Kamloops, BC
Quoted from gweempose:Thanks for the playfield photo! Yeah, that's just completely bizarre. I agree that the first thing that comes to mind is that the game was stolen at some point. What other possible reason could there be to remove that stuff? Regardless, it's still one hell of a nice example.
There are valid reasons. For example:
"Sometimes, distributors or operators stamped out,destroyed or removed the serial numbers from their games to make it impossible to track the origin of the game. In the old days, gaming was very competitive and operators used individual markings that allowed them to secretly identify their games if they were stolen or to disguise them if they were in someone else's territory. In the 1990's, WMS started making distributor regions a part of the electronic serial number of every game but that was easily bypassed with a simple electronic modification. Eventually, the distribution regions of games become meaningless and these tracking numbers were dropped."
Watertown, MA
