I no longer have a home arcade

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Feb 22, 2014 11:05 pm

I hope to have one again someday. The sheer amount of work to regain my home arcade is maddening. I can't fathom it. It's insane.

In many ways, this is the worst day of my life. Not from an emotional standpoint, but in terms of what happened.

RetroR · Post by **RetroR** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:55 am

What happened?

I remember that you were considering selling it cab by cab due to personal reasons, but was the entire thing instead swooped away?

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 3:44 pm

You finished moving and have no place for the cabinets anymore.

THE
DOWNSIZED
AARDVARK

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 8:14 pm

RetroR wrote:What happened?

I remember that you were considering selling it cab by cab due to personal reasons, but was the entire thing instead swooped away?

I was never considering selling them all one at a time!

[X]

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 8:19 pm

AArdvark wrote:You finished moving and have no place for the cabinets anymore.

This is fairly accurate but I still want to do the Family Feud thing!

[X] [X]

I actually didn't mean for this thread to be evasive. But yes, as the move continues, I needed a place to store many games, because they won't fit where I am moving to.

I sold Centipede and my Warlords project to my friend on Saturday, so they are gone. Zoo Keeper and Q*bert came with me, so this left a bunch!

The Milker offered to put them up at his place until we can save up for a larger house in this neighborhood. He currently has:

Tron pinball, Ms. Pac-Man, Food Fight, Mr. Do!, Tempest, Defender, The Williams Multigame, Asteroids, Mappy (that fat fuck), Elevator Action and Crystal Castles.

Polybius hasn't moved. I don't know what to do with it. I am half-consdiering leaving it in the house to let the legend grow.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Sun Feb 23, 2014 8:58 pm

I'll come get Polybius. What kind of time frame are we working with?

I missed your call Robb (longest basketball tournament ever) but yeah... not a good feeling to see your games being hauled off. Owning a single cabinet is a pretty obtainable goal, but once you get up around that dozen or so mark, it really shows a certain level of dedicated. It's part of who you are, and losing them all at once at least for me was kind of emotional. At least you know where they are and that they'll be safe. I'm assuming with a pickup it wouldn't be terribly difficult to swap them out from time to time.

RetroR · Post by **RetroR** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 6:32 am

Flack wrote:I'm assuming with a pickup it wouldn't be terribly difficult to swap them out from time to time.

I'm empathetic in regards to identifying with something and then having it pulled away, but jesus christ I'm glad this didn't become a hobby of mine.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:48 am

Flack wrote:I'll come get Polybius. What kind of time frame are we working with?

Well... the goal right now is to have the house listed on April 1st.

It's OK. I am still trying to think about what options I have. The original plan was to have three games here at my girlfriend's house, provided that one of them was her favorite, the Polybius multi-game. Maybe I'll check in and see if that could still work.

It's.... argh. It's sort of a fun Internet thing. But it's no longer the picture depicted on Wikipedia. Have I mentioned how much I hate Wikipedia idiots lately? Someone uploaded two more photos of the cab. Actually, I think it was Doc of RogueSynapse uploading pictures of his cab. (My impression, based on nothing, was that it killed him that mine was on Wikipedia and not his. He doesn't talk so we'll never know.)

Then some piece of shit went to the page and thought, well, we can't have more than one photograph of this game in a medium where space literally does not matter! And deleted two photos, the one of mine being one of them. I fucking hate Wikipedia editors. All of them. I have edited it once or twice. I hate myself.

I missed your call Robb (longest basketball tournament ever) but yeah... not a good feeling to see your games being hauled off. Owning a single cabinet is a pretty obtainable goal, but once you get up around that dozen or so mark, it really shows a certain level of dedicated. It's part of who you are, and losing them all at once at least for me was kind of emotional. At least you know where they are and that they'll be safe. I'm assuming with a pickup it wouldn't be terribly difficult to swap them out from time to time.

True. And hey, I managed to keep Elevator Action throughout all of this. That makes me happy. I think they are all long-term keepers from here.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 8:26 am

My home arcade was set up in a building out behind my house. Each time I bought a game, I had to go through the following procedure.

First, I had to back my truck up into the driveway and get the game out. My driveway was super steep, so it was literally like pushing or pulling a 300 pound wooden box uphill for 6' or so until it began teetering over the tailgate. Then the trick was to bring it down without smashing it into pieces.

Once it was out of the truck I had to put it on a dolly and wheel it to the backyard. After wheeling it across the front sidewalk it was off-road. Hopefully you didn't hit any potholes in the yard, otherwise the whole thing would tilt violently to one side. Then I had to open my single wide gate and push the game through. The gate had about 1-2" space on each side, and there was a concrete lip underneath it so you had to hit it with a bit of a running start. Either things went great and the dolly would pop up over the lip, or it didn't, and you would smash the game into one of the two sides. When that happened either the fence would get damaged, the game would, or both.

From there you had to haul the thing all the way across the backyard. Once you got to the arcade there were two steps you had to go up. They were steep enough that pulling the game up with the dolly was next to impossible, but putting it up from the front resulted in you and the dolly being on the wrong side of the game (outside, away from the building). There was a railing around the porch so if I did it that way i would have to lift the dolly up over the railing and then weasle the game around an inch at a time until I could get around the machine. Once I was on the other side I could then put the game back on the dolly and wheel it into the arcade.

