All, I wanted to let the community know that Thad Seeberger unexpectedly passed away today. Some of you are probably well aware who Thad was and what he meant to the community. For those that don’t know, Thad designed the Alltek replacement boards for Bally and Stern machines. Along with David Seidman, who co-designed these boards and currently runs the company https://allteksystems.com/ these two single handedly saved countless machines over the last 20 years. Dave once told me that Thad was the smartest electrical engineer he had ever met. Having worked with Thad for the last 3 years, and being a fellow electrical engineer, I have to say I completely agree.
Thad was active in pinball since he was a teenager, getting his passion for arcades by fixing them for several local amusement parks. He continued to actively collect over several decades, and still maintained a route in the central Virginia area to this day.
He helped repair countless machines for Decades Arcade, and if you had a machine that had any problem whatsoever you could be sure that he would diagnose and fix it faster than you could. It didn’t even matter what board or era of game it was. He would just fix it. He just did it all for fun, and to help out whomever he could. Sure it would be cheaper just to buy a repro board, but he saw no challenge or fun in that. I have never seen someone who could take a board that was 100% non functional and bring it back to life chip by chip by chip in no time at all.
More recently Thad also was key to board design at my startup company RetiVue, which is making cameras to screen premature babies eyes. He took our boards from prototype to production after their design had been languishing for over a year before he joined our effort.
Beyond any of his accomplishments in the field, Thad was just an amazing person to know. He would help anyone in any way he could. He was unfailingly generous with his knowledge and time. I would often have conversations with him for hours on the back dock of my arcade. His passion, like mine, was vector games. And if you know vector games, you know they are broken more than they are functional. So it was grist for many long repair sessions with him late at night. Perhaps that’s why we bonded so well. My vectors are fully working in the arcade entirely because of him.
I only had the privilege of knowing Thad the last three years of his life. I only wish I had had more time to spend with him and had met him earlier. I will miss him greatly, as I know will many of us in the community.