• Familiar site during a road trip. Gas stations and scary bathrooms. http://t.co/q65e3mUY #

• New Space Invaders champ doubles previous record | Games Blog – Yahoo! Games http://t.co/gVAQh1VK #

Here it is, the final installment of our “Road Trip to Arcade Nirvana 2010″, documenting the amazing road trip I made with Jeff Rothe back in the summer of 2010. If you aren’t familiar with our exploits from that summer, refresh your memory by checking out the first two legs of our trip here: Part 1 and Part 2. After all the fun we had at the Freecade, and the awe we felt viewing so many rare laser titles at Morgan’s house, I wasn’t sure we could top it. Jeff had told me very little about our next stop, or perhaps I just didn’t remember the details, but we were on our way to see long time collector James Marous in South Vienna Ohio. I didn’t know much about James or his collection, but Jeff told me that he liked vector games and was also a big fan of Showbiz Pizza…hmm, this should be interesting. Here is a map of the final leg of our trip.

On the drive out to visit James’ place, Jeff filled me in on some of the details. Not only did James like vector games, but he has a bunch of super rare titles in his lineup. Some of them I had never seen or played before. The kind of games that just can’t be played in MAME. Rather than ramble on about his stuff, I’ll just let the game list speak for itself:

Armor Attack, Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Aztarac, Battlezone, Berzerk, Black Widow, Blaster, Bubbles, Computer Space (yellow), Crazy Climber (deluxe), Cyberball, Death Race, Defender, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Dragon’s Lair, Food Fight, Frogger, Galaga, Gravitar, Gyruss, I,Robot, Joust, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Missile Command, Moon Patrol, Quantum, Reactor, Robotron, Space Duel, Spy Hunter, Star Castle, Star Wars, Tempest, Tron, Wacko, Warrior, and Zookeeper. That is 40 amazing games in one space, including every Atari vector (right? I’m not missing any?). I was truly going to be in Arcade Nirvana. Insert coin to continue…

While on the hunt for NOS Willis and bootleg artwork, I will occasionally find some wacky artwork that has already been applied to a cabinet. It makes sense of course, as that’s what the stuff was meant for. Arcade game artwork isn’t always lying around some old, dusty, operators warehouse, sometimes the stuff was actually used as it was intended! It’s fun to find these odd ball cabinets as part of the mystery is figuring out exactly what it is, or what it was. Such is the case in this recent find by avid collector “jehuie” (his KLOV ID) out in Martinez CA. The game had been posted for sale on his local craigslist, but he never had time to check it out…until it was relisted as FREE and kicked to the curb! Free is good and in this case it’s a great thing, as he saved a game that is not listed in the arcade museum archives. I’m a big fan of preserving arcade history and it would have been a shame if this cab had met its end at the dump.

The first thing that grabs you is the blatant Star Wars X-Wing imagery plastered all over the control panel, bezel and marquee. Why not? If you’re going to make a bootleg game you might as well slap some artwork on it that people recognize. It would get a few tokens for the art at least, while the gamer attempts to figure out what, if anything, Astro Attack has to do with the iconic franchise we all know and love.

John was able to get the game working pretty fast, “I actually got it going late last night. One of the circuit boards wasn’t seated in the edge connector properly and then the vertical hold needed adjusting but then it popped right in. Not a game I’ve ever seen before. The marquee is interesting. Each letter has a separate bulb and they alternate turning on and off randomly making a kinda cool effect. I’ll try to get some video or something later today if I have time.” He did have some time and shared this video with the collecting community. Pretty interesting how the marquee lights flash on and off, probably with the use of “blinker” bulbs. Might be a little distracting during game play, but still cool. (refresh the page if you don’t see the video)

John determined that the game play is identical to Astro Fighter by Sega/Gremlin/DECO. Interesting to note that the SEGA/Gremlin version of the Astro Fighter flyer has some blatant rip-off going on as well, beam me up Scotty! The game was released by a bunch of sources, perhaps that made it ripe for bootlegging, who knows? The cabinet has a simple design with an odd upright coin box and single slot coin mechanism. Done cheaply to keep costs down I’d imagine. Maybe it’s the Star Wars artwork, but I like the cabinet and would have dropped in a token or two to give it a try.

The printed circuit board mounts on the side of the cabinet, in a cage that doesn’t look like it was meant to go there. You can see slots in the wood that would fit a larger pcb. So is this pcb a bootleg or an actual Astro Fighter pcb? Tough to tell, as Astro Fighter pcb images from the internet vary. The monitor is nicely mounted with the chassis positioned on the side of the cab for easy maintenance. Everything inside the cab looks original and the overall clean, unhacked look of the cabinet got me thinking. Maybe this generic cab would accept a number of different bootleg games. Just mount a new pcb and connect the harness to the existing cab harness with those molex connectors. No hacking or rewiring necessary, just a new control panel and some new artwork. That would make this a pretty sophisticated bootleg cab, as it was made specifically for that purpose, with multiple games in mind. A multi-bootleg? I suppose the millions of dollars being made in the 1980′s on coin-op would have brought out all the scammers!

Of course I’m just speculating about this cabinet and its origins. If you know any facts about this cabinet or have seen other games in this style of cabinet, I’d love to know about it or see some pictures. Use the contact joystick and drop me a line.

