Although it's no longer on my "must buy" list, I wouldn't mind one day owning a Caribbean Cruise. I had a ton of fun playing it on a cruise ship in the late 90s. Huge surprise to find it there.

I regret not being willing to drive for the NIB one I was offered about four years ago now for $500. Would have been a neat experience.

The one thing that I think might be a possibility is a game like Safe Cracker. You're absolutely right that it was a bomb on location, but it's popular enough in the secondary market that I think we could see something like it reappear.

a machine without a head I don't expect to see at all, unless some boutique builder goes crazy and builds a head-to-head machine.

You can set it up difficult if you want. Mine is brutally hard, and I can't get close to rolling it.

A surprising number of these are HUO because they simply didn't sell back in the day for whatever reason. And I mean that, I wonder why not - they seem like something that fills a niche perfectly, and they were decent enough I would have expected them to earn, but I guess not...

Anyway, as recently as about 10 years ago, I know of people who had multiple of each NIB in warehouses and they were being sold for around $400 apiece. I regret not buying them both then, but as that one on eBay not selling for $999 shows, they simply don't have that much demand.

I don't get what you mean? When they were they were originally released they were marketed to homeowners to start their own routes? That's the first I've heard of that, and if that's right, yeah, that's nuts.

When they were selling so cheap, they were held by a couple groups who had bought out the remaining inventory, but I didn't see them marketing to the home.

Wow, awesome. Learn something new every day.

And yeah, that's absurd. If I was going to start a simple route, I would use a simple arcade video game, not my first freaking pinball machine.