29th December 2006

Posted December 29, 2006

Another whirlwind day.

We got up at a decent time, a little after eight, I checked email from any arcade people I was trying to meet, and everyone else had a little something to eat.

We headed off to the gym at about 9:30 for some racquetball and weights and such. Dad and I played first in the courts, and I was not nearly as good as I remembered. I wasn’t playing die hard, but I was playing to win, and I barely did. I did not want to leave with an injury though, everyone I know it seems has been injured doing something stupid while playing racquetball.

Afterwards Dad and I headed down to the weight room and sort of lifted together for about a half hour.

When we got home, Sarah and I tried to nail down plans for the day. I wanted to drive over to the Grand Rapids, Battle Creek area and see about three arcade game collectors. Somehow in there we were going to try to get her to see her friend, see if Justin could come along, and somehow end up back at the Varners at a decent hour, maybe dinner time.

In the end, Sarah came with me and Justin didn’t. We went together first to Vermontville. The collector in Vermontville was tucked away pretty far, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have much. He had built a whole addition to his house to have the games, it more than doubled his original space, and all of the space he built was filled with games. His gameroom, in the process of being finished, had about 10-12 games in it, some of them working some not. Out back he had another 12-14 mixed in with shelves and stacks of boards, parts, and everything else under the sun. I tried to remember all of the miscellaneous things I was looking for, but he didn’t seem to have most of them. He had some pretty interesting stories to tell on how he got all of the games in such a short time (5 years). Then, he took me to a family members house a little more down the road, and there he had another 100 or so games that we packed into a barn of sorts, it was amazing. A ton of stuff, mostly Atari games and nothing really rare, with different parts. It is just amazing how some people can get so many games. Like the guy in Nashville, people now seem to find him.

From there we took a ton of backroads to get to Middleville. We only got lost for a block or so, and we got to see some interesting parts of MI. I dropped Sarah off at the friend’s house so she could visit and catchup since it had been a year, and I headed off to the next guy’s house in Middleville.

His place was also tucked away, and it was a gorgeous house and land that he was on. He has a number of hobbies, die cast Mustang collecting, old console and game collecting, and of course he had about 6-7 arcade games in his basement. He’s a salesguy, so he was a little bit more of a conversationalist.