Dude just happens to find a fully working and in great condition arcade cabinet deluxe from 1983 in 2023? Jesus! What a find! I’m a huge fan of old arcade games and even built a few mame cabinets myself - this is extraordinary. There aren’t very many of those games left let alone working in great condition. Many have lost their CGA monitors or fried their boards.
Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie!
These cabinets are so rare, I have to wonder how it wound up on the curb. I'd imagine there's no way it's a happy story, unfortunately. Someone apparently felt that was worthless.
> Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie!
That might be due to movie accounting. There are times the producers of the movie have an incentive to make sure a movie has little or no profit, even if it does okay at the box office. For example when someone other than the producers will contractually get a percentage of the net proceeds of the movie.
It's not a great example (I have no idea about his specific motivations), but one example of how to tweak those knobs is when Kubrick's films had to use special equipment that was literally only available from a single company. A company that Kubrick happened to own, and could decide how much it charged the production. You can see how anyone involved in the production who had a piece of the film's net would have the size of their piece impacted by however many millions went to Kubrick's company.
(there's a play in which greedy producers joke about how "there is no net!" but I can't for the life of me remember much about it beyond that joke)
The producers of The Fellowship of the Ring were so anxious about the production, having sunk so much into it even before filming, that they offered Sean Connery the part of Gandalf. They offered him a percentage of the gross. Reportedly, he wasn't familiar with Tolkien and didn't care for the script (what the fuck is a hobbit?), and of course everything worked out fine for everyone concerned. Ian McKellen was great, and worked cheaper than Connery. Connery retired to a Carribean paradise with a good golf course.
I calculated it out once, and if he'd taken the deal they were offering, Connery would have - based on what the movie grossed - made a decent slice of a billion dollars.
Sean never managed to figure out which projects to join. Of course, being fucking Sean Connery, every script with a semblance of an older, wise but cranky man were sent to him. But he never got it right. He turned down Morpheus in The Matrix. He turned down Die Hard 3. He turned down Jurassic Park.
He really needed someone savvy to guide him, which he never got. At least he made The Rock .
"Tim decided to knock on the door of the owner. A woman answered and explained that the EDOT had sat in her garage for many years and she wanted to get shot of it. Tim was welcome to take it away for free, but she didn’t really want to discuss the machine’s provenance – Where was it from? Who acquired it?"
I'm gonna guess "belonged to former husband". Dead or divorced, who knows.
At $2k it would sell today. The condition looks great could easily go for more then double that to the right buyer (Environmentals are prized but obviously limit who has room for them).
This is a crazy rare version of an already rare arcade cabinet. I've seen exactly one of these in my entire life. The price may not be that silly if it is in good condition.
As someone who just recently spent a wistful afternoon looking at listings on Pinside, this price barely even seems crazy. It's a bit different since pinball tables have all the mechanical bits and bobs, but still.
Owning a Medieval Madness table has become one of my "boy, if I ever won the lottery" fantasies, and will likely remain that way.
There are pinball distributors that will do short to medium term rentals, a few hundred dollars for a couple months. Medieval Madness is probably in short supply for that, but there are quite a few other options for newer games, often ones a few years old that just came off a public location. Renting could be a way to go if you really want it but can't swing ownership.
You know, that's actually an interesting idea. Probably still the kind of expense that I couldn't currently justify, but it's also sort of nice to think that I could "subscribe" and have some rotating pin in my basement if I wanted to without having to take out a car-sized loan.
And that’s for one needing some TLC. The top of the cabinet is coming apart. The speakers are missing. The floorboard is missing. The display has ghosting. The colors are fresh and crisp but it’s hardly “slightly used” as the one in the OP is. Still. I’m just lost for words he got this off the street.
I saw this a few days ago on an arcade collector's forum (not based in the US), and the majority reaction was disbelief. People seemed to think it was a hoax. That thing is museum quality.
I wonder if it's due to those suburban garages, allowing people to pile up stuff for decades. That and having more cash to buy goodies than most of the rest of the world, of course.
The more likely reason is that it was a test machine, as shown by the paperwork in the cabinet and the low play count. It was put on location for a few weeks to gather earnings data and then probably pulled back to the factory. A lot of those test/proto machines were then scrapped or sold at a very low price to someone on the design/production team if they had the means to take it home.
