Alex,

You called it in one of the first posts to this thread. Your the man.

Feel pretty certain buyer has a better p/f to put in this game - crazy otherwise.

Whilst it seems crazy money, this game to collectors is truly rare and desirable.

On the other hand better 50's titles ( playability ) , and as rare can be had for a 10th of this price. Now, that is even crazier

The buyer didn't need to have a repro playfield up his sleeve to have made the purchase worthwhile. That playfield was far from un-restorable. Even some mild plywood delaminatioin could have been glued and pressed together. Here's a worn-to-the-wood King Pin that was headed to the trash when I picked it up. I probably put a good 60-100 hours repainting and clearing this playfield and I think it turned out great! (yes, too shiny for purists, but that is easily fixed) And that effort was for a common King Pin!

If I had deep pockets, I would have dropped a good amount on this game and restored the playfield myself. Total cash out of my pocket to restore a playfield would have been less than $100 (and 100 hours spent away from a bar, TV or internet forums.) I'd be ok with that...

IMG_4205.JPG IMG_4811.JPG

How many are accounted for, a dozen or two (based on how many playfields Clay sold)? There were 70,000 Rock-ola Jigsaws made and it's a fairly rare game today. There probably aren't a lot more of them still alive. This stuff just got junked.

that king pin looks great, you did a great job saving it. it is a tad to shiny but like you said a quick hit with 2000 grit would knock it down a bit.

That is a lot of money for an EM pin. Are they rare, yes, they appear to be. I hope the new owner is going to enjoy his new purchase. For sake of keeping EM games affordable I hope that people realize that not all EM games were painted with the same brush.

It would be interesting if Tim at PHoF ended up with this pin.

It's at $ 3000 and jumps to $9000 in the last minute.Theres something funny going on here.

Not really. As was previously mentioned it's the last 30 seconds where everything happens. I never understand why people bid before that point?

Not really. I was watching it in the final 5 minutes. It sat a 4509.09 for that entire time until the final few seconds. Then, I saw it jump one time (apparently to the $5000 mark) and then in the final second or so, it went right to the 9000 mark.

There are snipe services (I use one of them when I know what I want to pay and won't be around to watch live) that will place your bid for you in the last few seconds (usually starts around 15 to 10 seconds mark). Remember a bid won't usually go up unless there is a second entity bidding against it. So, proxy bids can exist and just not appear until someone else counters with a bid higher than the existing bid. If there is a proxy higher than the new bid, it will automatically place a higher bid the amount of the next ebay increment (which was probably pretty high at $5000.).

The odd thing is the bidder history that shows the final two bids being the winner. Well over what I saw happen live. Snipe services use multiple servers to make sure your bid makes it through in the last few seconds.

I bid at the very end of auctions and I've noticed sometimes my bid will go all the way up to my maximum bid, even though there's no other bid close to mine or a reserve on the thing. I just attributed it to ePay earning their nickname...

If somebody did pay that much they're freakin crazy.

Not unusual for a human to do this...I know I've bit 2 in a row at the end

maybe after he bid the reserve still was not reached so he bid again.

That's what happens to me (though in much, MUCH smaller dollar amounts) I feel like he cleared the reserve at $8100 than ePay took it up to his maximum bid at $9,000.

I've seen auctions I'm bidding on count down and end with my top bid at, let's say $27.50. Then, when the screen refreshes, It shows my winning bid at $37.75 (what my maximum bid was) yet no one really bidding between them. I find it odd that it miraculously ends at my exact maximum bid.

This. Yes. No real mystery here.

The is probably because someone else bid somewhere between 37.00 and 37.74 at the last second. It's the stupid incremental bidding system Ebay has in place which I'm surprised no one has sued over.

There has to be an intervening bid. Check the bidding history, including canceled bids.

There are still people out there who have a lot of old arcade games that are not active on any newsgroups and who do not attend pinball shows and don't really care what the games are worth, but will sell if someone offers them enough money for what they have. My Father-in-Law is one of them. He ended up with most of the games that were on location at Savin Rock in the 60s and still has a lot of them. He is an engineer and has absolutely no interest in any of the pinball newsgroups and has friends who have similar collections. He does not have a Mermaid, but he does have a few that are considered "rare" around here.

Rarity is also not a good term here. Desirability is better. Up until a fire destroyed it, I owned this game:

http://www.pinrepair.com/bowl/prize1.jpg

It was the only one in existence as far as I know. I bought it for about $150 off a guy who paid $50 for it at a local yard sale. That machine was much more rare than Mermaid, and more noteworthy as research into it revealed that it was the first of its kind to use score reels and that it was a prototype for several multi player machines that followed it, but it is not nearly as desirable as Mermaid.

I think there were two "shills" involved in the bidding trying to lure somebody else in.This never sold for $9000.