• Conventional or Synthetic Oil Change at Mike Haggerty Volkswagen in Oak Lawn – http://t.co/eX6U9ObD #

The Willis replacement control panel overlay for Atari Centipede is arguably one of the best CPO’s made by Willis. I not talking about finished product quality, as all Willis products had high production standards, I’m talking about the aesthetics. All too often Willis gets bashed for their “crappy” artwork, well this one does the game justice. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to find a Willis Centipede overlay that hasn’t already been applied to a control panel. The partnership breakup between Wico and Willis might also be a reason, check out the Wico Centipede overlay here.

The artist that worked on this one made an effort to do some color and design matching for the layout so the cpo wouldn’t look out of place on the game. He(?) even worked up a cool looking Centipede to add to the CPO, an element that was missing from the original design. Good color, cool Centipede, mushrooms and horizontal stripes. What else could you possibly need? I’ve only been able to find a couple of hacked up versions of this overlay and I’m on the lookout for a nice example. Check out my Willis artwork page for more information about Willis and their history.

I would like to add one of these overlays to the Willis artwork archive. If you have a nice example of this control panel overlay for sale or trade, drop me a line!

At first glance I thought this CPO was a Willis piece. It has an identifying part number listed in the lower right corner, a common characteristic of Willis overlays. The cpo has die-cuts and appears to be manufactured with a quality screen printing process. However, there is no Willis logo anywhere to be found, and the paper backing and adhesive isn’t by 3M. The part number sure does resemble other Willis part number formats, odd.

So I did some digging through my archives to figure this out. I re-read my 2009 post about The Wico Willis partnership. If you check out the catalog pages in the old post you’ll see another centipede overlay clearly listed, and it has the exact same part number. Well, minus the “00″ at the end, but otherwise identical. So the same part number exists for two pieces of artwork, but why? Here are a couple examples I have of the overlay from the Wico Willis catalog. Some genius decided it was a good idea to trim off the top and bottom, so its impossible to read any identifying marks, but you get the idea. So what’s the scoop on these?

My guess is that sometime after the Wico Willis partnership dissolved, Wico decided to make their own control panel overlays (or maybe they had made them previously, I just don’t know). Wico would have used their own printing company, possibly a vendor they had been working with for awhile and that company just didn’t use 3M paper products. They whipped up their own artwork and just kept the catalog part number on the front. I mean if you’ve already sent out a couple thousand product catalogs with the numbers listed, why change them? Just replace the product with your own and keep selling. Seems reasonable to me.

If you know anything about the relationship between Wico and Willis, or any information about either company, I’d love to learn more. This piece of arcade artwork gets added to the growing archive. Game on!

Flush with cash from a few recent eBay sales, I decided to shop around and find some new stuff to add to my arcade artwork collection. For about $22 shipped, I grabbed this pair of Bally Sente control panel overlays, not a bad deal and I’m a fan of the Sente system, so why not. Bally Sente was the brain child of Nolan Bushnell back in the mid 80′s. The idea was simple, buy a generic cabinet and swap out a few parts to create a whole new game. A supposedly quick and painless conversion for the operator. Unfortunately, the industry was starting its massive downward spiral and the Sente System never got the chance it deserved.

The overlay’s are only 11 1/4″ tall x 10 7/8″ wide and at first I thought they must be for the Sente Arcade Computer I Deluxe, due to the narrow width. The standard Sente Arcade Computer I cabinet takes a much wider control panel, so it couldn’t be for that cabinet. Even the conversion kit artwork would have had a wider control panel to fit games like Pac-Man, Rally-X, or Bump N Jump. Checking over the flyer images from The Arcade Flyer Archive I was pretty sure the overlays wouldn’t fit either of those cabs, take a look.

What the heck, what cabinet were these for? The seller I purchased them from had two sets, I bought one set. Each set consisted of a CPO that fits over a trackball panel and the other CPO fits a standard button and joystick configuration. Then it clicked. I looked around the flyer archive a bit more until I found what I was looking for. An image of a Bally Sente cocktail table. Hadn’t realized they made a CT version, but it makes sense. Take a look at the Mini Golf flyer snippet, you can see the cocktail table in the lower right corner. So instead of a pair of CPO’s for replacement panels, I had two cocktail overlays, each one for a different control panel!

Below you can see various images of both overlays. They are in excellent condition, printed on heavy duty poly-carbonate with a plain paper backing. The top edges of each overlay has a slight bend, but I believe they were pre-scored to make it easier to install on the panels. The die-cuts are all missing, but they were likely cut out and not punched with tabs as the holes are clean. The backing has some minor peeling, but other wise excellent. I would grade these a 9/10. As for the aesthetics, while the green background, white stripes and gold metallic accent color scheme is OK, it is also very boring. A fun, multi-color overlay would have cost more money and these games were meant to be money savers for the op. Boring is cheap. I’ve never seen a Sente cocktail table in person and a little searching didn’t dig up any photos. If you happen to own a Sente cocktail cabinet, drop me a line, I’d love to see it. If you liked this installment of NOS arcade artwork, please visit my NOS artwork page, where you’ll find more information and a gallery of pieces in my collection. In the meantime, these funky CT CPO’s will make a nice addition to the archive.

• Found this very confused cabinet at a local arcade. http://t.co/ou6ZHFb #
• Check this video out — NOS Arcade Artwork – Examples, Tips & Values http://t.co/Sumbxcf via @youtube #

The summer went by so fast, barely had time to work or play in the arcade. Summer school chewed up a bunch of time and now that the regular school schedule is back, any gaming activity is pretty much on hold until I finish. I have no free time at all. The summer wasn’t a total loss as I did get some interesting bits of info and started some projects, but all that will have to wait. Hope the school year goes by quick!