That’s the one at the back of Town Square?

We went their every Xmas vacation for the last 5 years (except Xmas 2020 for obvious reasons)

It was a huge store - every year we went there there was less and less stock there.

Xmas 2019, there was hardly anything left except heaps of electronic components.

That would have been a good ready made spot for Tim’s PHOF. Not on the main road, but plenty of tourist traffic from the Town Square complex.

rd

I wish they would just run straight for sale like papa on the pins for at least a period of time

Yes, that was their only Las Vegas location. I liked the animation on the color dot matrix "Reels". Three "Fry's" symbols would come up every minute or so....

Hey guys, I only brought up Fry's as a possible place that the MoP could move to. There is a topic on the fate of Fry's already though:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/fry-s-electronics-going-out-of-business

Good points, except for: Where do I drop the POD for several days while I bid, break down and move out the games?

My point is that the auction can be logistical nightmare for a buyer unless you’re local and looking at only a few games.

There are operators chomping at the bit nation wide wanting to fill a c-container or 2.
Many people have this idea already.
Personally, i might grab 1 or 2 machines.
Definitely becoming the Biggest Pinball auction in History.

Like others, I'd like to fill up a container and expand my current location. However, I'd be way upside down if I paid auction prices for 50 of these machines.

Most pinball auctions end up in ridiculous price territory, and with the visibility this one has it will be worse. Add on to that a big buyers fee, CA tax rate, and the extra cost of logistics, I'd be better off just overpaying locally.

The only buyers that are going to be happy are the ones looking for an obscure EM that no one else wants, or someone willing to pay anything for a rare title.

The market timing for the sellers couldn't be better.

Fully agree. Prime time for an auction in many ways that you mentioned. Locations are beginning to reopen as well and need machines to fill them back up.

Will be very curious as to the prices games go for at the auctions. Should be an alltime high.

Agree with all of that. Only silver lining is that it might keep distributors from swooping in and flipping truckfulls, if games are already going for retail after fees/expenses. I could see desperate operators overpaying, assuming they'll make it back in coin drop. Collectors of course will pay whatever they go for. Prices don't have to make business sense to us.

4 mins is crazy slow. A pro auction would target 60 lots an hour or more. Less desirable stuff could be lumped together into lots to speed things up too. Even at 2mins per lot, 1000 pieces, 33+hrs. They'd likely try to fit in a two day window.. so gotta get the lot time down.

Go watch a video from wholesale car auctions, etc and you'll see how they do high volume. None of that TV 'hyping up the product' stuff... It is all about non-stop bidding, closing, next item.

I will definitely have some popcorn ready to go when I watch the auction.

It’s going to be several days. They don’t want to sell it all at once. Current plan is 6 days of auction, weekends only

And are PODs such a great idea for goods like these to arrive at the destination -- particularly one involving any substantial distance -- in the best possible condition ? I've used NAVL at least eight times, and I presume that part of what I was paying for was a packing with adequate insulation / protection, and the game being properly restrained from moving around too much in transit.

Sure they are. You pack it. The protection is whatever you provide. If damaged, it's really on you. The pod goes on platform trailers with Hendrickson Air-Ride suspensions. Pods no longer move by railroad.

Bring plenty of moving blankets and DOT Rated straps. I'd consider removing the backglasses and taking them in my personal vehicle though.

I already looked at pods for this.
They only use 8 footers for cross country and it was going to be over 3500 to get to Atlanta.
Another reason I’m skipping.

I wonder how many of the more rare pins will end up listed for sale on Pinside after the auction, or how many fraud listings will appear here after the auction. "Just bought it at auction, wife doesn't want it, must sell!" type fake listings.

None. The rare ones will be way overpriced and anyone willing to pay that will be bidding already. If they don't like the hammer price they won't like the Pinside price.

If there’s a legit resell after the auction they should be prepared to show receipts. Not necessarily for the dollar value but for the legitimacy if it’s a rare title.

Course they better wait awhile we know how flippers get treated around these parts.

I sense a Bally Firecracker going up for sale real soon....

Well where were you planning to park your truck and trailer, if your were to drive out there?

contact the seller or the auction house. I don't know how they plan to empty the building how long do you have to move your games. I know about the site on how much of a loading zone, and loading docks, they have to use. I see that the collector car auctions have huge parking lots for trucks bringing and removing the cars. And more space for bidders to park.

It will be a feeding frenzy

This does not sound very smart or well thought out. You're going to shut out a lot of out of town buyers. I was thinking of flying in for the auction if it took place over a couple of days, not really a manageable proposition if it's spread over multiple weekends. An auction this big people will travel for, holding it over multiple weekends kills that.

