I know this is a month old, but...

If you ask operators who bought NIB machines 20 years ago and NIB machines today, they tend to tell the opposite story - that Stern for the most part out of the box is far better. The difference, as some will point out, is that the 20 year ago machines were either routed and trashed before they were sold to a person who knew it was a project, or were restored and play great because of it.

As for the question, I *sort* of think it was BBB that caused the bubble. Let's face it - the biggest reason that BBB is worth so much isn't for the rarity - if that was it, the Viza War that I have working out in the garage should be a gold mine and not worth the probably $200 or so that it is - but the story of it. Like him or hate him, essentially Gene wanted to write his own legacy, and he spent a ton of his own time and money to do so. When I heard him first announce that he would be taking pre-orders for the game (which he did at the 2004 Midwest Gaming Classic before he made it official), I fully believed that he could make these games show up in people's hands - it simply came down to he had enough money, willpower, and contacts that he could will it to life. And he, and about 20 other people who greatly helped him, did it.

I think that if we're going to point fingers at what caused the bubble, it would be more along the lines of Tron LE suddenly being worth extreme amounts of money. After a lot of people saw how that played out, it allowed other limited runs to be potentially worth so much money, and the marketplace exploded for them, with people throwing money at whatever they could. BBB was a point that they could look back at and think that success of the projects was inevitable, and feel more comfortable with their investment.

Without BBB, I think we still would have had a similar explosion of stuff, but I also think that it would have been a bit less than what we ended up having. Also, the years since Tron LE have been at least somewhat sobering with the releases of LEs now being seen like a huge crapshoot - on one side, you have games like ACDC that it has clearly worked for, on the other side you have games like WrestleMania, Mustang and Transformers that it hasn't. All of which, by the way, I think are solid games - but apparently weren't exactly what people are looking for.

Nothing will be. The entire story, start to finish, leaves BBB in a unique spot in history all it's own.

I feel like there are only basically two things that could ever be "like", but if they were made they would be produced in quantity and would thus be rather different - those two things are Wizard Blocks and KingPin.

No other games have the prior-to-production history and profile that BBB had, which changes it all up.

That's the thing though - BBB was NEVER about the depth of the gameplay. BBB is worth so much because of the Capcom closing and their decision to not manufacture it, followed by the IPB story of how it was manufactured. While Timeshock! has been out for years digitally, it was not began as a project expecting it to be real.

Having it would be a cool story, but it still wouldn't match what BBB is.