Honestly, that was a contributor to me selling my Quicksilver! Echoing what others said: Best max-bonus sound-effects of any Stern, and wicked-fast game-play. Alas, even with a mostly-Stern collection, I can't own all the good classic Sterns, so I've had to let F2K, Stargazer, and Quicksilver go over the years, and although I will likely never stop remorsing on them, the minty Nineball and Chetah, and decent Seawitch all serve to console me.

Sorry, not selling mine, but I paid equivalent of about a grand US$. Not that common indeed: You see Big Games all the time for some reason. My Cheetah was the first and only one I saw for sale in about 10 years of casual looking.

On Big Game vs. Cheetah: On paper Cheetah is the better game (more drops etc), but some argue the bingo-feature on Big Game is more fun than the somewhat different one on Cheetah. Haven't played enough Big Game to comment much (never liked that game very much), but the Cheetah sure is fun and one of the better uses of a wide-body playfield without getting into slow-moving/boring-ball mode.

Wow, I had never run across the existence of alternate ROMs for Cheetah until now! I thought I was pretty expert on the Classic Sterns, but just goes to show there's always more to learn. The "blue cabinet" ROMs are not mentioned on IPDB.org, but I got the copy from PinMame so I look forward to trying them out!

I purchased Cliff's replacement right-orbit flap and I can attest that if properly installed (may require a little bending to get it just right) the right-orbit shot becomes much_ more reliable and fun. Honestly, having a very challenging, hard-to-achieve shot is often more fun than something easy. Anyways, my Seawitch as currently setup is quite a lot of fun. Just wish it had Quicksilver's bonus count-down and whistle on max-bonus.

I've been "routing" some of my personal machines at my work (SW development company with between 50 and 80 employees) over the years, and since I only own Bally/Sterns from 1979 to 1981, I have some experience with which titles were hottest. EBD did just fine, but boy did the flipper rubbers ever wear out fast, always at the tip (from the ball shooting at high-speed SDTM and the player trying to do a save). But honestly, the game that really rocked the casbah earnings-wise was Paragon: It was just hard enough to be challenging without being demoralizing. That game consistently earned 200 to 300 plays a week for several months (I had it set to a quarter a play, or 5 plays for a dollar), and out-earned even some modern dot-matrix titles in the same location.

Yeah, the ball-hop/jam on the left made the game pretty much a dog on location (jammed EVERY day!) until I added a post in the middle (plastic actually had a hole already in the right spot) to lift the plastic just a hair:

IMG_20170313_113536 (resized).jpg

Well, someone of a more pedantic nature than myself might suggest that asking for Bally prices on a thread about classic Sterns is exactly the kind of "sidetracking" that you dislike!

Personally, I have NO problem with this thread's evolution: It ticks all my interest-boxes, and I have learned something entirely new about classic Sterns (the existence of the Blue Body Cheetah ROMs), which is rare enough to satisfy me. The original question about pricing is ALWAYS a subjective-shit-show anyways: Even the appropriate price for a specific example of a game is subjective, without getting into a "pricing trend" question for a number of realtively quite rare games that many of us have only seen for sale once or twice!

Just my two-cents, and continuing to waste my time on this one thread to the exclusion of all others on Pinside!

Not sure where you're going with this, but it's not like I was trying to be sesquipedalian :>