Winter Indianapolis USAmusements Auction January 2008
I was pretty bummed that I didn’t make it to the Indianapolis USAmusements arcade game auction for the first time in a year and a half. But, with an opportunity like the Tiger Fantasy Spring Baseball Camp, I had to make an exception.
I asked Mike if he could take photos and prices of the arcade games, and like a peach, he came through. Huge nod to Mike, thanks so much.
All that he had to say was that there weren’t a ton of items there, as you will see from the photos, and everything got to be really expensive, especially the typical items like the Ms. Pacman(s) and the Galaga(s).
Maybe March will be better. I was just glad that two of the games I have been waiting to pop up here didn’t come when I left, an Xevious and / or a Mappy.
Here is a list of the pinballs not pictured above that were at the auction with prices;
- Championship Pub – $1850
- World Cup Soccer – $1000
- Kick Off (Bally EM) – $250
- Theatre of Magic – $2100
- NBA Fastbreak – $750
- Monopoly – $1850
- Gladiator – $675
- Goldeneye – $975
- Jurassic Park – $800
- SpaceJam – $725
- Dracula – $1000
- Congo – $950
- Tales from the Crypt – $875
How do I preserve and save flaking arcade game artwork? (Ms. Pac-man)
Back in December, I managed to be the first in line to purchase an old Ms. Pac-man, sitting in a barn in Sagatuck MI. The game has great pink sideart, and is in really good condition overall, plus, I got it for a song.
Well, it sounds like the game will be making its way down to Indianapolis the week of the 21st – 27th. My main concern is that the artwork has some flaking. I don’t know how to preserve it and clean the machine. There is a good amount of dirt ground into the cabinet, like most old games, but I know that if I wipe the game down I will take some of the artwork with it.
Here is a photo example, the only one I have right now, of an area around the kickplate. I think I read somewhere about putting a clear coat on the stenciled sideart of arcade games to give them a shiny finish, and it also helps preserve the painted artwork.
Can anyone give me any suggestions on how to preserve the artwork on the Ms. Pac-man game, and keep it from flaking and peeling off any further? What cleaner, sealer, or other household product can I use to preserve the arcade artwork?
I did a search on the Klov and Google forums, and most of the flaking is related to glass marquee and bezel artwork, but not how to preserve flaking cabinet artwork. I also did a search on the pinball forums, which seem to have a more rich base of information, and the only tip I found there was “use a sealer”. Just like I thought.
- How do I stop cabinet flaking – Google Collecting Groups
- How do you stop cabinet flaking? – Google Pinball Groups
Has anyone used either of these products to seal their flaking arcade cabinet artwork?
The product on the left is Varathane Diamond Water-Based Polyurethane, and the product on the right is Krylon’s Crystal Clear Glaze.
Looking at the website, the Crystal Clear Glaze is advertised as a hi-shine sealer. I imagine that is dependant on the thickness and the coats, but still, that may not work. Thanks to Leinhit for suggesting this to me as an option, whether it may or may not be appropriate for the cabinet artwork vs. glass artwork pieces. Still, my main concern is how I get the dirt off. I doubt that “dabbing” lightly with a wet sponge is going to get all of the dirt out.
Can anyone help me with ideas? Leave a comment with your ideas.
Here are my posts in the different forums about preservation ideas for flaking, if you are interested;
Great Craigslist deal on a Ms. Pac-man with vibrant pink sideart!
I hear a lot on the klov forums of different collectors who have awesome luck picking up some nice arcade machines off of Craigslist for great deals. The closest I have come to that myself, in this area, is an individual who was giving away a complete Gottleib Q-bert in Anderson, IN two or three months back. The key about Craigslist is, you have to monitor it all the time. It is a time consuming thing, and not something that fits into my daily schedule. If I sit down in front of the laptop, I will bring up my RSS feed reader with all of my saved arcade related searches. But if you aren’t sitting in front of a computer the instant that new arcade deal post hits the web, and are caller number 2, you don’t get the deal.
Well, last week Friday, I got lucky. At lunch I was lucky enough to see this posting on Craigslist for Michigan actually (arcade machines in Indianapolis seem hard to come by at jaw dropping deals);
For sale 3 arcade games for parts. Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man & Centipede. $100.00 each. Call (Number removed) for more information.
I thought I would call, that was an excellent price for those machines. The first thing that popped into my head was that this was an individual who wasn’t sure on the value of the machines. It just so happened, I was the first caller! I asked if they had some photos, and she said they did and she’d try to send them to me by the end of the day. That is usually a bad sign for me, because I was so far away in Indianapolis, if another person offered to come get the coin-op games that day sight un-seen, there was nothing I could do.
But luckily, in 5 minutes I had some files in my email. I say files, because they were a Microsoft specific file format type, and not anything I could view. After a chain of calls and emails, I was able to help the owner get the photos changed to .jpgs and sent to me.