Who then pays the ebay fee?

Presuming there has been a purchase & a sale that it is possible but in my view not probable. I would think notwithstanding your personal great work on King Pin there are few with the commitment & capacity to achieve the level of quality pf restoration on this Mermaid demanded of a base investment of $9k.

No one. The seller files a NPB and ebay waves the fees and lets the seller relist if that is what happened.

Crazy is a relative term. To many people, those of us who collect pinball machines, or cars, or motorcycles, or Lionel trains, or whatever, and spend the money, time and effort to do what we do, we are all crazy!

The warm glow and good feeling you get when you see a game restored to it's original shiny glory is well worth it.

the king pin shown above and the mermaid in the auction aren't even close in playfield condition. the king pin was way better. the mermaid has serious delamination on several layers of wood. though certainly not impossible to fix (nothing is impossible after all), it would be a hell of a job to do. and i mean a hell of a job! i suspect the buyer has access to another playfield. after all, out of the 12 playfields i sold, that means there are 12 used playfields kicking around. maybe in better shape than this one?

Ebay can't force you to pay for anything.

This says it all!

I'm so tired of hearing, "It's worth what someone will pay for it," more like, "It's worth what precedence, or supply / demand dictates." There are many woodies with animation, many woodies that play better, many woodies with lower production numbers than Mermaid. This game seems to have capitalized in monetary notoriety as a result of 1 of HS's Ebay Auctions that actually attracted multiple deep-pocket museums, probably because it was ground-up restored with a new BG and new playfield, (from Mondial). Stunning in appearance.

The same seller had mentioned, (RGP), selling the same title for $4100 just a few years prior, so it appears to me all the hobbyists remember that 1 auction, seemingly setting a new price guideline for it. The seller stated he's had new backglasses made, and Clay stated he has since made playfields, so it seems to me several other examples are out there, most likely adorning other tasteful collections around the country, and NOT that rare.

How about a '51 Glamour, (with only 300 made)? Would a nice example of this be worth the same? How about 4 Bells, (400 produced)? The latter is a real good playing game, what's the opinion on it's value? Is the notoriety because this is one of the few '50's games with new playfields available, and HS was able to assemble a cosmetically very nice game? Will another of this vintage eventually net the same price? What's the opinion?

The problem with 4 Bells is it's a clone of Dragonette. So it's not a good comparison game. At one time i had both 4 Bells and Dragonette. It made no sense to me to keep both. I got rid of the 4 Bells and kept the more common Dragonette. That decision does not bother me. If i remember i didn't get all that much for the 4 Bells either (Dragonette seems to be worth more.)

Mermaid has a lot going for it. Survival rate is really low. The batch of plywood used on Mermaid had (what appears to be) a manufacturing flaw. That's the only excuse i can come up with as to why the playfield delaminates so severely. I mean every one i have seen has this fatal flaw. Also it's early 1950s, which doesn't help either (survival rate low in general on these.) Contrary to what people say, i like how the game plays too (more so than say Dragonette/4 Bells).

Glamour may be a good comparison model. I would suspect that game is worth some decent coin. but it doesn't have animation, and it doesn't have the elusive mermaid artwork either. Mermaid really hit it out of the park in my opinion with decent play, rarity, animation, mermaids, and awesome artwork. Most of that can't be said of Glamour, or really any other Gottlieb (aside from Knockout).

I don't think so.
15 or so years ago I watched a Mermaid Back box, painted brown, without the backglass, but with the animation sell for $3500.

Well................The game must be a better player than it's reputation dictates what with the common playfield wear mentioned, otherwise, with Clay's playfields and the reproduction backglasses made, I kind of expected to see more Mermaids pop up on Ebay the last few years. Instead they're probably remaining in personal collections.

The fact that 4 Bells is a clone of Dragonette, a tried-and-true playfield means it's a known good player with less examples existing than Mermaid, but it still doesn't attract the coin Mermaid does. Can't buy into the animation thing either, since other games have similar animation yet don't attract like prices. The rarity-survivorship is in question as well since there should be more recently restored examples with both backglasses and playfields having been re-manuf. The average production run on most games of this period was only 800-1000 anyway.

The game must be a better than mentioned player, with it's well-known playfield wear being legitimate, and with collectors wanting to hold onto them rather than cashing in on a big sale. That's about the best reason I can think of.

Then why did the same seller who sold the game for 20+ K in 2012 brag about selling the same entire game for 4100 some 15 years ago??

It's funny how many people walked right by this game to the W/B games at the VFW show and didn't know it was a 20k game. Not much love at the show for the old wood rails compared to the vip room.

But those who did know stopped and played a game or two!

Where I live, the woodrail room is the vip room.

I totally played a game of Mermaid!

It's no Medieval Madness. Which I didn't play at all that weekend!