You should NEVER regret this. You are way better off focusing on quality and not quantity in this hobby!

You are 100% correct. I personally struggle with this sort of thing. I'd consider my collection mature, as I am limited on space and I have a hard time picking what has to go to make room for the next project. I've slowed down a lot, spending most of my repair time on maintenance.

That said, it still bothers me to realize I probably won't be getting any more projects at the price-points I'm accustomed to. Or the price points I've sold stuff off at.

I would like to say this is true but when your in my shoes the affordability out ways the quality sometimes. In order for me to be able to purchase some pins i have to settle with player machines. Im sure im not the only one in this situation but it makes it hard to purchase some pins. This will change the longer im in the hobby but i had to get started aomewhere.

Retail certainly gets people into the hobby, but hurts them or gives them a hard lesson, at least. I've had a lady put in touch with me through a friend who paid 6K for a 4K newer Stern title from a retail establishment. She was looking to swap or sell and I made a very fair offer of $4300 and she couldn't handle taking the huge loss and ended up keeping her pin.

Regarding EMs specifically, I've not had to pay anything crazy. I did pay $700 including shipping for a gorgeous Jungle Queen because I had been looking for one for over a year. Most I've paid for an EM has been $800 for my Captain Fantastic at our local show. Was not working, but it was playing fine on set up night, so I knew it wouldn't take too much to get her going. I think we start appreciating the older games as we go along. When I started, it was all DMD stuff for me. I have 4 great EMs in the collection now. I can only fit 20 total in the basement, so I gotta spread the real estate between eras.

I paid around $1200 for this Pit Stop 7 or 8 years ago. There is some history. It has more than paid for itself. And then some. No one will be buying it while I'm in charge.

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There’s a out of sight in San Diego for $500
It’s working, BG looks perfect, Playfield looks good....Seems like a darn good deal
For a drop target Gottlieb

I always go in for this price range, if I have the space or the extra dough.

A nice out of sight for $500 and you didn’t scoop it up!?!
Top 5 head-to-head EMs. Period.

Short answer, it would be a battle royal with the wife...and right before Christmas
Wish I could, I’ll have to pass.

This thread convinced me to buy a storage unit. Not that I'm trying to hoard, I just don't have room, I genuinely like all the games I have, I would have a hard time finding them again at the price I paid for them, and I'm planning on moving into a larger space in the near future. I want to make sure I can free up a slot for restoration work until that happens.

Now that I have extra room in the garage, it's going to take a lot of self control to not buy even MORE games to fill the space

I'll see your attic and raise you a house build in Whitefish, Mt. Can't get a builder locked in though as an army of New Yorkers and Californians flush with cash and work from home computers are bailing out for the idyllic life.

I’m sure you can find some local friends who’ll be happy to temporarily pin sit some working games. If you decide you don’t have space for your 2001, I can help you out by buying it.

Glad your going with an attic! That will be awesome.

"Pinball Attic" sounds cool.

I was wondering how long that one would last. Congrats! I have an AA too, but the score motor seems sluggish; won't always start a game.

Over the past few years, I've picked up those EMs that I wanted to. C37, Atlantis, Eye of the Tiger, Hit the Deck, Abra, etc. I saw these prices rise and knew what was coming.

The generation that grew up with EMs is dying, and like cars from the 50's, the market has dropped. However I believe future generations will keep wanting the most popular/fun of these games.

I'm from the "arcade" generation and my memory is fuzzy but don't recall playing pins at all though I suspect I might have a handful of times. To be honest the only pin I recall from that era with any clarity was Xenon. I just didn't have any interest in pins.

Rally X, Defender, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Star Castle, Spy Hunter, Tempest, Sega Star Trek, Gauntlet, etc I played the hell out of.

Started out with EM 4 years ago and I'm deep into the sold state era now but still enjoy a good game of Night Rider or Melody. Good pins are good pins, EM or solid state. Of my 26 pin lineup, 6 are EM and doubtful going anywhere. EM's are their own flavor.

Some days I'm in the mood for a spectacle of light and sound, other times reels clattering like mad and chimes & bells.

We are almost the same age, but EMs dominated by youth. The resorts we went to had only EMs; I do remember the pointy people, Jungle King, and a few others. The first SS I saw was Xenon, but I remember ball times were too short and we didn't feel it was a good use of our hard earned money.

My NOOB story of EM love...

And thus why prices are going up, maybe...

