(Topic ID: 128178)

Mermaid up for bids on Pinside

By hoov

8 years ago


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  • 138 posts
  • 42 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 8 years ago by jwilson
  • Topic is favorited by 2 Pinsiders

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#15 8 years ago

Can someone please explain why this particular game is so valuable? Is this supposed to be a joke?

#26 8 years ago
Quoted from jrpinball:

Low production. Hard to find in any condition. Gottlieb woodrail game with backglass animation.
I don't think there are any others with this feature. Has an aura about it among collectors that probably adds to the value. If you have one, you're the dude, so that's part of it. Is it worth that kind of money? We'll see. Value is what someone is willing to pay for it. I say no one goes 9K, but I could be wrong.

I have 3 games in my collection with runs much lower than 600. If I could get 9K for any of them, they'd be sold in a second. One of them came from someone who bought their game from Restoration Hardware, then practically begged me to take it when the machine failed to turn on a month after buying. I didn't pay anywhere near the price they bought it for from Restoration Hardware. Live and learn.

#32 8 years ago
Quoted from jrpinball:

What three games are they? "Mermaid" was made in 1951, so far fewer of them still exist compared to say, "Bristol Hills" which was produced 20 years later, but had a production run of only 110 units. Plus, rarity alone doesn't make a game valuable. There's a lot more to it; granted a big part of it is hype, but there are people who are willing to pay up for something that no one else has, provided it's something that's well known in collector circles and something that is desired by others in that collector circle.

Bally Attention
Chicago Coin O Boy
United Prize Bowler

The last one had a production of 1 and was the first game ever to use score reels instead of BG lighting powered by steppers. It was an early run prototype.

As for animated backglasses, besides for what o-din already posted, I have Sunshine that has an animated backglass. There were quite a few games from the woodrail era that had various gimmicks.

Granted, I haven't been following rgp for more than a decade and am somewhat out of touch with the interweb end of EM Pinball, but 9K seems very out of whack for any EM, except for maybe the most extreme collectors of which I am not one.

#33 8 years ago
Quoted from Wickerman2:

What game does Resto Hardware sell??

They sold dozens of games regionally this past Christmas, mostly to people who make tons of money and know nothing about EM pinballs.

#47 8 years ago

That playfield looks like it was sanded at some point.

#50 8 years ago
Quoted from AlexF:

It probably was with a rusty ball. It would be nice if the one guy with a repro play field and the one guy with a Mermaid for sale (that also happens to need a play field) could get together and compromise. It seems a game very worthy of restoration.

#67 8 years ago
Quoted from wayner:

Now a separate post but like the ebay advert no specific info by seller on machine condition to support reserve.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/for-sale-gottlieb-mermaid-pinball-machine

If I were him, I'd drop the reserve and take whatever I could get for it. There aren't that many people who collect woodrails and if the title wasn't desirable, that'd be a parts machine.

#72 8 years ago
Quoted from boilerman:

I bet his reserve is about 9k
he will have it for some time unless he comes down to around 4-5k even that is high imo

Never understood that kind of mentality if he really wants to sell, pin guy or not. If someone has something they got for nothing and know its rare and are not attached to the item, advertise the auction listing and let it go from there.

What happens a lot on Ebay is someone will come out of the woodwork with something perceived as rare and then someone else will come out of the woodwork with the same thing in much better shape. The market's trending down. Sell if you're not attached to the thing. Just ask anyone who "invested" in comic books, baseball cards, Cabbage Patch Kids or Beanie Babies.

#82 8 years ago

With an original run of 600, I wouldn't be surprised at all if more of these surface in the next few months.

#117 8 years ago
Quoted from MrArt2u:

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.

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.

#119 8 years ago
Quoted from DefaultGen:

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.

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.

#123 8 years ago
Quoted from wayner:

Who then pays the ebay fee?

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

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