Obviously if it was raining or snowing I couldn't do any of this. And if it had rained or snowed recently then the backyard would turn into mud or make the ground soft, so I couldn't do it then, either. If I bought anything during the winter it backed up in the garage and then in the spring I got to do this multiple times until all the games were out in the arcade. And if I got rid of one to make room for a new one, I had to do all of this in reverse.

Collecting Star Wars merchandise doesn't have the "cool factor" that arcade games had, but so far I've yet to throw my back out while carrying a "mint on card" Darth Vader figure into the house.

RetroR · Post by **RetroR** » Wed May 28, 2014 7:51 pm

This thread taunts me, because just the thought of having enough space for a home arcade of any sort of insane right now. At this exact moment, I just donated:

1. Fifteen DVDs I had no room for.
2. About 30 books (of various sizes) that were crowding the apartment.
3. Two baskets of papers / misc. things that were clogging up my small closet.
4. Ten or so T-shirts to clear out a drawer so that I have a space for school supplies.

As of this writing, I still have barely enough room for random bags and odd ends plus Haptic and I are trying to make all of our books fit into a single Ikea book case...

Having room for an arcade, gym equipment, etc. just boggles my fragile little mind.

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Wed May 28, 2014 8:32 pm

You still have room for that $300 I borrowed, though, I hope! Comin' back atcha!

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Thu May 29, 2014 8:20 am

Pointing out the obvious here, but space is obviously at a higher premium in California than it is in the midwest. I can't imagine having to get rid of 15 DVDs or 10 t-shirts to make space. I have two rooms in my house we don't even use. The flipside of that coin is most people who live near the coast probably couldn't imagine living in Oklahoma for any reason.

RetroR · Post by **RetroR** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:46 am

I grew up in a large house and have visited friends and family in other states, so I have contrasting viewpoints in regards to relative home sizes. But after moving from a large house to a shared room, to a dorm and then migrating around the state for a few years, minimal has become more of a mindset than a reality.

I'm starting to break it, as I have larger "things" I wouldn't have even contemplated several years ago (such as a weight bench / associated weights and a couch), there is still mystification as to what people stockpile in their homes:

*Keeping and possessing ornamental items for Christmas, Halloween, Easter, etc.
*Stockpiling years of family heirlooms / random junk
*Having multiple hobbies that are essentially the collection and maintenance of doodads (Star Wars figurines, playing cards, stamps, arcade / pinball cabinets, etc).

I pass by large houses in Berkeley every day and I know the lifestyle of the family living there is different from mine. But while I can imagine myself living in Texas (Austin), Oregon (Portland) or even Colorado or Oklahoma if the job was right, it is doubtful that the "stuff" will ever follow.

That being said, I still have ample room for 300 George Washingtons.

--Retro

pinback · Post by **pinback** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 8:34 am

Your $300 is down for re-tooling.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 9:57 am

I think owning a house with ample storage enables some of those behaviors by simply not forcing people to think about it. If I stick a Christmas wreath in my garage for a year or suddenly acquire an interest in stamp collecting and buy a thousand stamps, the physical space those things take up affect my life in 0 ways. I could buy a new wreath every year for the rest of my life and stick them in my attic and never notice or see them again. I could have done that with my first house too, which cost $70,000. I assume $70k does not buy you a lot of physical space in San Francisco. The difference is, if you live in San Francisco you can go five minutes and view the bay and be in one of the cultural centers of this country. Five minutes from my house is one 7-11 and cow shit. Everything's a trade off.

Garth's Equipment Shop · Sat Jul 19, 2014 6:42 pm

We finally upgraded one of our MASH tents to an Old Hickory(tm) building. One down, three to go. :/

Personally, the only things I call my own that take up any space are my car, a couple boxes of books, and my computer. The 40 tons of shit that fills pretty much every room of our house, plus three large tents and an Old Hickory storage building outside plus a few rented storage garages at the edge of town is all 100% my so-called "better half". Never at any time in all the years we have been together has she ever had to actually lift and carry any of that shit from place to place as I have.

The city lets us use one of their 1 ton dump trucks for a week at a time when it is available. The whole week its parked in the yard she fights tooth and nail to keep everything and I have to just go out there when she's sleeping or not at home and throw away stuff she won't miss.

Theres always plenty of that kind of stuff, I loaded all that shit from our old storage garages and unloaded them into those tents myself so I know what shit has been buried for 5-10 years in storage (since I'm also the one who had to pack all that shit into those old storage garages in the first place all those years ago).

Her favorite argument is that all that shit is how we make a living on eBay but I know better. We do make a living on eBay (plus all the odd jobs I do on the side) but most of that shit just collects dust, cobwebs and mold in storage forever and she never looks at it again. We actually make a living on probably 1% of all the shit she has accumulated over the years from yardsales, eBay, and live auctions.

It really sucks having to share a home with the world's worst hoarder.

Garth's Equipment Shop · Sat Jul 19, 2014 6:45 pm

PS Sorry to hear about your arcade's demise ICJ. That kind of hoarding I can totally sympathize with.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Sun Jul 20, 2014 6:38 am

Garth, that sounds like my mother-in-law. She used to work at an auction house just so she could buy the things that didn't sell for pennies on the dollar... of course my argument was always, "those things didn't sell for a reason!" She had storage units all over town, so many that I can't believe she knows where they all are. When my wife and I asked if she had a small night table she would be willing to sell for my daughter's bedroom, we drove to at least two different units that she swore had one. To get it we had to move and climb over many boxes.

Also, I need pictures of these tents full of stuff!