Originally published at: Classic arcade game Discs of Tron left out for garbage collection | Boing Boing
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amazing. i would’ve done the same thing. you can’t destroy that machine, it’s iconic!
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Article doesn’t mention whether he tried to cross a busy street with it or not.
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That’s a whole lot of hardware! It looks like separate boards for the sound system and amp, and a heavy-duty power supply rather than a standard switching one.
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I very much believe I played that game back in the day in exactly the same style of console. What an awesome find for him and his friends.
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Pretty sure that looks like a nearby burb my mom lives in. If only I’d have gone over then!
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700 lbs!
they’re lucky they lived within rolling distance and had an empty garage!
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truth – i would have rolled it down the street too, haha.
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The article mentioned “nearby Logan Arcade” - so that places it near Logan Square.
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and they were on the run with something that had passed it’s prime? renew! renew!
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Seriously impressive. I agree with him that an environmental Discs of Tron cabinet is one of the holy grails of arcade collecting! My best out-with-the-trash score was an original Asteroids upright in very good condition.
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Articles describe it as rare and I can believe it. Unlike the other Tron arcade game that seemed to be everywhere I only played Discs Of Tron once after finding it in an airport arcade. This was back when every place had an arcade, or at least a couple of consoles.
Imagine a bunch of thirteen year-olds gathered around it. That night we stayed in a hotel room with twin beds where we recreated jumping from one disk to another.
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Shocked he didn’t try to sell it. EASILY could have gotten a few hundred bucks.
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They had one of these at the arcade in the Santa Cruz boardwalk FOREVER. I loved that game and was so sad when I went back a few years ago and it was no longer there. It’s the only place I’d ever seen the environmental cabinet versus the regular standup.
I would kill to have a decent vintage arcade cabinet for my MAME set up, of course my wife might kill me if I put one in the living room.
I just checked my MAME set up, yup, both versions of Tron and I suck at both of them.
What’s amazing is the guts of that Tron find versus the MAME I have running on a Raspberry Pi and 32Gb SD card with over 4,000 games.
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I have a Street Fighter arcade machine that was acquired in much the same way.
It was sitting in the yard on a construction site of an infill home. I walked up and asked the guy operating the grading equipment if the game was for sale. He says to me “Buddy, you’ve got twenty minutes to get it outta here otherwise it’s going in the hole as clean fill.”
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How the heck is a cabinet clean fill? There’s a lot of lead in that.
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My job wasn’t to argue. My job was to save a life.
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Holy crap!!! Environmental Discs of Tron is a crazy rare and desirable cab. To find one lying in the street?!? If there weren’t pictures, I’d never have believed it. People spend decades looking for these in any condition.
I’m sitting here in shock and dying of envy. This is a once in a lifetime find.
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That was basically my favorite arcade playing experience of all time. You had your own little personal space, cutting out some of the noise of the other games, a small, not-quite-seat (a lean rail?) to get settled against, and, in my opinion, the funkiest combination of controls ever (eight way joystick with trigger and thumb button, spinner with push/pull up/down control). Just you against the Master Control Program.
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