I am no veteran (a DumbAss actually) but I can think of two things as far as WPC goes. Still unobtainium.

• White Water topper
• Creature from the Black Lagoon hologram

Hard to say which is more expensive. Someone more veteran than me would probably know.

My first thought was the fancy piece of paper in the Whitewater topper. The creature hologram is another good guess

At some point the creature hologram was remade. There was a spare in my old creature. Unfortunately it was 10 years old and never installed, it was absolutely unusable.

This is true. My understanding is that the original model used for the OEM hologram was lost. A new model was used for the reproduction hologram.

There's a double semantic here.

• Is the question being posed truly OEM parts (manufactured back in the day)?
• Does the question include reproductions that may or may not be made from the original mold or model or whatever?

NOS is NOS. No disputing the definition. Does OEM mean NOS or reproduction from OEM or reproduction to look like OEM?

I remember Trudeau mentioning he found the original sculpt in a box of random pinball stuff he had amassed over the years.

Thanks for providing this information. Never too old to learn new factoids.

When I was let go from my old job, I made a point of returning all the property that belonged to the company. I wonder how many things like this got lost to time. I know from the recent Brian Eddy presentation at the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show

that he had a bag full of prototype parts that got lost to time. Those don't count as unobtanium since they were never used in production but it's fascinating to better understand how many failures occur to generate one success.

Congo Volcano ramp?

Another vote for Whitewater topper from me

Reminds me how when WMS was closing up a ton of the old documentation was just sent to the dump if enthusiasts didn't grab it. Only so many people at the company were vested in preserving the history. Decades of planning documents, mostly gone. Sounds like Stern was similar when they were moving and it was just the pinball nerds at the company trying to save random stuff like mylar drawings and extra engineering samples of the various mech designs over the years.

The video game industry was also bad about preserving their history. A lot of famous video games have none of their original source code anymore. Hell, some projects (like early Final Fantasy games) just wrote the new games on top of the previous game's source code.

Do NOS playfields count? I've spent well over $500 on at least a couple of those.

WPC-95 AV boards were going for $500+ for a while.

TWD Topper
GB Topper

Foo topper

You mean the one pictured in John Popaduik Ebay auction pictures years ago ?

Didn't seem so lost then.

LTG : )

NOS Twilight Zone clock is up there $$$.

LTG : )

It moves!

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Spike 2 board

Point to the schematics and tell us which Node board hurt you the most. It was Node 10 wasn't it?

I’ve heard stories of TAFs being parted out just for the main ramp.

TZ power balls were insanely expensive too. I don’t think there’s any way to prove it but I have an NOS one from the 1990s unless the ones from today have a different weight or something.

I wonder if viper balls were ever remade. I’ll bet those would still fetch something these days if not.

New ones are the same. It's a precision ceramic bearing.

Many years ago it often came up on RGP. And to get them made was insane. I suggested contacting potential manufacturers about getting them made. But that you'd need a few samples before ordering thousands.

It worked, a few people did get some samples.

LTG : )

I500 4 opto targets are extremely expensive and unobtanium.

I’ve heard from my local operator that the diverter for turtles is a pain to replace and that it’s also terribly expensive. Maybe he was trying to get some pity quarters…