Ugh this really sucks, I love that place and was so looking forward to it being regularly open in Palm Springs Aside from Stern I can't imagine anyone having enough money to swoop in and save the day. Even if they did find another location it would still likely take more than two months to get it ready for such a venue. Given the limited time window I figure there is only one option, move the games into storage until the Palm Springs location is ready. I wish them luck, I really hope they make it through this.

Morongo Casino was close by and had some good food options.

I made this video of the museum back in 2017, amazing place, sad to see it go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hmm, first time I've noticed that they charge 3% more fee for internet bidders.

It's rough but there are games there that you just never see for sale. I'll check it out although probably just via internet bidding, just cuz being all day at an auction can be exhausting. At least there won't be shill bidders on this one as the items can't just be relisted on the next auction by the owner, once they sell they sell. Realistically though I doubt I'll get anything as others have way deeper pockets than I do. I've sold a few games that I restored to the museum, kinda curious what those will sell for.

Yeah every game is always "bright and tight" even if it's faded and missing a wiring harness.

They tend to run very late, basically all day long which is mostly why I've only participated online so far. You can tell the energy by the end is just gone and they tend to go through items *much* faster near the end. If it was a fixed predictable schedule then I'd give it a shot live, but as it is they have always been open ended so I'm sticking with internet bidding.

I do something similar but in the reverse direction. Basically I have a Google sheets doc where I list the games I'm interested in and the max I'm willing to spend on each one, then the spreadsheet shows me how much my max auction bid must be taking all fees into account. That way I don't overbid or get caught up in the auction hoopla.

Yeah it's convenient, I added a sample pic. I go with 18% buyers premium and 7.75% tax, with the tax adding on top of the hammer price + buyers premium. The math seems to work out to:

(Your Max Price) / 1.27145

So people can just spreadsheet that. In the case of the attached pic cell C2's formula is =B2/1.27145

auction (resized).jpg

Naïve question alert, are they ethically allowed to do that? That would be like a realtor bidding on a house she is also hired to sell, just seems shady.

I mean I know there are always shill bidders and such, like people bidding on their own auctions because it's cheap to just relist then again at a future auction, etc. However if a bunch of pins all of a sudden end up in Captain's inventory right after Captain's was hired to sell them off, then there's ethical questions there. For one, did they try to get the best price for the client or were they just hammered off quickly so they could acquire them? I mean does the owner of Mecum auctions bid on cars in his own auctions to add to his own collection? Perhaps that's normal and they all do it, but it just seems like a conflict of interest to me.

Ah you're right that has happened at a Mecum auction, and follows TigerLaw's theory as well. So maybe they have the authorization to bid if a listing is just too low or below some agreed upon "virtual reserve", that would make sense.

Zaxxon sold for $1400. Yup, he'll do ok.

I'd expect that number to change, it only shows 3 pages of items but their auctions usually are 8 to 12 pages. They will probably keep adding until the date gets closer.

Going from past auctions, sometimes all photos aren't posted until the day of the auction. Hopefully that won't be the case for this auction though.

Hmm so they are gonna go through 15 pages of items in one day on an auction that starts at 3pm on Sept 10? If so they will have to move very very fast, much faster than they usually do. Unless I'm misunderstanding it and all it means is that the 689 item auction starts on Sept 10, they do as many as they can that day then the rest spill over to Sept 11, and then to Sept 12?

Ahhh thanks for that, makes sense. Finally found as well where that info is on the website:

https://bid.captainsauctionwarehouse.com/m/view-auctions/info/id/80

I'll post this again in case others missed it, it's a little old as I filmed it in 2017 but many of the same machines are there. I did a long walkthrough of both pinball and arcade sides before it opened, the pinball walkthrough part is from 8:28 to around 34:12.

Honestly I feel the same way for most of the uber rare games. I tried many of them at the museum and while they were interesting, it's rare that I'd ever want to actually own one. Like I played Cyclopes, Spirit, Varkon, etc and was like ok, cool but I don't need to own them. There's always exceptions of course like the Defender pin was great, and one other one I won't mention since I intend to bid on it

I never expected it to be about good deals, but more about finally getting that one game you want that rarely comes up for sale.

I bid $3000 on Rock Encore, wanted it because it's so 80s cheesy and I've never seen one for sale. Also wondering if I should have made one more bid...

What can I say, I'm a sucker for theme and art package, I even derive enjoyment from Asteroid Annie. Anyways I quickly realized everything was going to be out of my price range but it was still great to visit the museum one last time to say goodbye.

Wanted to get Starlight, but my max bid of $4500 seems adorable in retrospect.

Anyone know how many people are present at the actual auction? Curious if it's less people than two weeks ago.

I have to imagine the whole thing was still very painful for him, seeing your idea/dream come to an end. At least that's what I gather both from talking to him personally many times and from knowing how much effort he put into hunting down all these machines. It's still a loss especially given how mentally vested he was in the whole project. Mind you, hearing people endlessly bitch and moan over spending $50 to access millions of dollars worth of machines I suppose could be enough to push someone to say to heck with it all and just cash out.

Overcharging by pinball techs has already been happening for quite sometime, just check past threads where people gloat about it. Like when pinball techs would decide what to charge me based on where I live and what I drive. It's one of the things that pushed me to buy mostly newer machines as I can fix those myself now by just swapping a board.

Strange or not that's my personal experience and ultimately a phenomenon verified by gleeful posts about that behavior on this very forum. All moot now as I can work on and tweak/fix newer Sterns myself.

Side note, if anyone here bought either of the two restored Jr Pacman machines, they were both mine and I made Youtube vids on the restorations. So if your curious about the details just pm me and I'll get you a link to the videos.

Thanks for the link! Was interesting to see that his take is 95% of machines today are sold to the home market and 5% to operators, was always curious was that split currently was.