

Last Thursday I went out and got 3 of the same very weird machine. It's not a pinball, arcade, or chicken egg game. Also we don't have room for it so it won't be seen for quite some time. I got one machine fully working and 2 that probably could be fixed up and working if a few parts are found. I travelled to Lake of the Ozarks for these, which seemed a fitting place to find them. When I arrived it turned out to be a vacation home kind of area and a bunch of retired folks sittin' around and shootin' the breeze with all their parked boats everywhere. It took a while before one old timer finally got around to actually showing me the games and helping me get them loaded. Then he showed me his playroom which was filled with all kinds of silly machines like those I had picked up along with a very complicated slot car track and model trains. He also had one pinball which was Starship Troopers, which was kind of an odd choice given the kitchyness of everything else. He took me upstairs which had a giant model train set that he'd been working on since probably the 70s or 80s. Also he had hired an artist to paint a sky and clouds around the room so it's basically just a whole world in there. It was all pretty cool actually and I was really tempted to ask if I could take pictures but I never do as that just feels weird when you're doing a deal in someone's personal space. I kind of want to be that silly old man some day. On the way back I stopped in Columbia to check out Hitt Records for the first time. It was a very cool shop that is right next to campus with tons of people in an out just in the short time I was there. One of the owners talked to me while he was working with multiple customers at a time. It looks like their specialty other than vinyl is selling and repairing vintage stereo equipment, which I could see being a possibility someday. I find a G+ copy of the Trashmen record to take home as a souvenir.

[somejabroni]

Wow, thanks for writing this all up Jeff! As someone who hasn't been around forever, I like hearing these stories of how things came to be. I also love pinbot, so I'm happy to hear it's not going anywhere. Congrats on the weight loss, btw

[brain galacki]

Chris Yeager (of the Gunga Dins) came in and actually saw the inside of our arcade for the first time today. He didn't play any of the games, but he says he approves.

[jeffradon2000]

I've made some updates, getting real close to the point where Whiskey lounge arcade was at its peak

[vanslater]

love this

[jeffradon2000]

Just added some more entries to this important history archive

[jeffradon2000]

More updates to the list

[somejabroni]

These are great

[jeffradon2000]

I need to update this again one of these days, and I'll have to remember to add my trip this Thursday to Springfield, MO to pick up more games

[somejabroni]

Wait there are TWO springdields?

[jeffradon2000]

No just 1, my deal fell through so we don't need to talk about that other Springfield

Jan 26, 2022 15:10:54 GMT -6 somejabroni said:

Wait there are TWO springdields?

[brain galacki]

Dumb Records Pinball / Arcade Department, can we get a thread going that gives a list of every game we've had (kind of like this) - but just the dates that the game entered and left the arcade??? (maybe not exact day but month / year) ? Or you can get one started and I can fill in any gaps with photos on my phone of us moving pinball machines around.

Hey Jeff, you should make a new forum account that is

"DR. PAD"

(dumb records pinball & arcade department)

[somejabroni]

Knowing his arcade hi score name I'm amazed we aren't going for Dr. RAD

[jeffradon2000]

I made some updates finally! I would do more but Brian says I have to clean all the windows before I'm allowed to go play Rush pinball

[jeffradon2000]

New update, I think I'm through 2020 at this point, 2021 coming up next