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I bet it's minimal for Bally/Williams games, as collecting picked up quickly once Bally/Williams closed the doors. People knew the games had value, so were unlikely to destroy them. The most likely losses would be - fire or water damage, or donator/parts machines.

No one knows for sure. On another thread someone estimated about about a 1/3 of the existing machines of any title are in the pinside database. This was based on recent machines where the production numbers are known and most produced are still in existence. Based on this the remaining numbers of lower production games from that era (AFM, CV, MB) are probably about 50%. The ones you mentioned (AF, TZ) had production numbers in the range of 15-20K, I would guess well under 50% of those are still around.

Id say no more than 15% of those games were actually destroyed.

Operators are hoarders. They don't get rid of anything. And no offense to any operators, but very few seem to be internet savvy, and theyre usually pretty antisocial.

I've not been in the hobby long, but I've personally seen 2 places that have had loads of bally/williams machines (20-30+) from even earlier less-collectible years just sitting in storage. The problem is that these ex-operators are hesitant to show anyone, talk to anyone and aren't interested in selling for any less than eBay prices even though the machines will need a ton of attention, so they just remain in storage. They're still out there though!

Agreed. I'd say more were probably destroyed in floods/natural disasters than anything else.

Search, this has been discussed in depth already. End result, no one knows.

NBA Fast Breaks are dropping like flies.

Certainly because of the rate those things seem to re-themed into MM or CC

Papa flood took out a bunch. I'd guess about 1/2 the # on most pre 1999 games are left out there. Didn't chuck e cheese have a destroy when done policy on their games? I'm sure lots of games became donors, and some of the more problematic or complicated games were too much to keep up. Take into account the games that are out of the country, and that Canada has been buying a lot until fairly recently, the question should be how many are left in the U.S.?

What does kind of surprises me are some big production games that don't show up as often as I would imagine. They made a lot of TAFs and even a run of golds. Where are they all hiding? Also it seems some areas of the country tend to have a lot more games come up for sale than other areas...

Going to be interesting what gets thrown into this discussion, but I think the reality is that nobody even has a clue.

Pins aren't like cars, they aren't really tracked. Once they are sold, nobody really knows what happens to them.
Kept tucked in a box? A few.
Kept on route? Sure.
Kept in a home? Absolutely.
Relegated to parts donor status? Yep.
Destroyed in floor/fire/vandalism? Yep.

But there just isn't any easy way to track them.

Closest thing we have to serial number tracking, but even then, not everyone contributes to it, so numbers are fairly low for most titles:

http://www.ipsnd.net/

TZ has the most submitted serial numbers (718), but that only accounts for 4.7% of the total production run.

I have a backlog of serial numbers off of parts that I need to photograph and upload at some point.

But the problem is that DB is pretty outdated, and just a miniscule percentage. And people don't record when they destroy games regularly. Heck, I contributed to that site a while back, but I know what games I've parted out, sold, rebuilt, etc...and they aren't reflected anywhere.

A lot of machines were parted out. What remained probably was junked.
NBA:FB
Congo
These were the goto WPC95 games for this.
Judge Dredd was another one I remember seeing parted out alot. Hard to think about this now, but for many years these games were not worth much at all and Noone wanted them.

It's not that outdated--there are still folks who contribute. I've added well over 100 serial numbers myself in the past year. Including a couple games that were parted out by other people.

0% they are all gone,time to shut down PinSide.

Tons of B-list games were parted out for sure - Dr. Who, Dracula, Judge Dredd, Whodunnit, etc.

I'd say the estimate of 1/3 of them being destroyed is reasonable.

agreed the b and c 's for sure. but games like TOTAN where only 3,000 were produced I bet the number is within a few hundred. Also remember over sea's is different. It's more profitable to part out then sell whole

Agree, it's a question nobody could answer, but I'm pretty sure just about everything pinball related has been discussed at some point on Pinside. This topic is no different than all the rest.

To stay on topic, if I had to guess, I would say less then 10% personally.

0 to 100 percent. Take your guess.

Some believe TOTAN is a c lister at best.

Half of pinball production was/is exported. Still have the occasional container load of pins shipped back to the USA from Europe. Years ago they used to be in pretty fair shape, but the reimports I've seen the last few years have really been the dregs.

A lot of Operators would part them out once earnings dropped off to keep the earning pins running, mostly the pcb's they wanted.
It also stops other Operators competing in their market using their old equipment against them

23.658%

I have a dr dude and a nba fastbreak both 90s pins still alive and kicking. I registered them on the serial website .

I got the same number so we must be right.

This is very true and I've noticed the same with reimports. The latest overseas games have looked absolutely awful, the bottom of the barrel for sure, however I feel like sometimes that is all that's around or the only decent value left if you're ready to do some work.

Hey don't forget congo it was very low production and many were turned into other pins and used for parts

Yep them and congos it seems of course now nba is being converted back to congos lol

32.56%

I have heard that in the past wh2o's were parted out \ combined because of a lack of parts available.

Ican understand that because of all the ramps

THATS WHAT i WAS FIGURING...