Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

The Arcade Auction
Though I wasn't planning on getting much at the arcade game auction, I've been looking forward to this thing all week. Starburst Coin Machines is the other local area arcade/pinball dealer in the Toronto area (at least, that I know about), and I was genuinely curious to see what they had available. I had been told from a posting to the alt.binaries.mame conference a while ago that it was possible to pick up an arcade box - working, with controls - for as little as $25. This was significantly less than the "$100 and up" Toronto Pinball Exchange offers for just an empty shell. But it was more than just curiosity that led me to the sale - that and the chance to help up a fellow former ex-KL Group colleague who caught the MAME cabinet bug from reading my accounts of building my own unit pick up a good box to work with. I was also hoping that if a cocktail table unit went for cheap that I might pick that up as well for a future project. That and an old gaming gun that I could disassemble and put new innards in to work with MAME-capable games.

I got my neighbour Jay interested in the possibility of a MAME cabinet as well, and with his younger son we drove out there on Saturday morning. The auction happens primarily in the storage building adjacent to their showroom, with a few units spilling over onto the back of their parking space. These first arcade boxes outside were all in the roughest shape: obvious cosmetic water-damage to the cases, rusted innards, sticky controls and most with burn-in on their video screens. None of them prime units, but all low-end candidates for modding into a MAME-capable cabinet, and all of them in working order. Things got better when we went into the main warehouse, which was lined with arcade and pinball games as well as some oddball mechanical contraptions. To the right was a bunch of old (primarily late 80s/early 90s) video games, few of them memorable, but all good candidates for modifying into a MAME cabinet. Two from this batch stood out: a mid-80s vintage Atari racing game ("Super Sprint") with 3 steering wheels and a Puzzle Bobble game with an enormous (27" or so) screen. Their sheer bulk prevented me from giving either of them serious thought though.

I went to the office at the head of the building and signed up for the auction. A $200 deposit (cash or certified cheque) was required to get an auction number. No foolin' around here. Glad I went to a bank machine first thing in the morning prior to coming over. With my money and life seemingly signed away, I surveyed the rest of the machines.

A bunch of oddball mechanical machines flanked the old video games. A basketball game caught Jay's son's attention, and one of the local techies kindly got an extension cord out and plugged it in for him to try out. Much fun, but again, bulky. You would have to have a huge rec room space to be able to have something like that. In the corner was a similar ball tossing game called "Feed Big Bertha", which featured a frightening large muppet-like creature with a huge open mouth meant for catching (and presumably, eating) balls. I think if I was a kid it would have given me nightmares after playing it.

As promised, there were plenty of pinball games there too. The vast majority were relatively recent machines, all made since the early 90s. One old electromechanical game stood out: a relatively small electromechanical-era game called Reno which must have dated from the early 60s at a guess. It had a 5 cent coin feed - certainly from before my time! It looked nice, but obviously in need of some heavy-duty restoration work prior to anybody being able to play it. They also had the one semi-recent pinball machine I would have liked to add to my existing electro-mechanical era machine: a Dr. Who pinball machine from 1992. Plastic dalek on top, an evil Master looking menacingly at you from the playboard and a Tardis that would pop up when all of the right targets were hit. Uh-oh. It was at about this point that I ran into Jerry Z., and he told me about the "Wife Acceptance Factor" (WAF) that some audiophile magazines use when rating the latest sound gadgetry. Me getting another pinball machine would definitely be a low-WAF.

I started work with Jerry, trying to help him spot out suitable machines for converting into a suitable MAME box. Basically it comes down to: not too deep a cabinet, a good working trackball desirable as well as a machine that already comes with plenty of standard buttons and controls, and didn't have a metal-based play surface (working with wood is much easier than drilling large holes in metal). Preference is also given to non-rusty innards or ones that didn't look like something had made a nest in it at one time. Jerry seemed keen on several machines that had large screens, though I cautioned him on that point: most of these would use TV tubes which are relatively low-res in comparison to a computer display. Replacing a 20+" TV tube with an equivalent computer monitor would be prohibitive, and running Windows or any other OS on a TV is a guaranteed way to develop bugged-out eyes. Jerry told me later that he overheard a dealer-type who was considering buying a unit that hard a big screen, but balked at the enormous weight of these monsters, making them particularly hard to ship anywhere.

