I couldn’t pass up the latest controversy to be found in arcade collecting circles, this just posted video of some 2 year old footage of a company known as TNT Amusements throwing some select games off of a building. If you want to pour over some of the controversy yourself, you can check out the comments on the Youtube video, this thread or this thread on KLOV.
One thing to at least keep in mind is that the destruction of cabinets happens fairly often when distributors have a lot of old games sitting around that nobody wants to buy (rare or not)- the act just isn’t caught on video and placed on Youtube for all to see. I once saved a T-Mek from such destruction although I never found the time to fix it up as it wasn’t in great condition to begin with, which is often the case with cabinets that meet such doom. In fact just the other day I had to break apart an old MKII cabinet I had sitting in the back of my store. When I picked it up originally it had been converted to a Golden Tee and was covered in old, dry vomit. I cleaned it up and used it for a while until the monitor died and then I ended up parting it out until it was just a shell. It sucks to bash a cabinet but if no one wants it and you don’t have the space for it, there’s not much of an alternative. Still, I can’t say that I personally enjoy destroying arcade cabinets, when this is your hobby you want to try and preserve everything possible.
Here it is….
My arcade/pool hall was right next door to my house (bought both in a package deal), and my house had a nice big back yard. Whenever I would either part out a cabinet or get ahold of a machine that was only good for parts (I was an operator as well), I could just haul them to my pit in my back yard and we’d have a nice place to sit and drink beer while watching the cabinet burn. The only one I now regret torching was a Robot Bowl, but the rest were pretty worthless (Time Killers was one I especially enjoyed watching die a fiery death).
Our large local distributor of arcade games used to have a huge junkyard out back of their warehouse. It contained some real treasures, but the cabinets were often water damaged and in a state of disrepair. I rescued one.
A lot of collectors used to go down to the junkyard every weekend to sort through, looking for lost gems. The company hated the idea of people going through the junk-yard, so they ended up locking the “junk” in large shipping containers. It bugged me. They didn’t value the gear and were quite willing to let it get rained on and destroyed by the weather. But rather than let anyone take it away for free, they locked it up.
I can’t help thinking that they missed an opportunity to fix the machines up and selling them to collectors. Ho hum! Now they are locked up for no-one to ever enjoy.