Mr. Do! History Topic on KLOV

Posted November 2, 2007

Interesting topic going on right now on the klov forums. One user was looking at the Mr. Do! entry on klov.com, and wondering which of the three versions there was the original dedicated. The correct answer was all of the Mr. Do!’s there are dedicated.

Here is an exerpt from one user;

The other “dedicated” units were done by ops who wanted the games to look as good as possible. I have an old Play Meter article that talks about a lot of vending companies going out of their way to make Mr. Do! kits look like dedicated games… some even making cabinets just for them.

Lost in the collecting world is the fact that, in 1983, Mr. Do! was one of the biggest hits. 7th highest earning game that year, meaning only 6 dedicated games in 1983 out-earned Do!. 30,000 legal Mr. Do! kits were sold, roughly 10 times more than most Golden Tee kits sold nowadays. Only about 2,000 dedicated Do’s were sold.

Opinion or not, pretty interesting information of how many Universal Mr. Do! units were sold vs. conversion kits. Even more interesting is a quote from another member here in Indiana (Shacklefurd) that actually investigated into my coveted White Mr. Do! cabinet with clown artwork;

A had series of E-mails with the former CEO of universal from the 80’s a while back and here is what he said. The white one with the red yellow and orange strips came from Japan. The wood grain and the white with the clown side art were factory built by smaller companies on the east and west coast that bought the rights to release Mr. Do and other Universal games. So they are all “Dedicated”, but the Universal from Japan is the one collectors think of as dedicated.

I should get in touch with Shackle and see if he has the CEO’s information still and try to track down the company that made the White Mr. Do! Until this post, I had posted here that I was thinking it was Gleeb who made the cabinets and that Gleeb was also based out of Japan, not here in the USA.