1 1/2 years after my first visit, i returned to "the warehouse with the gold nuggets inside" (at least that's what the owner thinks)! however, in the meantime his son has taken over the business (with the father still crawling around in the background
) and he's much easier to talk to. while he still thinks he has tons of gold stored away in the warehouse, he
is open for offers and seems to be at least willing to sell some of his stuff! this time around, i was not alone though, i met up with toralf "time pilot" who was there on a mission of his own - but more on that later!
my first order of business was to check out the tehkan world cup for an arcade friend of mine. the game is still there (who would have thought otherwise?), although much dustier than the last time i was there!
dust is not a problem, age is, so the big question is: is the game working? let's plug it in
sideart is still present, but the rest of the art is missing. i'm afraid getting replacements / NOS artwork will be impossible here. it's a shame, because the game
is fun indeed (but the trackball's bearings definitely need to be replaced)!
i love the "stadium bezel" around the monitor!
here's what the game is supposed to look like with artwork attached
the owner also showed us a room i hadn't seen the last time i was there. it was their repair room and in it there were also a couple of cocktail tables, the nicest of which are those dedicated asteroids machines!
the main purpose of my visit though was the super sprint! i wanted to find out more about the condition of the game (didn't have that much time on my first visit), whether it is working or not and if we might be able to come together on a price which would make both of us happy!
so we plugged the game in, coin door lights came on (at least two out of three), we could hear the fan, but we waited and waited for a picture to appear on the screen - nothing! we added credits to find out if it played blind, but nothing happened. he told me that the game had been in operation until ten years ago when they pulled it from location and it was working back then. the operator was 99% sure it was still working, well, he had to realize that 99% is not 100%!
we started talking business and i told him his father had told me two years that he wanted 200 for a non-working game and 500 for a working one. his reply was something like "this is not
A game, this is
THE game", because this is the one in which he sunk tons of money, so basically a lot of childhood memories involved here. i made him an offer for the game as-is, but he refused and said he wanted to have his technician have a look at it first! whatever ...
everything else was still there as well, for example the two gauntlet machines (one with tall sideart)!
this time around i also decided to do the pinball guys a favor and take more pictures of the machines, so here you go
because most of the pinballs are cramped together in the middle of the warehouse without an aisle to walk in between, i asked the owner if i could set up one of the ladders leaning on the walls to get some nice shots "from above". even i have to admit, that sight was absolutely impressive!
in the background, you can see toralf on the ladder i had set up and the warehouse operator on the right
Get me a pinball list 
if anyone isinterested in a list of available pinballs, send me a pm with your email address (or an email directly) and i'll forward to a pdf document i received from the seller. please do
not try to contact the operator without going through me, ok?
but the operator not only has pinballs and video games stored away in his warehouse, but also some really nice jukeboxes!
check out the amazing light effects of this
seeburg mardi gras!
while i think that most jukeboxes are pretty ugly, i have been chasing one particular model over the course of the last few months - a seeburg smc1 disco. i love everything about that machine: the design, the colors, the light effects, the controls, just everything! it's a machine from 1978, so it would fit perfectly in my (arcade) collecting period. i
almost bought one a couple of weeks ago on ebay germany, it was listed pretty cheap, but it was not working and i'm still somewhat afraid of the electronic and mechanical stuff inside a jukebox. this is something completely different from a videogame!
why am i telling you all this, you might be wondering. well, while the operator showed us around the warehouse we entered a long hallway and guess what was standing there, as if it had been waiting for me: a seeburg smc1 disco! i had never seen one in person before (just videos of it), so i asked the seller if he could plug it in for me - which he did! are you ready for some amazing photos of that beauty?
unfortunately, we couldn't try out this fully-loaded jukebox (because there was something wrong with one of the locks and we didn't have german marks to add credits). later, we found two more machines in another room in the cellar, but the one we opened up didn't have any records inside. nevertheless, i know now what i really really want!
here's a picture of the one we opened up. right now, for me this is like watching someone do sudoku: i just can't comprehend what's going on there!
let's turn our attention to toralf's mission, because he didn't travel all the way down here from northern germany just for the fun of it. his eyes were on the missile command! he had been in contact with the seller before asking about that particular machine. the last time i was there a hand-written note on the glass bezel said it had been converted to something else!
as it turned out, the operator's brother is a software developer and he had put a computer and a tft monitor inside to test one of his games
! most of the original parts are gone, the control panel has been hacked, but this is one of toralf's arcade grails, he got it for cheap and he has almost all the parts to convert it back, so he went for it. this is going to be a lot of work, but well worth it. one more classic saved!!!
time to haul the machine out
a proud toralf next to his grail!
as always (or least: often), toralf was accompanied by his 71-year old dad and for the first time in his life, he operated a digital camera to take this final photo of some crazy arcade guys who - once again - travelled hundreds of kilometers for some 30+ year old video games to relive nostalgic childhood memories
. i think he did a great job with the photo!
and then we rode off into the sunset ...