Back in this era it was very rare for an arcade cabinet to be sold directly to the home. Aside from being very expensive, you had to buy from a distributor much like a car dealer. Most local distributors hated dealing with home owners (too many questions, couldn't fix it themselves, delivery was a bitch, etc).
Given this was found in a Chicago suburb I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was a Bally/Midway employee that kept it in their garage or basement for a few decades and then decided it just took up too much room. Or it was handed off to a friend or neighbor over the years but either way it really hasn't left the city and never saw hard use in an arcade. Galloping Ghost has taken great advantage of this situation and obtained many pieces that are more rare then Discs of Tron.
The reason I know this is because I have a few engineering sample games in my basement as well.
Yep. I have a century-old pool table (coincidentally also made in Chicago) that was left in the house I lived in as a little kid. It is extremely rare. Thinking of taking it to Antiques Roadshow.
That's right. Bally/Midway left the city for the suburbs during the boom years, with offices in Rosemont and factories in Franklin Park and Bensenville.
The Franklin Park factory is actually still in use. It now makes equipment for Life Fitness, which has a historical tie back to Bally.
For classic cars and other large pieces of vintage machinery, "barn finds" have been a common source of weirdly well preserved specimens for many years - especially in dry climates. Now that we live in a world where many elderly people have had suburban garages for many decades, that probably will be a major source of interesting finds like this.
All other things being equal, having the space to keep a large object you're not using is gonna be a big predictor for how many specimens end up in a safe storage situation for long enough to become antique.
Large objects can be so hard to deal with that they are often discarded, regardless of theoretical price or value. Motorcycles, Hammond organs, etc.
So often it might be worth quite a bit it someone in another location, but especially after someone dies, there often isn’t the energy to deal with it. So on the street it goes.
You can find some people asking $6000 for a Hammond B3, but then someone can’t give away a D-152 outside of an urban area because folks don’t know what it is on a search. It better than a B3, essentially the deluxe model. But they weight nearly 500lbs and people don’t know how to turn them on to test even (it is a 2 step process)
Indeed. I used to own a vintage IBM AS400 server system and a separate disc enclosure. Each component was roughly the size of two mini fridges one atop the other. It weighted over 130 kg each. Add a "smart" crt terminal and a carrier bag full of cables.
Unfortunately I had to relocate for work and I couldn't take it with me. I tried to sell it, then I advertised to give it away. Eventually I had to take it to local "it recycling" facility rum by the council where they had me pay a fee for "disposal of a business grade it system" (fair enough). I wish I could've kept it.
I got a fully complete Nixdorf 820 with the dust covers for free. As far as I can tell I might be the only person outside of the Nixdorf Museum with one.
I don't I could sell it if I wanted to. The drives alone seem to powered by washing machine motors.
We went toRhode Island computer museum pre-pandemic, was fun (smallish) retro museum. We were offered a tour of the warehouse. A short drive later, a warehouse full of old machines. Impressive lot. It was a lot of fun. They rent them out for movies apparently. They have one old car. One of the founders told us he switched to computers because they were smaller..(ha)
It’s impossiblely hard to keep all the machines working, but they're still fun to look up.
Same thing with aquariums. If you want a 150 gallon you have to pay. If you want a 2000 gallon and are willing to go pick it up and move it, it's usually free.
I run into this with tools at auctions. Want a small milling machine you can move into your garage on your own? $2k. Want a giant one from the 60s that takes a crane to move in? $400
Exact thing happened to me when I first started collecting arcade games. I was ready to sell a Xenophobe cabinet, which is a massive, awkward monstrosity. Took a huge "loss" on it but at the time needed it out of my house and only cared that a potential seller could help get it up the stairs. :)
Ha, I knew someone who formerly worked for IGT. Said when he relocated he had a complete gambling machine (massively obsolete) in his living room. Including the 300 lbs something steel plate that is used to weigh it down. Put it on craigslist for free and said it was gone that evening, scrappers showed up and moved it out for him.
Freight costs and logistics are the killer. The freight cost often approaches or exceeds the theoretical resale value of the item, and the logistical details are difficult to figure out if you haven't done this before, which the overwhelming majority of people haven't.
Absolutely. When I was in college (early 2000s) I found someone selling a Hammond A-100 in great condition for $400. It was her grandmother's who had recently passed, so they were trying to clear out the house. She had a really nice Wurlitzer baby grand piano for a similar price, but my college apartment definitely couldn't fit that thing.
