When I was, oh, seventeen or eighteen years old, I saw a magic trick performed right in front of me that blew my mind. While working in a local restaurant I watched a customer make a dollar bill "float" in mid air, about a foot away from my face. I knew it was a trick, but for the life of me I could not figure out how it was done.
After going over the details of that night over and over and driving myself crazy for a couple of weeks, I went down to the local magic store, plunked down $24.95 (I was making somewhere around $150/week at the time) and bought the instructions to a trick known as "the floating dollar bill."
For my $25 I got a sealed envelope that contained a folded up piece of paper with the secret to the trick written on it. The secret to the trick was "magician's thread," a very thin thread that's almost impossible to see. The instructions said to tie one end of the string around a wad of paper that could be kept in your mouth. The other end was to be embedded into a small, sticky wad of wax or gum paste, and stuck to a button on your shirt. To perform the trick you remove the sticky end of the thread, stick it to something near you (in this case, a salt shaker), and move the item across the table. To float the dollar bill, you simply fold it in half and drape it across the string.
For $25, I don't even get the thread. And in less than a minute, I went from someone who was completely baffled by a magic trick to a guy who felt stupid for (for lack of a better word) "believing."
It is within that context that I present to you my summary of last weekend's local arcade auction.
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About five years ago, "Funtime Pizza" (we'll call it) had a dream. The owner, a middle-aged Asian man, borrowed a million dollars to build a building and open a combination pizza buffet and arcade. Construction ran long and expenses built up and by the time the doors finally opened, the owner had borrowed around 2 million. Add that to the fact that out of "location, location, location," Funtime Pizza had none of the three, and you can see that the place was doomed the day the doors opened.
Maybe six months after they opened, Mason and I met a friend up there at noon on a Sunday for lunch and some game playing. Literally, we were the only people in the place. I told Mason at the time, "play all the games you like -- this place won't be here long." In some cases that was hard to do as half the games were already broken or non-working.
I was right. Last year, after bleeding money for a couple of years, the place closed. A sign went up claiming "GAMES FOR SALE" but the owner wanted to sell all of them (around a hundred or so) together as a lot. All the regular locals sniffed around the place but as far as I can tell, nothing ever left. A couple of decent offers were made, but the owner got caught up in "how much he paid" vs. "how much stuff is worth" and couldn't let it go. Instead, he decided to have a no reserve auction yesterday to clean out the building in hopes of leasing it to the next restaurant owner.
So that brought us to yesterday.
Out of 100 games, I'd say 40 or so were 100% working, and that's only because someone brought in at least 10 60-in-1 Multicades. I think everyone here knows what those are but in case you don't, they're arcade machines that play 60 different classic games like Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, and so on. To a classic collector they're worthless and somewhat offensive; however to the general public, gosh, if one machine plays one game and another one plays sixty, then the second one must be worth more. Prices reflected that; the cheapest one I saw sold for $575; the highest I saw was $1,250.
The biggest problem for heavily advertised private auctions such as this one is they draw in a bunch of amateurs. Don't get me wrong, I'm no pro, but at these you end up with people who have never been to an auction before overbidding on everything and driving the prices up. The good news is, most of those people are usually only looking for one game, so once they buy one they go home.
When the first game (Fast and the Furious) went for $1,600, I knew it was going to be a long day and I was right. Prices were up and down all day. A couple vendors picked up all the redemption machines for pennies on the dollar. The bigger the machine was the less it went for (I'm guessing most people didn't have a way to move them). A gigantic dual-cabinet Time Crisis 3 went for $700. A two-seater Initial D with a ram issue went for $125. A non-working 18-Wheeler cabinet went for $25.
Auctions like this one are always a little bittersweet to attend. On the one hand, you're literally bidding pennies on the dollar on games while the owner of the failed business is standing there watching you. It's creepy and feels dirty if you think about it too much. On the other hand, if there's a silver lining at all, it's that at least some of the games being sold are going into people's homes for someone else to enjoy.
Some of the games sold at the auction had already been listed on Craigslist by the time I got home. A giant Jurassic Park with a questionable projection monitor that sold for $150 was on Craigslist for $3,000 "or best offer". Some of the redemption equipment is there now, too.
I saw all the normal shenanigans that I talked about in my
latest podcast about Arcade Auctions. I saw shill bidding, I saw games being sold as "just working" that weren't working a year ago when I was in the place ... all of which just reinforced that arcade auctions are
such a "buyer beware" scenario. I was told that after I left, a fight broke out and cops were almost called when someone was caught taking working parts off of someone else's machines. Sad.