I'm 54 and grew up going to the bowling alleys with my bowlover parents in the 70s. Being younger, and the balls at the alley being horrible, I found bowling unappetizing for gaming and entertainment and would run into the game room to play pinball. EM pinballs were fascinating to me as a kid from circa 1973-1978. There was a vendor that rotated the machines, and I remember the oldest being BEAT TIME, which was still rotating in the mid-70s. My first love was KING KOOL. Naturally the Ballys were striking to look at, but not my thing, and the Williams machines with pointy people weren't quite so enthusing. I really dug those Krynski-Morison Gottliebs with the longer flippers than the 60s pins: the art was COOL and reminiscent of Marvel comics at the time, recalling Buscema and Kirby and there was a lot of Ed Wood thrown in as well. The sounds, the lights, the play, the strategies, etc... and there were always these "cool guys" and stylish 70s people back there playing, their girlfriends always quite striking. It was a whole scene in the game room prior to video games. Circa 1976-7 I had the money to buy a machine and was trying to get myself on one, but my dad pin-blocked me.

Our main alley nearby burned up one night in October 1978 and the games with it. Never to return. I would play one here and there in Holiday Inns or 7-elevens or even in video arcades. However, my young mind was enthralled by video games from 1978 onward, and I soon forgot the love of EM pinball....

40 years later, I recollected that joy of EMs. Found this site and others and researched the games I used to play. Finally, this past week, I decided to reconnect to my past and buy one. So I just purchased a nicely restored OUT OF SIGHT to begin my collection. The wife is sweating bricks and bullets.

Depending on how life goes, I would love to collect a bunch of 70s EM Gottliebs to preserve them and improve them. There is something admirable about the complexity and primal engineering, the art and craft, of those machines. Naturally they were part of my formative years, but I would assume they grab younger people as well at some point and foster similar admiration, despite some disappointment over the simplicity of the playfields compared to the modern machines.

You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into!

Surprised it’s still out there. I’d get but just ain’t in the mood.
ebay.com link: 1977 GOTTLIEB PIONEER PINBALL MACHINE LIGHTS UP DOES NOT PLAY

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Smart woman. I think my wife might have some minor regrets stating she liked the first pin I brought home.

Been pretty positive experiance on the whole though.

Our 77th pin in three years just came home last week, and my 15th Data East.

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I could tell early on that you had the bug....and bad!

At a point now after trying a bunch of pins and knowing what I like and dont like. Going to focus on restoring what I have collected as the best use of my time now.

Still have a few on the wish list, but not interested in random pins as much. Still very fond of EMs and have 2 in the queue for makeovers.

See now you made my Duotron cry....

Totally get it mind you. It was my first game and I did not read the Pinside reviews first. I take some solace in the fact that it's probably in better shape (playfield, backglass, cabinet, etc.) than a comparably priced / available, better regarded machine would be. And I had no idea what I liked or did not like when I bought my first game. It was a while before I got to play other older games, and I began to fine tune my preferences (EM vs. SS, Gottlieb vs. Williams / Bally of that era, two flipper vs. more flippers, etc.)

I'm one newbie that wants them and am happy to dig in a bit to get them working and keep them running. I'm not going to do a complete restoration but I love EMs, have picked up 3 in the past year, and would have more if I had the space. I think because these were the games of my youth. And I like owning, preserving, and playing a game that was around when I was a kid.

Oh, I have a feeling she’ll love it Gott. And don’t say I didn’t warn you about how they seem to somehow strangely multiply.

A bunch of nice EMs just got posted in the NE thread at classic non-banjo strum EM prices. Go get 'em!

I somewhat disagree with OP. I think in maybe 10-15 years the classic EMs will start to become like woodrails are now. Interesting only to the oldtimers and hardcore collectors. Most pinheads will not own one. If it's not a desirable title you'll have trouble giving it away. In collections they'll be there just as a curiosity.

I think part of the value increase is due not only to supply and demand of games but also availability of parts. It's pretty incredible the amount of reproduction parts available for these things nowadays. Especially with all the reproduction playfields and backglasses out there now. Of course that cuts both ways, a game with repro parts available becomes more valuable, and rising game prices also makes reproduction business viable.

I think the classic EM pin will hold its value better than a wood rail as they are closer to the pattern of what a standard pin is now. Wood rails tend to have features that dead ended like gobble holes.

2 flippers, standard slings with outlanes, 3 to 5 poppers, drop target banks, spinners, etc. Late 60s to 70s EM seem to set the bar in pin design aside from ramps and subways.

Wish I knew where these cheap wood rails you are speaking of are...

The only ones I heard about for cheap are serious projects.. otherwise any flippered woodrail in fair working condition/complete seems to be highly desirable, and much more bids / value than any B-list Wedgehead anyway.