Incredible is really the perfect word to describe this: Both the "extraordinary" definition and the "impossible to believe" definition.
It's too bad the two top-level comments doubting this story have been downvoted into oblivion and dunked on for being cynical. We might not like that line of conversation, but I think it's a legitimate POV that adds to the discussion. This find just seems so...incredible. In what actual universe do you see these kinds of things just left out on the curb?? The only things I see on the curbs in my neighborhood are old junky furniture and kids' toys.
I subscribe to estate sale newsletters to find treasures like this, and have never seen something like this even for sale, let alone free by the side of the road. What an amazing read!
It may be an intentional misdirection...The guy may have had a contact that was easy to deduce, and neither of them wanted the attention it would bring...so it 'fell off the back of a truck.'
My uncle had a 1968 Dodge Charger in his garage, covered, that hadn't been taken out since then. At that time it was working, but the hoses and seals had deteriorated since (though the paint job was perfect) and he wanted it to be his retirement project to get it running again. Parkinson's set in and he wasn't able to follow through on that, unfortunately, and he ended up selling it for a considerable amount of cash.
Chicago does have an incredible density of suburban garages, perhaps at a scale which is unique in America. Row after row, column after column, copy-pasted outwards on a massive grid.
As someone who just bought 900 Pokémon cards at an unadvertised estate sale at a roadside Michigan blueberry stand, I can relate. We had just stopped by for blueberries.
I happen to see a couple unlabeled sheets of paper tacked up in a corner with grainy scans of cards.
I asked the old farmer if she has some for sale and she pulls out this massive binder of cards with many first edition and holo cards in very good condition… they were from her sister’s estate and she didn’t have time or interest to deal with them.
I don't know, if someone wants to dump a whole lot on you, you should just take their asking price. They're not asking you to do a valuation. They won't feel the "loss". However, if you go through and tell them what every card is "worth", and buy a couple that you can afford, they will then feel bad if they ever part with them for less than their notional value.
My conscience wouldn't let me do that. Don't get me wrong I'd be willing to accept a steep discount for the hassle of potentially grading and listing every card, the time it takes to sell, and the expectation that some won't move in a timely fashion, but I'm not gonna give someone $20 for $10,000 worth of merchandise just because they're ignorant.
What if you say, "you know, these cards can be worth a lot sometimes, is that going to bother you?".
I mean, part of it is that you should also remain ignorant. If you see an expensive card on the first page, yeah, morally you're in a spot if you act like you didn't. But if you just assume that a collector has something of value, but you don't really go through it other than to make sure that it's actually all the same stuff, I think the terms are fine. Just so long as you're actually spinning the wheel as well.
I'm reminded, though, of High Fidelity. There's a part of the book (maybe a deleted scene on the DVD as well) where Rob goes to buy a collection and he's seeing all these great items, first editions in pristine condition. The seller is a woman who is going through a divorce and doesn't need the money but her husband does, and he asked her to sell them for him, and she's trying to dump them for very low price to be mean.
Rob can't bring himself to buy them, even though he wants some for his collection. So I get where you're coming from. I don't make as much money as I could because I don't fleece people, either. But there's times when people are asking for your expertise and times when they just want to move on, and everyone should be happy in the end.
Yeah that’s fair. If the seller is knowingly and intentionally selling below market value it’s moral to buy just as it’s moral to accept a gift (in most cases).
I'd say it was a fair price. I have work to do to reach ROI, but after some hours of spreadsheet building, I project a reasonable upside on the investment.
I'm not surprised at seeing this. Most of my electronics "purchases" in the 80s to 00s were perfectly good discarded things just thrown out on the street because they were inconvenient or someone bought something shinier. I even got a 2 year old Intel Mac Mini once and used it as a desktop for nearly 3 years!
An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big and heavy. I suspect that's why this turned up on the street.
> An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big and heavy.
Yeah but there's nothing like standing up in front of an actual arcade cab, one joystick in each hand, and playing Robotron 2084! (one joystick to move in one of eight directions and the other joystick to fire in one of eight directions).
About ten years ago a friend of mine was moving to a smaller house and had no room for his vintage arcade cab... So he offered it to me. I immediately took it (my fancy car wasn't big enough to carry it so I went and borrowed my parents' car).
This cab has already been moved to three (EU) countries (!).