Below is a link to all the pictures I took before the auction began.
http://robohara.com/photo/index.php?alb ... KC_04.2012When I was, oh, seventeen or eighteen years old, I saw a magic trick performed right in front of me that blew my mind. While working in a local restaurant I watched a customer make a dollar bill "float" in mid air, about a foot away from my face. I knew it was a trick, but for the life of me I could not figure out how it was done.
After going over the details of that night over and over and driving myself crazy for a couple of weeks, I went down to the local magic store, plunked down $24.95 (I was making somewhere around $150/week at the time) and bought the instructions to a trick known as "the floating dollar bill."
For my $25 I got a sealed envelope that contained a folded up piece of paper with the secret to the trick written on it. The secret to the trick was "magician's thread," a very thin thread that's almost impossible to see. The instructions said to tie one end of the string around a wad of paper that could be kept in your mouth. The other end was to be embedded into a small, sticky wad of wax or gum paste, and stuck to a button on your shirt. To perform the trick you remove the sticky end of the thread, stick it to something near you (in this case, a salt shaker), and move the item across the table. To float the dollar bill, you simply fold it in half and drape it across the string.
For $25, I don't even get the thread. And in less than a minute, I went from someone who was completely baffled by a magic trick to a guy who felt stupid for (for lack of a better word) "believing."
It is within that context that I present to you my summary of last weekend's local arcade auction.
###
About five years ago, "Funtime Pizza" (we'll call it) had a dream. The owner, a middle-aged Asian man, borrowed a million dollars to build a building and open a combination pizza buffet and arcade. Construction ran long and expenses built up and by the time the doors finally opened, the owner had borrowed around 2 million. Add that to the fact that out of "location, location, location," Funtime Pizza had none of the three, and you can see that the place was doomed the day the doors opened.
Maybe six months after they opened, Mason and I met a friend up there at noon on a Sunday for lunch and some game playing. Literally, we were the only people in the place. I told Mason at the time, "play all the games you like -- this place won't be here long." In some cases that was hard to do as half the games were already broken or non-working.
I was right. Last year, after bleeding money for a couple of years, the place closed. A sign went up claiming "GAMES FOR SALE" but the owner wanted to sell all of them (around a hundred or so) together as a lot. All the regular locals sniffed around the place but as far as I can tell, nothing ever left. A couple of decent offers were made, but the owner got caught up in "how much he paid" vs. "how much stuff is worth" and couldn't let it go. Instead, he decided to have a no reserve auction yesterday to clean out the building in hopes of leasing it to the next restaurant owner.
So that brought us to yesterday.
Out of 100 games, I'd say 40 or so were 100% working, and that's only because someone brought in at least 10 60-in-1 Multicades. I think everyone here knows what those are but in case you don't, they're arcade machines that play 60 different classic games like Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, and so on. To a classic collector they're worthless and somewhat offensive; however to the general public, gosh, if one machine plays one game and another one plays sixty, then the second one must be worth more. Prices reflected that; the cheapest one I saw sold for $575; the highest I saw was $1,250.
The biggest problem for heavily advertised private auctions such as this one is they draw in a bunch of amateurs. Don't get me wrong, I'm no pro, but at these you end up with people who have never been to an auction before overbidding on everything and driving the prices up. The good news is, most of those people are usually only looking for one game, so once they buy one they go home.
When the first game (Fast and the Furious) went for $1,600, I knew it was going to be a long day and I was right. Prices were up and down all day. A couple vendors picked up all the redemption machines for pennies on the dollar. The bigger the machine was the less it went for (I'm guessing most people didn't have a way to move them). A gigantic dual-cabinet Time Crisis 3 went for $700. A two-seater Initial D with a ram issue went for $125. A non-working 18-Wheeler cabinet went for $25.
Auctions like this one are always a little bittersweet to attend. On the one hand, you're literally bidding pennies on the dollar on games while the owner of the failed business is standing there watching you. It's creepy and feels dirty if you think about it too much. On the other hand, if there's a silver lining at all, it's that at least some of the games being sold are going into people's homes for someone else to enjoy.
Some of the games sold at the auction had already been listed on Craigslist by the time I got home. A giant Jurassic Park with a questionable projection monitor that sold for $150 was on Craigslist for $3,000 "or best offer". Some of the redemption equipment is there now, too.
I saw all the normal shenanigans that I talked about in my [url=http://podcast.robohara.com/?p=71]latest podcast about Arcade Auctions[/url]. I saw shill bidding, I saw games being sold as "just working" that weren't working a year ago when I was in the place ... all of which just reinforced that arcade auctions are [i]such[/i] a "buyer beware" scenario. I was told that after I left, a fight broke out and cops were almost called when someone was caught taking working parts off of someone else's machines. Sad.
Below is a link to all the pictures I took before the auction began.
http://robohara.com/photo/index.php?album=Arcade%2FAuction_OKC_04.2012