Quoted from Bryan_Kelly:Me and a couple friends also took the tour. I took no pics but the other guys did. Maybe Brian Millard has them?
It was obvious Gene had no interest whatsoever in selling anything, no matter what you offered. He just loved knowing they were all his.
The sad thing was, we weren't allowed to turn any of them on. So many of them had water and corrosion issues. Something like 700 games just sitting there rotting.
I took the tour with some friends back in 2006. Gene made it a point to ask if there were any pinball parts that I couldn't find or was trying to find. I mentioned an Ali backglass. He said he had a NOS example in perfect condition. I asked how much he wanted and he just smiled and said that it was not for sale. I thought it was pretty odd behavior. We spent a couple of hours walking down the rows of games. At one point, I saw an EBD with the playfield missing and a bunch of wires and parts sitting in the bottom of the cabinet. Gene said they had to use the playfield for new EBD playfields. I asked why they didn't just unplug the wires from the PCBs instead of cutting everything? He just shrugged his shoulders. Gene was pleasant enough throughout the tour, but wouldn't sell anything. I walked away with the feeling that the whole collection was just going to waste.
As far as IPB goes, I provided my used MM playfield for the run of IPB MM playfields with the promise of a free repro playfield down the road. A couple of years later I get a call from a guy that had bought my house and said that there was a delivery there that I might be interested in. It was a new IPB MM playfield! Glad the guy was honest and had kept my contact information. Kudos to IPB for following through on their promise.