[edit] I should add that just like any pinball.. all are not equal.. there are of course, a huge gambit of flippered wood rails of various desirability... I'm talking about desirable ones... DRAGONETTE and Buccaneer come to mind as I've seen them recently...

Great points by all.

I’m 56 and grew up playing the early SSs from 77-80 and in a few years couldn’t stand any machines that started using the bi level ramp design after 1980-81 (still can’t). By the same token I felt the late EMs were slow and antiquated compared to the Eight Balls and Harlem Globetrotters of the world.

Once I got my own pins I started with 2 early ss machines but then really fell in love with 70s EMs after I bought one.

Don’t think I could enjoy the earlier 60s EMs or woodrails like the later ones but That’s just me right now.

I'm trying to get into them too, but they're hard to find, and even harder to know what ones will be fun to play or not since it's nearly impossible to get time on many of them) unlike many 70s ems)

I need to get back to fixing my Straight Shooter. Four flippers, plays fast, option for points instead of specials, and a "line up the lights" ruleset instead of "light all the things", feels like it should have potential.

I have the same issue even with many 60s games, trying to discern which ones will play fun and which won't without any opportunity to play them. I think a similar thing will happen with ems. Popular 70s games like grand prix will continue to command good and prices for a long time, but the ones people don't talk about or have in barcades or at shows will be forgotten more, and have the same thing happen to them that wood rails have where most players don't even really know they exist

I agree with this. Seems like more and more people that are serious SS collectors are starting to look at 60s/70s EMs as viable options in their collections. Even if that means only one or two games, that increases demand over time, at least for A/B titles. Case in point 4-player Gottlieb pins in good shape from the 70s like Royal Flush, Out of Sight, Jet Spin, Target Alpha to name a few have started to move the needle quite a bit lately.

If you look at EM's through an aesthetic lens they have a much deeper artistic value. It's like most modern things; it's entertainment vs. art. I'll take the peril of risk over the comfort of distraction any day. Why do people collect vinyl records and spend crazy $$$ instead of owning a digital version at the fraction of the price? It's not purely nostalgia or affordability that creates vintage markets, it's our desire to connect to something that is mechanical, analog and tangible, that also preserves the feeling that it was made and designed with basic instinct vs profit. The pins from the 60's & 70's are flawed, but vibrant, and you can feel the human element in every aspect of the layout. I personally prefer wood over plastic, reels over digital and chimes over speakers. If you want a lot of stimulation, I've heard video games are pretty nifty. Pins should respect primitive for a reason, they are rudimentary to our core instincts. The artwork on those old EM pins is sure sweet and much better than the blatant advertisement and commodity of tv shows and movie themes that dominated later machines.

You older pinheads are forgetting something very important that factors into this event of rising prices.

YOU ARE REPAIRING THESE GAMES.

Those $300 trash-bin cheapies of 2000 are now either destroyed or parted out or restored in some fashion. So they aren't $300 cheapies anymore--someone dropped $1000 of parts and labor into them and they are now worth $1400 on the market. The more they get handed around, the more likely they are to be improved by each owner until someone takes the titan leap of doing a total refurb and putting it on the market for $2200+ because it is in excellent shape, or even $3000+ if it is almost-new.

Add to the improvement of games the enlarging of a nostalgic or discovering group of purchasers in the market and you get rising prices due to demand.

WELL WRITTEN! I thought I was alone on this aspect of pinball games.

a) The primal feeling of knockers on wood and metal, the clicking of contacts and rotating relays, etc etc., all add to a VERY instinctually satisfying experience.
b) They are pleasingly primitive in their design. These 70s Gottliebs have some extremely clever (sometimes finicky) design for USA 1960s-70s when so much design and manufacture was going south and getting haphazardly lazy.
c) The artwork--PRE-CONSUMMERISM--is a "sign of the times" which has this happy reflection of what enthused people in the pre-80s corporate conglomerate and public relations packaged world. Once the movie tie-ins came into pinball, the field suffered. However, the movie tie-ins were also done because pinball wasn't gaining ground and was losing to video games. So the "high times" of pre-78 were producing games that reveled in the joy of reflection on culture rather than product cross promotion for the sake of bailing out budgetary boats.

Those games showed SPORTS, MUSIC, CARD GAMES, HIPPIE-DIPPIE designs, HOME TOWN life, FUNNY scenarios, FANTASY, SCI-FI, etc.

In the future, I think those 60s-70s EMs will still retain interest due to several factors such as these. And they are fun, too. They are fun post-video game and microprocessor revolution, and will be fun in 2200 when people are doing something beyond our comprehension for their entertainment.