I was blown away, and I told them this on the phone. The Ms. Pac-man had a lustrous pink left in the one side of the sideart I could see. I only had one photo to go from, but I had to assume that the sideart on both sides were close in color. I started to get really excited. But what ensued was quite a struggle.
I was the first caller by about 15 minutes, and then the calls just came streaming in. A collector posted on Klov about the machines and then all of the great arcade collecting community in Michigan on the west side was abuzz. Here I sat, down in Indy, with my hands tied a little bit. I knew I was possibly only interested in the Ms. Pac-man, and not the other machines. Gone are the days for me when I was to mess around with reselling arcade games for between a hundred and two hundred dollars. If I resell an arcade game, I want $300 plus to make it worth my while. The other frustrating aspect was, a lot of these collectors who are local, can make a little more money off reselling these arcade games, and that is what they intended to do. I wanted this Ms. Pac-man for my personal collection, having looked for one of this quality for two years at an affordable price, and I didn’t want it to slip through my hands.
After talking with the seller some, it sounded like they only wanted to sell them as a lot. Understandable. At the time they didn’t know about the forum post, and thought that if they did a piece meal with the games, they would be stuck with one, two, or all of them in the end. Not to mention all of the time dealing with a bunch of different individuals and their schedules.
So, I had first priority, but the second person who called said they would come up, by Saturday, and get the games sight unseen, or that is what I was told. I now had a number of things working against me, availability, location, transportation, and time.
I was honest through the deal, and kept the owner’s best interests in mind, knowing that if this was meant to happen, it would. I won’t go into detail, but we worked out a deal. I think in the end, I communicated really well on this deal except for one minor piece. I got what I wanted, the Ms. Pac-man, so that was all that mattered, but the ex-owner is getting a really great deal from me.
Here are the photos I got tonight, and more to come later. First off, I wanted to post photos of my current machine to show the drastic contrast!
~Update 12/22/07 I got to see the Ms. Pac-man in person for the first time today. The Ms. Pac-man marquee has vibrant color with little scratches only on the black portions covered by the marquee brackets. The marquee was secured by non tamper torx screws, which I found odd. I’ll probably replace those.
The Ms. Pac-man glass bezel has just a tiny bit of flaking on the left side and the biggest surprise was the amount of flaking in the sideart. I can just brush off parts of the sideart with my finger if I wanted. The Ms. Pac game is dirty, so I will need to scrub it down, but I am not sure how to do that without taking off some of the sideart. Preserving the artwork will require some research.
I got to the back door through the marquee, checked the connections, powered Ms. Pac-man up, and surprise! It’s a working game! I got a working Ms. Pac-man with great pink sideart for $100. Thanks Craigslist. Hopefully it keeps working after transport.
I need some tips on cleaning the game. Can anyone give me any without ruining the sideart? I have heard of giving arcade games a clear coat to make the sideart shine and protect it, but I don’t want to put that over the dirt. Can anyone help me?
Ms. Pac-man Stencils on BYOAC
When I first got into the arcade game collecting hobby, the one game I wanted was a Ms. Pac-man. A common game that is easy to come by, but one I grew up with and have the fondest memories playing. (more…)
Ms. Pac-man Kickplate Dimensions
For awhile, I have been meaning to post about the three seriously long topic thread on BYOAC and KLOV about Joymonkey, and his quest to make licensed Ms. Pac-man stencils. He produced a set of Ms. Pac-man stencils, complete with videos, the whole works. There are a ton of images of the stencil development in the BYOAC thread which give a ton of great content and information.
For now, posting the Ms. Pac-man kickplate dimensions will have to suffice. Here they are. I could have measured my own Bally Ms. Pac-man, and drawn this diagram out, but why re-invent the wheel, and this is a nice kickplate diagram.
Any time you have a thread related to dimensions of Midway arcade cabinets you have talk about the “slope” of the Midway cabinets. (Ms. Pac-man, Pac-man, Galaga, Galaxian, etc. etc.) But in the case of the kickplate, there was some discussion of how accurate the Midway cabinet plans on Jakobud are, and this diagram puts all of those questions to rest.
Jr. Pac-man developed by GCC
I was surfing tonight, trying to come up with an idea for an arcade related post, when I came across this arcade history.
On arcade-history.com, I saw a snippet of information on the history of Jr. Pac-man that I did not know;
Jr. Pac-Man was developed by ‘General Computer Corporation’ (GCC) for Bally/Midway and is essentially an enhancement to “Ms. Pac-Man”
I thought to myself, isn’t General Computer Corporation the company that made Super Missile Attack back in the day, a hack enhancement board to Missile Command and was sued by Atari? I thought that the lawsuit was settled, GCC went under, but before they did they had to build three games for Atari as part of the settlement. Food Fight and Quantum were two of those games, and the third was never made.