Thank you chuck for your efforts as well. I know I will get to see you at some point to talk more. I look forward to that.

The volunteer staff is a bunch of very excellent people. Dedicated.

It’s stuck now and it won’t go away. Foreclosure of a dream, Megadeth.

There's really no way to have an auction of this many pins and arcade machines not be several days in length. It take a lot of prep time including pictures, descriptions, testing, etc that splitting it over multiple weekends may be the only way to do this. Plus it may have to be weekends as people typically work weekdays.

What does how long it take to prep the lots have to do with how long the auction should be?

"Strike while the iron is hot" as they say. If they can't hold equipment after purchase, splitting up the auction will hinder people collecting and transporting games in bulk. You have to worry about buyer fatigue... but you also want to create the biggest draw you can to get the buyers in the action.

If you spread it out over weeks - you might as well just have a massive online auction and skip the live auction.

Sounds like a lot of people are assuming MOP will run the auction themselves but hasn't it already been confirmed it's going to Captain's out of LA?

Auction Game Sales and Rob Storment's Super Auctions used to run auctions all the time where they run through 800+ pieces in a day. Surely MOP could do something similar over a long weekend.

Because of time constraints. From what I understand the museum needs to vacate the building fairly soon, so after everyone agrees on terms then the auction house can get started. I figure they tackle it a few hundred items at a time, take pics, etc on weekdays then auction them off on a weekend, rinse and repeat until all items are gone. I suppose they could instead catalog every single item first, then do a 3 day auction marathon but from the auctions I've been in it takes quite some time to get all the listings uploaded and all setup right.

Not sure how they pull that off. If you go by say a 12 hour auction with 800 items that allows for < 1 minute per item. I've never seen an auction move that fast, heck they usually spend at least a minute or two milking that last dollar out of an auction listing with "last chance!" calls.

Captain and the crew have been big supporters of the MOP for as long as I can remember. It would be easy to guess they will be involved. If you have seen Captain aka Chris auctioning in the "barn" he can jam through games when he needs to. To do this many games, it would take multiple weekends, and leave very little time for the logistics of moving stuff out. But if you ever saw what it was like the days leading up to events and the Halloween party, you would know the MOP tech crew can get it done.
Details are leaking out and dates should be announced soon, so start saving.

During the day, on the street, probably a half mile away or more.

At the motels there and back, I will assume you need permission to park a 45' lg rig in there lot.

Pods can just be dropped on the street. MOP has *some* parking room in there lot but I would assume they would charge for it.

So yes, a logistical problem to make participating happen.

If it was some homegrown thing... I could see that. But if you are paying pros - they can scale their labor with additional costs. I mean what is gonna cost more, paying for transportation (multiple times) and storage to move out - or paying the auction house a bit more to move faster?

They were quoted as having to be out by October for their new tenant. If they have to be out by 'two months' as cited earlier, they are already halfway through that meaning they'd probably have no shot at any 'extended' format in the current building anyways.

When the auction house knows they have a huge pile of lots - they act accordingly.

I am curious to see how this will unfold. It's not like auctioning off estate items which are often kinda crappy, most everything at this place is valuable/desirable so you'd think each item at auction would need time spent on what it is, hyping it up and extra effort extracting those last bids especially with what I'd expect to be a large online audience for this. Personally I'm inclined to think that spending < 1 minute on a pinball machine auction is leaving money on the table but I guess we'll see.

I do secretly hope they have one last hurrah where they open the place ostensibly for people to evaluate the auction items but really just for me to go play them all one last time. One can hope I guess.

I'd love to just buy a game for a fair price and come pick it up. An auction sounds like a big headache. Why not just sell any modern games for which a fair price is easy to determine and offer them for sale?

Because that takes a LONG time and means doung the same back and forth with hundreds of different people. Basically a huge nightmare… just ask doug from papa

They should auction off bundles. 6 machines you gotta bid on all 6 and take them away. I think the goal is to get rid of the pins fast as possible right? Sounds like the clock is underway

Is there a list of games somewhere?

See post 287

Or run three parallel auctions: EMs, SS, and video games...

The bright spot is that with basically only one owner, the shill bidding that has become commonplace at other consignment auctions should not be much of an issue. With an auction this big, by the time they get near the end and everyone has spent their money on the more desirable pieces, there should be some real bargains.

In the 1990’s at super auctions, if you stayed until near the end, working and semi-working classics would go for $30-$150. In 1997 during the final four I snagged a fully working Sorcerer for around $150 and SF2 arcade for $50. Spy hunter upright for $80. Crappy 90s jamma games would go for 5 to 10 bucks and stripped in the parking lot for parts. I might go to pick up an em or two, but the damn internet bidding and outrageous buyers premium rate increases on top of CA sales tax have ruined auctions for bargain hunters.

