So I live in a semi obscure place, an island the size of PA, with 95% less people. Due to how spread out we were, we had a lot of small time ops and lots of machines. In fact, Replay had an article (I don't have it handy to remember year) that stated we had the most Jukeboxes per capita in all of Canada.

I have spent years cultivating leads, tracking down people and letting people know I collect Pinball and arcade machines. It's paid off. I find a couple things a year.

However, it's usually:

- Arcade Machines
- Such bad shape most of you would not look twice.
- Very lowly desirable pins.
- Rusty beyond all belief.

I love tracking down this stuff. Digging though a crumbling building is more fun to me than restoring or playing my machines. Sad, I know. I just love the history of it however.

There was never been a big collecting scene here however and much of we we have was raided by other collectors on the mainland, or shipped off by the truckload from ops who know they could get decent money elsewhere.

96% of everything I come across, are leftovers from someone else. I know guys who hit every major op and shipped trailers off the island. Hell, I even know a pilot who carried his tools with him on commercial airline runs. Call the nearest op at each spot, offer to spend a few hours doing repairs and take home a machine in return. Lots of cool stories of what people did to hunt down games before they were worth the prices of today and before I got into the hobby.

I raided one old building a few years ago. I can trace the history of raids on that spot to:

An Woodrail only guy in 1995.
One major collector in 2001.
One collector who shipped everything valuable off island in 2005.
One collector who took any knowable titles left in 2010.
Me who spent two hours looking at the amount of mold before I decided if I should take anything in 2016....

Plus who knows what else in between those gaps.

Now I know from past threads on this topic, people know of huge stashes that are going nowhere until the building owner dies. Plus then its 50-50 if someone trucks it all to the dump instead. I saw that happen last year. 40+ System 11 era machines gone in the blink of an eye.

So what are your thoughts? In 10-20 years will it be mostly just machines moving back and forth between collectors?