I caught this bug hard and fast.

By TRAMD

January 14, 2017


7 years ago

I have always been an arcade guy and enjoyed pinball but was never that enthralled with it. The collecting started for me when I was at a Dave and Busters in 2014 and my wife was playing a 4 player Super Mario Kart arcade game with my kids and saying how fun it would be to have it. I just hadn't really considered having an arcade game in my basement before so I looked it up and it was $11,000 per unit. I then decided that I wanted a TMNT as that was my favorite arcade game when I was a kid. This evolved to buying a custom MAME that included TMNT and thousands of other games. Then the local Chuck E Cheese rip-off pizza place (it was originally a Gigglebees) that had a massive (over 100) game arcade, mostly 80's and 90's classics, was closing and held an auction. I bought 6 more arcade games and put them in storage (not enough room). Somehow, I managed to see a NBA Fastbreak pin for less than $2000 on ebay. My dad is a big fan of both pinball and the NBA and had talked about getting a pin to put in his basement for years. He always decided not to because he was worried about the maintenance. He already had a theater, bar, pool table, foosball, ping pong and air hockey. I bought the Fastbreak and while he and my mom were gone on vacation, I moved it into their basement. Six months later, I bought a much larger house with a huge area in the basement that would be perfect for an arcade. As the move-in date became closer and closer, I started buying games like crazy, both locally and online. My storage unit was full but it was all arcade games so far. I moved the 24 arcade games into my house. I bought two more pins around that time: Lord of the Rings from a local guy and Ghostbusters Pro NIB. When the GB came in, a friend and I got a trailer and rounded up it, LOTR and the Fastbreak (Dad didn't really play it that much and Mom didn't like it in the basement). The pinball section of my arcade was started and blew up fast. I purchased every single one of my first 12 pins in 2016. I also purchased 17 of my arcade games in 2016; the first 7 were purchased near the end of 2015. Now I love pinball far more than arcade games and I don't see myself ever going back.Something about the simple to learn and difficult to master aspect of it is so appealing to me.

Story photos

No photos are attached to this story.



Comments

There are no comments to this article yet.

Add a comment

Wanna make a comment? Click here to sign in or register.



This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/community/pinsiders/tramd/stories/i-caught-this-bug-hard-and-fast and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.

Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.