Ding,Ding,Ding!!!!

As Chuck wrote in the the thread with the list of games:

We have EVERY Stern LE, the largest collection of LEs in the world.
We have EVERY Spooky except for Rick and Morty which is due to arrive in April.
We have EVERY American Pinball (Octoberfest arriving January 30th)
We have EVERY JJP including two WOZs (Emerald City and Yellow Brick Road) with two being CEs (POTC and Wonka). Haven't ordered a GNR yet.

How many games is that list alone? I don't know but I bet someone does. I'm guessing that is about 50 or so?

Again just speculating, but maybe these would start out first? Here is where the big bucks are. Heck, what would the Tron LE go for?? They are being offered for $20,000 these days.

After that, there is another big pile of earlier era desirable machines. like Addams Family, TZ, AFM, and such. These will go for thousands, like $7-10,000 or more.

Then lots of cool older SS machines.

And finally there are lots and lots of EMs. But how long would it take to get to them? Will the bidders be burned out, or broke? Or, will there even be many people there that care about the EMs? Would they go for good prices? I like the new machines, but I like the EMs too. It would be interesting to see if there could be a good score there.

I ask lots of questions, I have no answers...

And then, there are those arcade machines by the hundreds! I spent some time over there also when I visited, that collection is also amazing. Its kind of funny how the KLOV thread on this topic is very similar to this one. The same discussions and arguments about the volunteer techs, did they waste their time and effort, or were they happy to do it, and on and on. It's like 2 parallel universes that intersect with one another at times.

Your "We have" list confused me. If "We" referred to MoP, so they will be taking delivery on some ordered titles *after* the MoP is no more ? To where, and what is to become of those ?

What dimension is that thing going to be spending the next 8 months in??

676 machines as of late June. Guessing couple posts up was quoting from an older post. https://pinballmap.com/map/?by_location_id=14611

That post was made by Chuck a few months back, apparently before all of this stuff started to happen. Or, right around the time it was looking like a somewhat solid plan to move to the new location in Palm Springs and open up there.

So by today's standards, when the EM's roll around and everyone is out of money, they will still sell for 1500-2500/each.

Probably higher. Captains auctions are notoriously high, particularly when adding in fees and taxes. Now add in the notoriety of this auction and this becomes the Barrett Jackson of arcade auctions.

The secondary downside is that it is likely going to drive pin prices up further, as buyers are going to look at these prices to set new levels.

The biggest drive to the price increase was lockdowns. This created a MASSIVE increase in demand and obviously there wasn't a corresponding increase in supply.

In fact it's possible that a big release of pins like this auction will satiate a lot of the demand which could start leading to lower prices as there are fewer buyers seeking pins.

Supply and Demand is still the bottom line. With people going back to the office, kids going back to school, free money from the government stopping, there simply won't be the same crush we had on games and prices for the last 15 months.

I'm not saying prices will crash back to $2000 for a WPC but every seller trying to get $10k for a B or C tier game are gonna be disappointed.

F.Y.I. for anyone reading this: If this version of the list has any lasting reference value for you, or simply for nostalgia value, my suggestion is that you save a print version of it for yourself, *now.* I make no claims to understanding the inner workings of Pinball Map, but if past practice is any guide, once a venue is gone it vanishes from the listings. So, a mere browser bookmark would be unavailing, and that info then becoming absent -- unless it happens to turn up as some previous date snapshot on the WayBackMachine (Internet Archive), which is not guaranteed. I just saved all of it with the "Save as PDF" feature in Opera Browser for Windows. It ran to over 38 pages worth; took a while to load it all and I stopped counting. That was worth mentioning because I've used many browsers and most of them are not that reliable for this sort of thing. Their 'Save Page' or 'Print' functions will badly represent what you were viewing, or severely truncate it, sometimes after just the first page or two. And depending on what program was used to construct the web pages, you might also see mangled results with things that directly overlap each other, making the Save or Print unreadable. If the browser has a 'Print Preview' feature, that should indicate what it actually sees and how it sees it, so *that* is what you'd end up with. Opera seems to have the best, most consistently accurate print rendering engine. But YMMV.

I do this goofy stuff all day for work.

Copy the entire list from the web page.
Paste into a Word doc as txt
Search on View Playing Tips on Pintips and replace with empty space
Search on ^p^p and replace with ^p to remove all the empty lines
Set the margins to narrow and the font to Arial 10point to reduce the number of pages

Done

Print to PDF so it can be posted here. Want Word doc by email? PM me. It could easily go into a spreadsheet as well.

MOP games list.pdf