$20,100 USD....no snipe

SOLD! $20,100.00 big ones!

wow stalled @ 20100

w0w! No snipers!

$20,100

Final price.

Aww, no last second action. I accidentally hit the "bid now" button while keeping my phone from going to sleep and about had a mini heart attack.

lol at the guy who bid $2K at the beginning instead of buying it for $12K.

Is the winner here?

$20,100

Haha. Anticlimactic.

Maybe I should buy a lotto ticket.....

It is rare to see sniping on high dollar items like this. Snipes are typically impulse buys. If I could impulse snipe a 20k King Kong, I don't think I would need a lotto ticket...

Wonder where the two $30k guys were? Or, maybe this was one of them and the other flaked.

Wow! I thought that would have been higher.

Yeh it needs work. Cool looking game though. At $12K it would have sold. Someone was pretty dumb to not do a buy it now.

Oh well Good luck with your game. I'd love an invite to come play it

They only exist on the internet. This was a real life auction....

Snipes aren't usually impulse buys in my experience. There are apps specifically made to throw in your bid at the last second. That's how I bid on any high dollar items. (And by high dollar, I do not mean $20K, more like $400 or so.) I put my absolute max price in the app as soon as I find the auction and let it do the work while I forget about it. Then if I get it, great. If not, oh well, I didn't want to pay more than that anyway. Keeps the actual real-time bidders from seeing what I would bid, like on this one where someone bid high then retracted it just to see someone's max.

Would have been worth triple if it was actually signed by King Kong

(See DE:Star Wars thread for verification )

I know what a snipe is.....And maybe impulse is not the right word.... Sniping is very much a take it or leave it experience..... High dollar items like this are typically not take it or leave purchases....

king_kong.jpg

You're right. Impulse buy is "Hey, I think I'll grab a Snickers while standing in this check-out line." Not so much "Hey, I think I'll spend $20K on a pinball machine."

I impulse bought my first machine in 1999..... once the sickness fully kicked in, I am pretty sure that impulse set me back around 80k...LOL

exactly, I can never figure out on items like this, why do a bidding war during the auction anyway, what do you have to prove by being the high bidder with 4 days to go, it means nothing, it only allows others to sit back and pick away at your bid. If you bid all your marbles at the beginning, you will get others gradually picking away at it, and keep going as they just can't help themselves. Years back I bid on a rare record album, putting in $100 before leaving for work. If I put that bid in at the last few seconds I would have won that record for $10 yet when I got home, one buyer bid 31 times until they finally overcame my bid. From then on I only bid in the last few seconds, and like blonde says, if I get it fine, if not move on. Many people detest snipers, but if you think it through it's the most practical way to do it. If you don't like snipers then bid your max and be done with it, and you'll probably pay more than you have to, but if you lose at least you can have no regrets about not bidding more.

Another reason there weren't snipers is the price at the end was above what the snipers wanted to pay anyway. Honestly I think this sold too high and if I was going to snipe it, I wouldn't put a bid in over 20k but if this was languishing at around 12k after missing the BIN, I probably would have put in a snipe a little higher and probably lost, but I wouldn't enjoy my dinner any less if I did. I suspect if the winner put this for sale on pinball classifieds tomorrow for 20k he would have a tough time selling it.

There are less than 10 games in existence right?

Then... why this?

kingkong.jpg

Does someone have a pinball parts ebay engine that just posts parts for any game that exists or existed?

I sorta did the same thing with our JP last year. Then a year later we had 9... the sickness is strong. Can't have just one.

This is true with lower dollar items, but look at bid histories with other higher dollar items and you will see they don't get sniped as often. It is one thing to snipe at 4k, but an entirely different animal at 20k+.

If I am on the fence about buying something at 20k, every dollar over that is certainly going to be harder for me to want to snipe...

What is the old saying? In for a penny in for a pound?

Sniping= In for a penny, maybe in for a few more pennies...

Jeez, I had no idea you went up to 9 . . . I remember when your thread when you got the JP. I bet you would have laughed had someone said a year later you would have nine!!!

Well, 9 in the "family collection" meaning 6 at my house and 3 at my parents' house. But yes, we had one old Twin Win in the basement for years, then I bought JP, and now there are 9. And yes, we are all insane. But at least my phone didn't force me to bid on the King Kong earlier because I'm pretty sure my mom would have had a heart attack if I'd told her I needed $22K.

I would like to have one but it is 1/4 of a needed digital projector I have to have to stay in business, plus its a lot of money. That could b weight loss surgery to live longer or buy a pinball machine and die quicker, easy decision for me as to why I did not bid. Still like to have one at 15k if anybody wants to sell in the future.

The real collectors know this thing needs
Another 5K at least to restore the games playfield and
Reproduce plastics missing and fix many other issues

Therefor no sniper action on this one
12k would have been right price for Non working
Game like this

Hope to see it at a show someday !

The World's Foremost Data East King Kong Expert has spoken.

I don't think you can accurately say that this thing is missing plastics as each of the nine are unique parts-wise.

I was comparing pictures of other King Kings
And noticed several plastics missing
Liked the Other king Kongs better and
Seemed more playable to me
Live us like a box of chocolates ....
And that's all I have to say about that!

I was just messing with ya. I would really be surprised if the plastics on this were yanked or lost; they probably didn't exist. I agree that one with a full set of art should command more, others would say they'd rather have the set up with the Back to the Future ramp & the black stand in plastics. So, yes, it is a box of chocolates.

Bottom line is, I would never pay $20k for a game so any of the stuff spewing from my keyboard should be taken as having no value whatsoever. I really don't care for chocolate.

I'd rather have your F-1 Grand Prix.

For real. That is some collection!

Now that Kong is gone, somebody buy that Laffing Sal on eBay. She's more terrifying. $(KGrHqN,!q8FDvI,U-EpBRF!p)Ygqg~~60_35.jpg

On another note: I will have my custom Sexy Girl
Back soon with LCD monitor and some cool
Sexy animation!!

$20100 is ridiculous, it kind of faded out in the end with no last minute bidding........personally id rather spend $20k on a couple of NIB machines.

In a collector hobby, a large percentage of purchases are of the unplanned/opportunistic type. Odds are most of the KK bidders were not pondering the purchase before the listing.

Scenario: someone ran across KK on a forum thread or eBay listing got a craving for something new/unique, dug in the bottom of their purse or pocket for enough expendable coin, and put in a bid for something they don't need and were not looking for. Not too much different than buying a candy bar in the checkout lane.

Hmmm.......maybe, maybe not. I know when I was looking for one I was looking for it because it was KK, I wanted it for the theme. Once I found out they were rare then that was sorta like icing on the cake. Of course it took a few years to find a guy that had owned several of them at one time. It took many more years of trying to close the deal to secure one the second time around. I really thought I was crazy for spending that much money on a game as it was the most I'd spent for just a single game up to that point. I never looked at it like a investment, seriously. I figured I was the only one that would be that silly to spend so much on a game that nobody at the time seemed to have any interest in. I remember friends saying "you spent HOW MUCH?" with there jaws dropped and there eye's bugging out. I figured at that time if I had to sell it that I'd get MAYBE $5K for it back in 2007, and thats if I was lucky enough to find someone that wanted one really really bad. Times sure have changed.

John P. Dayhuff
Battle Creek, Mi.
269-979-3836

Auction not paid - Relisted let the fun start! ebay.com link: King Kong Pinball Machine Extremely rare prototype

6 hours to go, 25% lower price so far.