I took a look at General Computer Corporation on Wikipedia, and this is what I found;
The General Computer Corporation was an early video game company started by Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran.
The company started out with the game Super Missile Attack, which was sold as an enhancement board to Missile Command. Atari sued them for this, but the suit was soon dropped after Macrae and Curran agreed to develop games for Atari and stop making enhancement boards without permission. Their next project was Ms. Pac Man, which they developed as an enhancement kit for Pac-Man. They took the game to Midway who sold it as a sequel to Pac-Man.
They made other arcade games for Atari, such as Food Fight…
So, GCC was a third party that development coin-op games for the big arcade companies at one point in time. It looks like GCC development Ms. Pac-man, and more importantly, Jr. Pac-man.
I would assume that developed means they designed, built, programmed and fabricated the arcade machines themselves. Which leads me to believe that maybe an artist at GCC would have done the sideart and other artwork / stickers for Jr. Pac-man.
I am going to have to explore this a little more. At the very least, I still believe the famous pinball illustrator Margaret Hudson may have some contacts to lead me to the original Jr. Pac-man artist. I just need to find her contact information, hopefully an email. It almost seems like she does freelance work for Stern Pinball now, or works directly for Stern in their art department.
Re-useable Arcade Game Stencils
I was excited to see this post today on the Google Arcade Forum.
After tons of trial an experimentation I have landed on a solution for those looking for reusable stencils for their games. Stencils can be cut from 1/8 inch Sintra material which is basically a dense PVC foam. The resultant stencil is rigid, resistant to temperature and liquid, cleans off with a hose and scrub brush, lightweight, thick enough so pieces won’t easily break off and lays nice and flat on the surface to be painted.. and oh, each layer is color coded to the paint needed 🙂
These are still experimental for a few more weeks, and will add 80.00 to the cost of most stencils and shipping won’t be cheap as they must be shipped flat but the option will be there at last. Some games these stencils make tons of sense such as Defender and Robotron, others like Taito they just wouldnt look as good as vinyl.
I have spoken with Brian a number of times since I started collecting arcade games. He is the authority on artwork, especially stenciling arcade cabinets to restore them. He has an arcade restoration business where he sells a lot of great stuff at Oleszak Creative.com.
There is always a fair amount of discussion on restoration and stenciling arcade games on the forums, and there are some collectors who would like to buy re-useable stencils. I know I would like to buy a set of re-useable stencils. I would like to restore my Ms. Pac-man, and if possible, would like to recoup some of the cost involved in painting it. For a three piece stencil set, it could cost as much as if not more than $150. Then, add in paint and buying / renting the equipment, and it gets expensive fast.
The $150 is just the cost of the vinyl in that amount. The cool thing about Brian, he is nice enough to do the arcade stencils right around cost. If it was a big coin-op business, the markup would make the stencils astronomical.
But not only getting some of the game restoration cost back, but for me, it would be my first time. What if I mess up the coin-op game artwork I am restoring on my first try? I could do some test spray pieces, but that isn’t the same and painting a whole cabinet. If I do it wrong, and the vinyl stencils are one time use only, then I have to pay another $150 for another set?
It is a tough decision for me. Brian would have answers for all of this, and has had some great advice for the klov forums on why acetate, metal, and other plastics don’t work well for stenciling games. Mostly because they aren’t tight to the surface.
He did mention that it won’t work on certain games, and it may not work for my Ms. pac-man arcade game. But I am going to email him and see.
Update July 23rd, 2008
Checked back with Brian today to see what ever happened with re-useable arcade game stencils.
Brian did find a solution that in theory should be shippable. However, vinyl stencils with a backing and a pre-mask allow for floating pieces in the artwork. The plan was to use Sintra Board, a dense PVC Foam that could then be used to stencil multiple machines. The problem is that it will only work with certain artwork, and is highly suitable for Williams games because they didn’t have any floating pieces of artwork.
But that is just one challenge. Not only do you rule out some of the popular Pac-man games like Ms. Pac and regular you are talking about shipping multiple boards that usually measure somewhere around 3’x5′. Shipping is pretty expensive, upwards of $50 depending on where you are located.
When it is all said and done usually the cost for the materials for the multiple use stencils would be about double the cost before shipping. But, if you happen to do multiple machines, or have enough swagger to think you can resell the stencil for someone else for 75% of your cost with shipping, then these would be perfect for you.
Brian does make these stencils using a CNC router and takes custom jobs, he just doesn’t push the service because 90% of the arcade collecting community will only use them once and can’t justify the extra cost. If you are still interested, hop on Gamestencils.com and send Brian a message to see if your chosen artwork can be done and how much it would cost.