It's fully working, I've got a few PCBs (both originals and bootleg PCBs) and I've got a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter, driving the CRT screen...
It's a joy to see my little daughter play on the games I used to play as a kid (like Elevator Action, Buster Bros/Pang!, Bomb Jack, etc.).
It's an amazing relic from really glorious times.
P.S: it used to be in my office room first, then in the living room (which was epic) and now in its new house it's in the laundry room next to the washing machine : )
We had a similar situation...broken Defender cabinet...free
A power supply and 3 RAM chips and my kids got to experience unlimited Defender...having 24x7 access to that cabinet like that, you picked up really interesting insights into the code...and the realization that, no matter how much I played, I was never really going to get good at it.
My friends and I were into computers before this, but four of us got into systems administration and network architecture primarily from dumpster diving around the SF bay area in high school. Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations, Cisco networking equipment, IBM and DEC servers... we got good getting enterprise and/or obscure technology working and talking to each other which gave us a more generalist or fundamental knowledge of systems and troubleshooting.
I dumpster dived the IBM offices in North Jersey in the 90s. They would trash brand new in the box model Ms, plus huge piles of more esoteric keyboards, equipments, manuals, etc.
When I was a kid, my dad acquired an Eight-Ball Deluxe pinball machine. He restored it, and for years it was a regular fixture of our house. We moved a ton, but it always came with us, for about a decade. Then my dad finally sold it.
I played that game a lot. I have fond memories of the lights, sounds, and feel of it. It was a very different experience than modern pinball machines.
Arcade trash is amazing. One day driving around my neighborhood in a box truck I spotted a arcade cabinet at the curb. As I'm getting close I see the side and its Terminator 2! I stop the truck, see a guy in the back yard, flag him down and ask "Is this trash and does it work?" he says "Yeah it works but the guns don't vibrate anymore and I need the room in my garage" So into the back of the truck it went. I was lucky to A. find it and B. also happen to be driving a truck.
Guns were easily fixed. The vibrator is a solenoid with a rubber tipped plunger mounted to an L shaped bracket made from stamped sheet metal. The plunger strikes the short length of the L and the bend takes the stress. Over the years the constant slapping broke the plate at the bend. I welded the plates back on adding two gusset strips on each side to brace them and the guns were back to vibrating. Still have it but hasn't been powered on in ages.
What's the monetary value of a find like this? It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it". I guess sometimes you just need the headspace!
You pay for things when you buy them and when you keep them and when you pass them on to their next owner.
Often these transaction costs are both in time and in money, and people all value their time and money in different ways.
Disposing of this thing, which likely has a huge amount of emotional weight already embodied in it, via a specialist web site and interacting with a gazillion flakes is likely an exhausting prospect.
TBF this is more of a "have to find the right buyer" product. Some arcade aficionados would give an arm or a leg to get one, but most of us don't have the interest, the space or the know-how needed to get it running (I guess the odds of finding one in working condition, like this one, are not that good).
I’m working order? Maybe as much as 10-12k. The emergence of barcodes has inflated the price of games like this.
A DoT environmental is widely considered an arcade grail and is rare. It’s extremely sought after and the logistics of the size of the cabinet resulted in lots of them being trashed over the year or chopped up.
I really wonder if the market will soon be (or already is) flooded with similar cabinets but in bad condition. Barcades put a lot of stress on the machines -- high playtime, by adults with more strength than children, who are drinking, on machines that are often decades beyond their designed service life. And they don't have high enough maintenance budgets to keep them in good condition, or often in working condition at all.
Or perhaps they just get thrown out when the barcade replaces the machines or goes out of business.
> It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it".
I think people underestimate the time and effort that goes into doing that. It's not as simple as "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it", now it's a project you have to manage. Not only do you have to deal with people contacting you about it but then you have to find a time/price/location that works for everyone and you get to deal with the long tail of "Is this still for sale?".
I mean for something like this I would absolutely put out feelers since I know there are people who would pay for it but in general I just donate stuff after posting in my friends chat to see if anyone wants it. It's just not worth the hassle, for myself it needs to be well over $100 before I try to sell it. Maybe that's "privilege", maybe that's "lazy", I don't know.
Yeah, you really do. I'd imagine who isn't in the space might think "well the graphics are so outdated and the thing is so heavy, who would want to deal with it?"