And endless fascination for certain collectors of old goods in the "peek back" you get from the product. Some of these games will probably be hugely desirable beyond 2050. Take for instance the BOWLING games, since bowling alleys are wrinkling up; FANTASY artwork games will also persevere since artistic aesthetics will change and yet you can get something like JUNGLE QUEEN and see how people dreamt of a sexy-visceral experience, or ASTRO with the clunky space suits and robots and portals on rocket ships, etc., or HISTORIC games like SPACE MISSION or PIONEER with that 1976 vibe of hope and progressive humanity discovering new boundaries.

Yes, they are an acquired taste. It doesn't help that most woodrails are really in a very distressed condition, so you are not getting anything close to a true play experience with them. Just like the wedgeheads of the 1960s, unless someone has dialed a woodrail back in to a decent operational state, these machines will play dog-slow. The problem is that it is a few orders of magnitude more difficult to bring back a woodrail than it is to bring back a late 60s or mid 70s game. But it can be done. So if possible, try to find a woodrail you can play that has been fully rebuilt - and that includes resetting all the inserts to PF level. Otherwise, you won't get a good play experience.

Also, the specific year of manufacture makes a huge difference with these games. I agree that the late 40s games are difficult to relate to, because they represent, for the most part, small incremental advances over pre-flipper playfield layouts. Humpty Dumpty is essentially a pre-flipper game with the addition of six side-swinging flipper bats. To modern players this is really weird, but if you can put yourself into the player mindset of 1947, when all games were non-flipper, it would have been pretty cool to use those bats to prevent the ball from just dropping from the top of the playfield to the bottom. From a historical perspective, this is all very interesting, but that doesn't make Humpty Dumpty a fun game for modern players.

In the late 1940s, there was still a lot of tinkering with flipper placement and game features, so those games can still be difficult to relate to. I happen to really like playing some of them, but I understand why that is a minority opinion. Some of these games still had a strong pre-flipper flavor, meaning the ball mostly moved from the top of the PF to the bottom. Flipper shots were much more difficult to aim, and often the game layout made it basically impossible to get the ball all they way back to the top of the PF with a flipper shot. My favorites from this era (all Gottlieb games) include Barnacle Bill, Harvest Moon, and College Daze.

In the 1950s, flippers moved to the modern position, and so I think these games are more approachable to today's players. There are several titles of this era that I think are a lot of fun to play (again, all Gottlieb) including Niagara, Quartette, Crossroads, Coronation, and Flying High. These are all trap-hole games. I think trap-hole games are far superior to gobble-hole games, which I don't care for very much. With a trap-hole game, once you make a specific hole to advance a feature, your remaining balls won't be trapped by that hole. So while your first couple of balls may have have a shorter play time, as the trap holes fill up, and game features are enabled, your later balls can play much longer and cash in on those features. So in that regard, I think these games are excellent players.

It took me a long time to come around to liking woodrails. It wasn't until I had the opportunity to work on them and play them fully dialed-in that I appreciated how good some of the games were. I know it can be difficult to find some of these titles in decent working condition, but if you can, I think they are worth checking out.

- TimMe

I had a '57 Gottlieb Double Action and thought it played fine and was pretty quick. The side flippers were damn near useless though, should you happen to use them more often than not they would heave the ball in an outlane.

Yeah, I never did get why those side flippers were put on later 50s games, they don't seem to add much. Most later 50s game layouts were pretty close to a modern playfield, except for gobble holes, so I think in general they were more likely to be decent players.

- TimMe

Most woodrails have the ability to change to a novelty mode where you score points instead of specials. Sometimes just a Jones plug change, often a spring change on the replay unit (for older games).

Woodrails have some very deep rulesets and the thing I like about them most is that you can approach the same game, with 5 different winning objectives, and still lose. Being able to change your strategy on the fly is very valuable to me (some games you just can't light that -one- insert! But you can hit the A-B-C-D targets), and something I treasure with other thinking pingames like bingos.

Exactly.. I had recently come across some of this guys videos.. he does a nice job of explaining the woodrails.. and clearly has access to some gems!

Points were not a substitute for replays. Some games had "points" as well as your "score", and both could award replays when a certain threshhold was reached for either points or score.

My Straight Shooter has a jones plug to award 500,000 points instead of a replay for special

These games were built long before the add-a-ball concept was even a twinkle in the designers' eyes. The whole idea was to win credits, and largely because of the influence of bingo games, MANY credits.

That would be 500,000 added to your "score". Points were a completely different thing. On some woodrails, you had a score and you would accumulate "points". Both could award credits if the threshhold was made.

Yes, and the unit for score is 'points' in all games except, apparently, some other gottlieb woodrails which made a distinction.