30 Nov
2008
30 Nov
'08
1:35 a.m.
Ethan provided a long, informative reply to my post:
Ah. Yes. In the US, prices may well be depressed by there being no
coins in common circulation above a quarter dollar.
The slots on the front of the Space Invaders machine said "50p" on them
- that seems to be about 70 or 80 US cents at the moment. At your
calculation, 895 pounds would only take 1790 games to pay off the debt -
five games a day for a year - which is a much more attractive figure.
Many arcade games here now accept one pound coins, so if the owner did
that conversion, the game could pay for itself quicker still.
(FWIW our 50p coins got smaller in 1997, so there's a chance the coin
mechanism would need converting anyway.)
There's a
shop in Coalville...
In the window this weekend were two machines that caught my eye: an original
Space Invaders machine from 1978, priced at 895 pounds; and a pinball
machine from 1979 (branded "Gottlieb") for an almost-as-unreasonable 495
pounds. (I think at current exchange rates that's about $1300 and $700 US)
OK.
... what sort of an active market is there for
such machines? The prices looked
high enough that they must be aiming at serious collectors, or possibly
innkeepers who want to create a retro-seventies atmosphere.
So do people here know about the classic arcade game market? Are my
neighbours of a couple of blocks away being overoptimistic with their
prices?
I would personally not pay $1300 US for a real Space Invaders, but
consider how many paid games that turns into - in the US, it would
be $0.25/game (don't know about the UK.), so that's 5200 games. I have a few games on my list I'd like to get.
Space and opportunity
have limited me to just a couple. Unfortunately, some of the games
from my childhood are pre-microprocessor, so it's not even possible
to play them on MAME. I need the real thing or to build/program my
own replica. The time has somewhat passed to see games from the
B&W 8080 and earlier era at auction on a regular basis, and when
you do see them, they are not always in the best of shape, and if they
are, they don't often go cheap. These are all older than Space
Invaders.
Interesting. IIRC Space Invaders spanned the BW/colour divide. Later
games had colour displays, but earlier ones had monochrome displays with
strips of colour filter over the screen. I don't know when the change
came, or which version this one is.
Thanks, Ethan, for an interesting window onto a world I hardly know at all.
Philip.