And we don't know what else was on the curb that was taken by the trash people; sometimes you get to a point where you decide that cleaning out fast is worth more than hoarding until you're able to sell everything.
It may also be along the line of "Stan said he'd get that thing working, then he didn't, then he died of cancer leaving me with a bunch of unresolved crap to deal with, and I really miss him and I really hate him and I really miss him." or some similarly complex issue.
Absolutely this: for many people settling the estate of a close family member is such an exhausting chaos of emotion that the question becomes: should I take it all to the dump, or maybe just take myself there?
My spouse has been going to estate sales recently, and it's an incredibly macabre scene. You walk into a house whose owner recently died, everything looking still basically lived in, and price tags have been put up on their entire life.
> It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it".
Except ... ever tried to sell something worth $500+?
Good grief, the number of idiots. And it goes both ways.
Look, I know what I'm selling. I know what it sells for on FleaBay. Any offer below 50% of that and I'm going to tell you to pound sand (most of the time it's not even 10%--I mean, really?). I will throw it in the garbage rather than enable these kinds of morons. By the same token, if you give me about 65-75% of FleaBay, IT'S YOURS.
And, vice versa. Dude, I can see what the last 10 of these went for on FleaBay, and you're trying to get quadruple that. Get stuffed.
(Usually those things are such things as sunlight, oxygen, trees, water, flowers, grass, friendly small animals, human beings that express the best of humanity, etc., etc... but in this case it's sort of like a very specific subcase of a very specific subset of a very specific subcase of all of those other best things in life that are free... this specific subcase happens to be that of a "Discs Of Tron" arcade game(!) -- probably from the 1980's -- with its own (highly immersive!) full "environmental" (arcade) cabinet -- left on the curbside, for FREE!)
So the best things in life -- really are free!
(Up to and including a "Discs of Tron" full cabinet arcade game -- with its catchy tagline: "Become the most powerful video warrior of the computer world"... :-) <g>)
I mean, what's not to love about all of that? :-) <g>)
I had a similar, though less impressive, find last year. I was going to the park with my daughter and spotted a pinball machine dumped near the entrance (in a couple pieces). I did a triple take and then immediately called a friend to help me. It was a Bally Midway Spy Hunter. Much of it was in decent condition, though it clearly had been outside for about a week.
The issue was the previous owner had literally torn the backbox off of the cabinet, and had snipped the two bundles of wires connecting the two (at least 50 color coded wires). So it required woodwork to mount the backbox back on, and rewiring.
It sat it my garage for a few months before I accepted that I wasn’t making progress and I gave it to a friend.
Anyway, yeah, people dump this stuff! My hobby dev project is a pinball one, so it felt very serendipitous to find one sitting on the side of the road.
No where near as cool; but ages ago when I worked at Tumblr, and when we were expanding the office, they were going to throw out the MAME arcade cabinet - since I lived about 15 minutes walk away, I put it on a dolly with a coworker and we pushed that thing through Manhattan to my apartment building. Got some great looks from people as we tried to navigate it up and down curbs. Still have it over 8 years later sitting here in my home office.
I have a similar story. I was working at Microsoft and part of the internal arcade alias. One day, somebody on there mentioned a team was moving buildings and had some arcade cabinets in their storage room that they had to get rid of, one of them being a Street Fighter II: CE cab. SF2 was my favorite arcade game as a kid, so I needed it. I asked how much and they said free.
I got excited and quickly rounded up some coworkers, one with a truck, to go down to their building and "rescue" it. It ended up in my office and needed a few repairs. Over time, I learned how to do minor repairs here and there and even did a monitor tube swap (found an old CRT TV at Goodwill that became the donor).
The thing is huge, so became a nuisance when I moved teams a few times. I got good at putting it on a dolly and transporting it myself from office to office. I left Microsoft years ago, but kept the machine and it's now sitting in my home office.
That is a really nice find. I played this one extensively back in the day and it's one of the better games of the era but beyond that it's one of those games that really needs the custom controls. I got it set up on MAME but never found a control mapping that was pleasurable to play.
Custom controls make a huge difference. I remember playing the Atari "Assualt" tank game in college.
It was fun. 2 joysticks, one for each tread (forward and back). You could roll the tank using the joysitcks left right together, or turn the tank up by pulling the joysticks apart. The fire button was on the joysticks. Sounds weird but was pretty intuitive. I tried it emulated, even with 2 analog sticks it wasn't the same.
