On Sunday, a couple dropped by to load up my dear old Kickman arcade machine to take it home. I have to admit I was being a bit of a “helicopter parent” to a machine that was no longer mine: I was practically grilling them about whether or not they had the necessary gear to load, secure and transport it home. “Do you have straps? Have you seen the clouds building overhead – do you have a tarp?” How they resisted the urge to tell me to shaddup and go inside, I have no idea. The point is: thanks to an inept employee of North American Van Lines, I never got to get the full enjoyment out of the machine, because he damaged it all but ramming it through the walls of my house when the machine was delivered to me years and years ago. The wording of my auction was pretty strict: don’t bother to bid on this unless you know the proper way to get it out of here. I’d rather keep the machine and not have the money than watch it get beaten up even more on the way out the door. (I even got a nastygram from eBay notifying me, within 24 hours of the auction going live, that someone had flagged the auction because they didn’t appreciate my “tone.”) My uppity attitude is not unjustified. If this machine was a car, it would qualify for an “antique” license plate. But instead of being made of steel, it’s made of wood, and even if I wasn’t able to get its monitor issues cleared up, I did my part in making sure this giant slab of wood and glass and wiring and circuits survived nearly an extra decade in my house. With its unique control panel and artwork, this machine wasn’t made to be converted into something else. It’s pretty unique. (Honestly, it’d be worth too much trouble to try to gut it for a MAME cabinet, simply because it’s so specialized.) This was a machine meant to last until 1983 or ’84, tops. It’s now over 30 years old. I didn’t want to sell it to just anyone.
I discovered, however, that the people buying it from me were serious collectors with several machines. And this wasn’t his machine: this was her machine. She had been through chemotherapy recently, and this was a machine she’d grown up playing at a gas station down the street when she was a kid. This was her baby. I can’t think of a better place for it to go. (Come to think of it, Gabby wanted to go with them too, but I would’ve had to charge extra for that.)
The Mrs. has already announced that she’s not sorry to see the arcade game go, but I have to admit that I miss seeing it. Even when it wasn’t working, it was sort of the prize piece of the game collection I used to have. Now, much like the rest of that collection, it’s been sold to someone else. As the most visible piece of that collection – something that would often provoke the response “Wow, how did you get this!?” – its absence is now the most (in)visible reminder that I’ve pulled out of game collecting as a hobby. It was a hobby that defined me for a long time. I used to be That Guy With A Lot Of Old Video Games. Now I’m the guy who has had to flip a lot of old video games.
That brings me to a question I’ve been asked several times of late: am I going to CGE this year? Sadly, the answer is no – I have no job that I have to ask for time off from, so I have no income at the moment (aside from selling things on eBay and book sales). Things are simply too tight right now for me to head to Vegas; the shows I am going to (to sell the book) are within an hour’s driving distance. Though I have to admit some relief to not going. CGE has always been the place where I got to hang out with Bill Kunkel, who was one of the editors of Electronic Games Magazine (a periodical I devoured when I was a kid) and later became a friend and mentor to me and to a great many others in the field of video game journalism. It was because of Bill, Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley that there is such as thing as “video game journalism.” It is, in part, because of my absorbing many nuances of their writing style that I took up writing as a hobby, and then a way to make a living. The effect that magazine had on my life was profound. You can probably blame every blog entry, article, review or book I’ve ever written on the fact that EG, together with a few other seminal influences, was so much fun to read that it made me want to write. (If you check the dedications at the back of VWORP!1, you’ll find that it’s dedicated to my parents, my maternal grandparents, and Bill Kunkel, even though I have no idea if the Game Doctor was a fan of the other Doctor.)
Without Bill holding court, telling old war stories from his days as journalist, game designer and comic book writer, and still teaching me a fair few things after all these years, I’m not sure CGE could ever be the same. It was always sort of an unmentioned line item in the mental day-planner for the show: shoot the shit with Bill for a few hours, usually over dinner. The museum was always neat, the keynotes were cool, but from the very first year I went, Bill Kunkel was always one of the absolute highlights. I’m not saying I’ll never show up for the Expo again… but only a year after Bill left us, I’m kind of relieved not to be there. It just wouldn’t be the same.
That being said, despite the gradually decreasing size of the ol’ game collection, I still play quite a bit – and I still write about what I play quite a bit. (I cranked out a couple of Phosphor Dot Fossils entries recently that are among my favorites. Of course, I think I say that every time, but that’s a good sign, right? If I didn’t like writing it and reading over it, why would I expect anyone else to enjoy reading it?) The dream ain’t dead.
And I did keep one Kickman souvenir – a spare Kickman marquee I’ve had since before I had the machine itself, back when I thought “Hey, it’d be cool to have a bunch of marquees and have them lit up, because I’ll never be able to afford a whole machine.”
Turns out I was both wrong and right, in that order.
Just for giggles, here are the photos I took that went with the auction – believe it or not, these sold the machine.
Most Kick/Kickman machines had big round “kick” action buttons; this is the only one I’ve ever seen with little rectangular buttons.
Ugly big-ass eye-bolt for a latching bar across the coin door, kindly installed by the previous owner.
Laugh at the bizarre side art all you like. I loved having this thing in my home. It’s hard not to crack a smile at least once a day at this sight.
As you know, I recently went from 30 or so machines down to 6, with 2 of those still up for sale. There may not be a lot of people who know how you feel, but trust me, I know how you feel.
Arcade cabinets are so unique and fairly uncommon and just so BIG that they always elicited gaping jaws from visitors to my home. There aren’t many elite clubs one can join by simply spending a couple hundred bucks, but becoming the owner of an arcade cabinet is definitely one of them.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that your wife didn’t miss seeing yours go. Unless you grew up hanging around them (as both you and I did), it’s hard to justify owning a giant chunk of wood and electronics. If you try to explain it “logically,” especially to someone who has seen MAME, it’s hard to explain to someone why buying one of these machines even makes sense. And, as I’ve learned, it’s fairly fruitless to try. As I was selling machines, my wife was sad only because parting with them made me sad; she was glad to see the physical objects go. While she supports my madness, she definitely sees it as madness. 🙂
Arcade machines by design, with their paper capacitors and the business model itself, weren’t made to last forever. All you can do is give them a good home while you own them by loving, appreciating, playing and repairing them, and when you pass them on to the next owner, hope you find someone else that’ll do the same.
Congrats on finding a good home for the Kickster. Sounds like you find someone who’s wanting to fix ‘er up and play it, which is all you can ask for.