Because this is a couple years old and just resurfaced recently.
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Look through the pictures in the link, the ship seemed pretty sealed up and protecting the arcade cabinets. It was only in a later visit that they had discovered that people had begun stealing the brass window frames which let the elements in for the first time and water started to get in. They moved all the arcade cabinets away from the water, but it sounds like it was somewhere under 10 days or so before they got them out.
Awesome! It seems so typical to me (I buy and sell used records), that even tho the owners really couldnt give a shit about the games that these guys wanted, they stalled to surely look up perceived âvaluesâ of them, screwed around, âlostâ the guys number (???), and finally when they were actually going to do something with the ship (and iâm guessing had no other buyers) magically FOUND the number to call and mention yeah youâll have to get the things out with a crane. And thereâs water in the ship now. And you have to do it in 10 days 'cuz weâre renovating (presumably wouldâve trashed every last one). Just makes my skin crawl people that own things they couldnt give two shits about, and makes this guy jump through a bunch of hoops - glad he did it and hope it was worth the money and hassle!
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Luckily they found a very skilled crane operator.
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the most nerve racking part of the story is how the owner who knew what was in there and didnât give a damn about them, suddenly saw dollar signs in his eyes and wanted to make a profit. Clearly he intended to simply destroy the games anyway in his ârenovationsâ so why gouge these guys who want to take them?
jackass.
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I am NOT disappointed in BoingBoing today. This is fantastic!
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[quote=âquorihunter, post:25, topic:78697â]
the owner who knew what was in there and didnât give a damn about them, suddenly saw dollar signs in his eyes and wanted to make a profit. [/quote]
Ever watched Antiques Roadshow?
Clearly he intended to simply destroy the games anywayâŠ
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no no. I get it. I get it. I just donât understand these type of people. Because honestlyâŠless greed would be good.
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I always had the dream of finding a long shuttered store with a rack of vintage star wars charactersâŠ
Itâs tricky stuff, because Iâm sure the owner was just looking at all of it as trash. In their eyes, who would want 30-year-old obsolete arcade games? Itâs not until someone called repeatedly to ask about buying all of them that he was twigged to their potential value. Antique raiders (âpickersâ) try to pull the âoh itâs just trash, but Iâll take it off your hands for, say, ten bucksâ ploy, but with a cache like this, itâs hard to say âhey, I was just driving by and saw fifty arcade cabs in your derelict shipâŠâ
I used to go around with an arcade owner friend of mine, pulling old cabinets out of basements and garages for restoration. We once pulled a Tempest game out of an old barn and discovered a family of raccoons living inside.
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Amazing story! A similar story from Spokane, WA popped up recently. Brothers Tim and Tyler Arnold rescued 140 vintage arcade games from a warehouse upon witnessing a man literally âsmashing the games with a tractorâ Check out article here
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I was fortunate enough to make it to the Texas Pinball Festival this year. ~400 games under one roof, plus some classic arcades and some amazing custom jobs. Iâd recommend it for anyone who can make it that way.
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less greed and those things would never have been mass produced to now be the treasures they are.
Iâm not talking about actual sea water seeping in and causing damage. Iâm talking about the combination of high humidity and salt in the air itself. Unless that room was air tight that stuff got in and it caused damage. I live on the coast (within a few hundred yards of a major marine estuary in fact) and I can give you a few examples. In the summer when the humidity is high I cannot dry myself after a shower. Just canât. I occasionally wake up in the morning to find water dripping down the walls of my house, especially in my basement. My parents decorate their yard with antique metal farm implements, and they rust and rot away within 2-3 years. Piles of splinters and rust. These things survived 70+ years further inland with minimal rust, and only light weathering to the wood. Completely gone. The steel rakes we use for clam digging do the same on a 10 year time line, and those are designed for use in salt water. A car left un-attended here for 5-10 years will be in a worse shape than a 50 year old car left further inland.
And weâre nowhere near as harsh as the coastal UK or Ireland. My cousinâs in-laws have a house in Galway, not to far from the water. Its all stone and mortar. It needs to be re-mortared every 5 years, the salt and moisture just eat it out from between the stones. And for a while they had teak windows. That teak rotted out every 3 years and needed to be completely replaced. Teak. A tropical hard wood known for its resistance to moisture. Done in largely by the salt.
This gets exacerbated by the sea spray. The closer you get to the water the more their is, and it brings persistent damp and far more salt. Its hard to fathom how much moisture this represents, until you see what it looks like when its frozen.
We often travel by ferries a lot like this. Older steel boats converted to car ferry service. Look at those photos, the interior walls are rusted. Straight through the rust preventing paint. Theyâre far from air and moisture tight. Even when in active use and well maintained thereâs typically some level of rust bleeding through the paint. The walls, chairs and floors are always wet and sometimes dripping on a humid day. Especially after rapid temperature drops at nightfall, or as you head into heavy spray from cold waters. That level of moisture, always carrying salt. It just gets in, and it does damage. Iâve even seen arcade machines on these boats. They need quite frequent repair or replacement, and their interiors feature an awful lot of mildew and green copper oxidation.
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Iâm not convinced by that argument. Can you not make games because you love making games and make money only so you can continue to do what you love?
Donât think of how things are, think of how they could be.
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And the USS Hornet and St. George Distillery and Forbidden Island. (The latter two not so much for families.)
You can make GAMES, but you cannot wind up with a boatload of arcade cabinets⊠without a lot of arcades⊠one or more in every town. And those arcades existed because profit motive. 25 cents at a time.
I remember playing space invaders at the local pizza shop in the 80s. They didnât have it because it made people happy. They had it because it made people money.
The games could have been invented without profit, surely. But would we have ever heard of them, experienced them, seen them, and then played them⊠without it?
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