This exact post appeared on RGP about 300 times over the past 15 years. Yet here we are, with games trading at prices that would make the old-schooler CARGPs over there break out into a cold sweat and possibly convulse.

Pinball machines AREN'T jukeboxes, and they certainly aren't cars, so you can throw the cargument out the window.

They are completely different. Classic cars are huge, expensive, and difficult to maintain, and have very little practical value. You aren't going to drive your cherry 1957 Bel Air to New Hampshire to see your folks.

Jukeboxes are large, difficult to maintain, and have very little practical value. An ipod the size of a postage stamp hooked up to a speaker the size of a brick does a far better job on it's intended responsibility with a mere fraction of prize, size, and complexity.

Pinball is completely different as the past 5-10 years have shown. When I started collecting in the early 2000s *I* was a young guy in a hobby of middle-aged white men. And the standard rap at that time was that it's an old, white, upper-middle class hobby and the popularity would deflate faster than a pierced Parton boob as soon as those fogies started dying off. The era of $500 Monster Bashes was right around the corner.

"It'll be JUST LIKE THE JUKEBOX hobby!" they always said.

Well, obviously that was bullshit. Pinball machines are completely different in that there is no other way to practically replicate the experience. Classic cars have a perfect alternative - a new Chevy. Jukeboxes do to - virtually everybody on the planet's phone.

Full-size, commercial, kickass pinball machines have NO viable alternative. Video pinball is Fn lame. "home" pinball machines are terrible.

So as long as people like pinball and think it's cool, this hobby will be fine and the prices won't plummet. There's a completely new generation of people in this hobby - a generation that 10 years ago everyone swore up and down wouldn't exist.

Well, I'm still waiting for my $500 monster bash. Maybe the NEXT 10 years will see it happen, because suddenly nobody will like pinball anymore.

Or, yet another generation of collectors 5 or 10 years down the road will get into it, just like last time.

I'm putting my money on this thing continuing for a while.

I've never spent more than $3500 on a pinball machine in my life and I've gone through HUNDREDS. Most were under $1500. Half were under $500. Pinball machines are NOT expensive, they certainly aren't huge (you can fit one in most bathrooms).

I keep 15 of them in a space too small to even fit one car (I don't think the car would fit in the elevator, hallway or the several doors).

Cargument -don't work here.

Maintainance...hey whatever. Sorry I didn't mean to piss off a gearhead and unleash a bunch of stuff not really relevant to this discussion.

My point - as usual, 100% of the time when the cargument comes up, is that PINBALL MACHINES AREN'T CARS.

And the pinball hobby and the "classic car hobby" have very little in common. We could argue cars and pinball machines all day but the point I'd like you to take away from this is:

The idea that pin prices will drop because this happened to 1940s automobiles makes absolutely no sense.

Uhhh...

So you think because the 1940s automobile market tanked, the same is right around the corner for pinball machines?

It's a simple question and hopefully not too perplexing.

My "rant" was full of good stuff.

Cars and jukeboxes are not pinball machines. Those fallacies are as bad as any "red herring" I engaged in.

Of course pinball prices will tank eventually. The apes or zombies will take over one day and people will have bigger fish to fry.

People have been saying the pinball collapse is right around the corner for ages - cause after all that's what happened to jukeboxes and old cars. They have been saying this since literally the second I started buying pinball machines in 2002.

I don't see it happening any time soon. Please re-read my previous rant for the reasons.

Yeah that was kind of my point. But as always, it gets lost in the fury of a the cargument.

You must never anger the cargument gods.