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On Saturday I awoke at the startlingly early hour of 7am in order to drive down to Griffin (over an hour) and attend the arcade auction put on by Super Auctions at Rushton Mill. For the uninitiated, Super Auctions is a traveling auction company that commandeers large spaces in order to create the biggest assemblage of arcade industry refuse most will ever see. And then enthusiasts bid on it as if it were desirable.

I had been told that the Super Auctions were generally a waste of time. The machines were beat, and the 13% “buyer’s fee” tacked onto the winning bid (plus sales tax!) meant you probably weren’t going to be walking out with a deal, unless you’re into non-working vid cabinets. It’s the dumping ground of regional operators. This is where games that are too junky for eBay turn up. Still, I decided to go for myself to see what it was all about, and I had some fresh playfield glass to pick up anyhow.

The pinball lineup was pretty unimpressive. A nice Dr. Who (not a fan), a fairly decent Revenge From Mars, and a worn Slugfest were the only items of interest for me. I idly contemplated RFM, my favorite of the offerings, as I wandered the hall looking over dusty video cabinets and driving game steering wheels held on with duct tape. There was also a Mrs. Pac-Man cocktail table that played pretty well, an item I knew Jayson was keen on.

More skill cranes than you can shake a stick at.

Coin-pushers featuring New England lighthouses and a sunset scene. Former fern bar residents?

At around 10 the auction began, with the auctioneer propped up on a ladder (below) and his main partner (right), whose main purpose seemed to be clapping his hands as if cracking a whip and inciting bidders, hiking himself up on a nearby arcade cabinet to get above the crowd. A cadre of interesting-looking fellows surveyed the crowd, apparently tracking bidders, sometimes seeming to suggest that they bid up their opponents. A battery-powered bull horn on a tripod spread the auctioneer’s call loud and… well, just loud, throughout the hall.

I was frankly amazed to hear the auctioneer launch into the classic heb-heb-heb-heb two-fifty two-fifty heb-heb-heb gibberish, and for the first few minutes was convinced that even if I wanted to bid on something there, hell if I could understand what was going on in the auction in order to do so! Even the price was difficult to determine.

I contemplated all of the unintentional bids I’d seen in movies as I watched them work their way down the line of arcade cabinets. In time I began to decipher his strange language. At each “lot,” they would attempt to power up the machine, and at that point a brief description would be issued (”Mrs. Pac-Man, working” or “Galaga, needs adjustments” — this means it’s working, but obviously screwed up), and the bidding would open at some value presumably invented by the auctioneer. Generally $200 or maybe $500. He might try to work the bidding up in $100 increments, and then slow down to $25 increments if the bidders weren’t biting. He’d also drop down by $100 if there wasn’t any interest, and $50 was the lowest I saw anything go for while I was there (generally dead, non-working video cabinets). The Mrs. Pac-Man cocktail table went for $700 (that would end up to be more like $840 after taxes and fees), and a multi-arcade system in a Mrs. Pac-Man/Galaga cocktail cabinet went for an astonishing $1,175 (perhaps I just don’t know vids, though).

As the auctioneers moved along, I sensed that it was time for me to leave. The odds of winning Revenge From Mars, a game we aren’t even that crazy about, for a decent price were pretty slim, and by the looks of it I had several hours of waiting to do before they worked their way around to the pinballs, which are somehow always last up. A hypothetical winning bid of $2,000 (a bargain) would end up being $2,400, and at that point you aren’t getting much of a bargain anymore. Perhaps I just don’t understand all of the work and overhead that goes into renting a space out in Griffin and moving machines in and out, but a 13% fee seems a bit steep to me, particularly when the electrical system can’t support having all of the games on at one time. (Throughout the time I was there circuit breakers were constantly popping, waves of “awwwww”s rolling down the aisles.) Finally, keep in mind that all of these machines are “as-is,” and non-working auction machines are notorious for being found to contain no circuit boards.

And so I left the land of arcade cabinets, beat, worn-out pinball machines, redemption machines, dimpled air hockey tables and outmoded jukeboxes without anything but a few panes of glass to show for it. But, like Jessica and Little Caesar’s, I’ve done it, and I don’t need to do it again.

After all of this new way I’ve found to become jaded, I leave you with this. There’s just something cool about two old Tech guys checking out an old 45 RPM jukebox:

It feels good to do another photo-laden blog entry after such a drought.

Posted: Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 1:17 am; Category: Pinball; Comments feed: RSS 2.0.
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