(Topic ID: 283461)

Ohhhhhhhhh them EM prices... *banjo strum* what does it mean?

By NicoVolta

3 years ago


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  • Latest reply 8 months ago by DanMarino
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    17
    #123 3 years ago

    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.

    1 month later
    #141 3 years ago

    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.

    Quoted from AdamPDX:

    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. ... 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. ... 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.

    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.

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