Tempest has the spinning nob. Centipede had the trackball. That sitdown helicopter game with the elevation control at your right hip. Or intellivision with that wierd 16 direction disc and the keypad. They don't work as well without. analog sticks help some (robotron for example).
There is also the chance that memory of those games has given them a more rosy glow. For example I can't imagine grinding up ulitma3 levels today.. But I did so fairly happily in my youth.
I feel the controls are an inseparable part of each game. Even if the original cabinet used generic buttons, the precise positions of those buttons are still important. That's why I never really got into MAME cabinets. Wiring up some game ROM to a "least common denominator" (or greatest common multiple) stick/button/ball layout is just unsatisfying and does not adequately replicate the experience of the original cabinet.
That, and emulation is just not perfect, and you can often "feel" when you're playing through an emulator and not the OG electronics.
I got it to work in an acceptable way with an 8BitDo Pro 2. I control the movement of "Tron" via the right stick and the aiming cursor with the left D-pad.
The main thing I notice on the environmental version is the Sark voice acting, I still wonder if they actually got David Warner to do it. :)
Dragged it home on dollies? This has a very strong feeling of George Costanza Frogger episode from Seinfeld.
I worked fro my uncle who rented games to arcades. Discs of Tron always had problems with the 3D joystick. You need it for the Discs game the levels go up and down.
So a guy who just so happens to specialize in old games, and just happens to have an exhibition going on specifically about Tron, who happens to have a friend who owns an arcade and a network of people who know how to evaluate and restore arcade cabinets, just happens to be visiting people in a place (it sounds like) he doesn’t go on a daily basis, hears an offhand comment from his young niece who happened to be riding a bike a few blocks away, happens to find a perfect condition game cabinet that’s been sitting out in the weather for who knows how long, that was put there by a random old lady who was apparently able to drag the thing to the curb but doesn’t want to discuss anything about it.
Look, I’m willing to accept that rare things can happen, but this is pushing the bounds of belief. There are so many coincidences and this story needs to at least be viewed with some skepticism toward the details.
It’s not unreasonable to wonder if the goal here is to generate a viral story, which seems to be working at some level.
Occam’s razor would suggest that they obtained the game “somehow” and the provider just doesn’t want any publicity.
P.S. And if they decide to sell it, the decent thing to do would be to at least checkin with the old lady and offer some of the proceeds.
You wildly underestimate how willing people are to avoid lose money in order to avoid the time and effort it takes to get rid of some kinds of stuff ;)
The specific guy being who he is was essential to him finding it, mind you -- the story says his niece mentioned it to him after seeing it a few blocks away, presumably because everyone knows he's "the Tron guy".
Imagine how many random time-limited opportunities exist around you like this that you just never hear about.
It depends on the person who owns it and the expense/level of effort required.
Some game collectors are motivated by the idea of owning something that no one else has. For decades, there were no preserved, shares versions of Marble Madness 2 available for that reason, but looks like that finally changed last year.[1] Akka Arrh was a similar case.
If a collector is interested in preserving and sharing, there's still the expense/effort factor. For an arcade game, they need to buy (or find someone with) specialized equipment, and may need to desolder chips from the board. I.e. there's a non-zero chance of destroying a one-off artifact, even when performed by people with experience.
The production ROMs for Discs of Tron have been preserved for quite awhile.[2]
However, if this was a test machine, it would be neat for someone with the necessary gear to dump it and see if the code is different.
It’s such perfect condition I have to wonder if they bought a cabinet then made up a faked story about finding it out on the curb outside as trash for clicks.
I’ve been following Tim Lapentino for many years and immensely enjoy his Art of Atari book and love for all things retro nerdity. I’d be really disappointed if this was faked. But I admit, it is astonishingly remarkable that the guy who curated a Tron exhibit would also be the one to find a minty DoT environmental, an arcade grail, abandoned on the curb.
Well, it was his relative who found it so I guess his whole extended family and social circle know that he's into this.
I occasionally get guitar questions because people know that I put the time into researching what's what and can at least tell them "yeah, this is crap - don't buy it".
This just feels fishy to me. It’s too much of a coincidence for that cabinet, in that condition, to be found in this way. It very well might have been such a crazy event, but without the backstory of who owned it and how it was acquired I’ll be skeptical. I’m not saying this was done as a stunt, just that for me it doesn’t pass the sniff test.