One arcade near the back caught my eye - an old Road Blasters game, another Atari favourite of mine from my University days. Next to it was a Gottleib "World Challenge Soccer" pinball game. Jerry had been looking at some of the other pinball games, but this one caught his eye. There were relatively recent Baywatch, Star Trek: Next Generation and even a recent Star Wars: Episode One pinball games there, all of which were likely to fetch premium prices. Then there were a few generic pinball games, but not many of them had targets you had to aim for, typical of the older electromechanical games. This pinball game had plenty of targets, and when plugged in, played well. There was a sudden gleam in Jerry's eyes. I reminded him about the WAF, but he figured it would be a calculated risk.

In the far corner were three "cocktail" unit games. Now this was something I was interested in. These tabletop games are relatively small (good WAF there) and was a MAME conversion project I wanted to tackle. Out of the three there, I set my goal on one unit that seemed in better shape than the others. My limit I set for myself on it: $150. My limit for the Dr. Who pinball game: $500.

The people gathered around for the auction were a diverse group, and can be summed up as: geeks, roadies, frat boys and Dad's looking to furnish their respective rec rooms with a pre-Father's Day present for themselves. The vast majority were males - most females there seemed to be attached to either a husband or boyfriend attending the auction. Some of these guys were obviously dealers looking to buy several new games for their own small arcades or Mom-and-Pop corner store operations. I got to talking with one of the technicians associated with Starburst and he told me that several of these game dealers came from outside the city, who would have a couple dozen or so of these games circulating in the places they had space in. Each machine could earn on average about $50 per month, and when you multiply that number by a score of machines, it has the makings of a living. He also mentioned one operator somewhere up north who had between 800-900 machines that operated on this basis.

The auction began at about 11:45pm. Everybody started crowding around the auctioneer and his assistant, the former standing on an old solid plastic stool. On top of a tall metal stand were held the auction number of the item currently up for bid. And if you were on the wrong side, you couldn't see the auction number. ;-) The older, rusted-out games were among the first on the list. There were no bids on some of them, and when one came up that had plenty of decent controls, I snapped it up for $25. It was a former "Double Dragon" fighting game which now had a "Captain Commando" game in it instead. It was not for me, but for either Jay (who had had to leave before this point) or another neighbour who was interested in a games cabinet. A huge, potentially person-crushing Coke machine went for $50. A similarly bulky old sit-down fighter pilot game went for $125. The old, generic video games in non-rusty shape went for roughly $50 - $100 - a good deal there. I thought for sure Jerry would snap one of those up, but it turns out he had his eyes on that pinball machine.

I knew I was in trouble when the bidding on the pinball machines started at $500, which was my limit. The vintage pinball machine went for less than that: $450, bid on by a few non-dealers -- dealers would only want a working unit. The Dr. Who game was not destined to be mine, soaring quickly past a thousand dollars, finally selling at $1300. Jerry was lucky: he bid on and in the end successfully got the pinball game he wanted for $800 - a good deal really, since most recent pinball machines ended up selling for over $1000 apiece. The notable exception: the relatively recent Star Wars: Episode One game which sold for $2800. The Road Blasters game went for $325. :-(

More recent video games also exacted a premium: ranging from about $300 upwards to about $500 for the large-screen games, the few monster projection screen games -- like a skateboard simulator -- fetching $3300. The cocktail games also went for more than I had hoped for, averaging in the high $400 range. Game ROMs (sans cabinetry) went for between $25-$50. When it became obvious that Jerry wasn't going to get an video arcade cabinet, I offered him the one I had picked up, and he gladly accepted.

The auction went quickly, and in just over an hour it was all over.

I chatted to some people after the auction. A young woman had bought the vintage pinball game, and was really happy with her purchase. I think she was tickled more to have a pinball game which after a basic clean-up and some wood-polish would look great -- I am not sure if she even cared if she ever got it to work. ;-) Some frat boys were taking digital photos of their recent acquisition, a first-generation golfing game: Golden Tee. The new owner, while proud of his acquisition was also wincing at the comments from a colleague who ribbed him about where the heck he was going to put it in their house. (This was also one of those "monster"-sized units which would undoubtedly be hell to move).

I talked to another of the Starburst employees there, who told me that this was a smaller-than-average auction for them, as they normally had about 120 units or so for sale. He told me that the best time to buy was the February auction, when everybody is still hurting from Xmas purchases. He also figured that the next auction happening in August would likely have more material.

Jerry called a neighbour who had a truck and after a quick lunch, I helped them load the pinball machine and video arcade game into it. I headed home by subway shortly afterwards, having bought nothing, but having a lot more information on what to expect price-wise at the next auction, which was occurring in late August. If you are interested in the auction results, see the figures I jotted down during the event on my auction sheet.

The other good thing about having not bought anything: high Wife Acceptance Factor. ;-)