I went to the arcade auction held by the Michael Angelo Auction Co, in Franklin Park IL, on November 14, 2009. I had never been to an event by this company and the online photos weren’t that promising for a classic arcade game collector. Since Franklin Park is a whole lot closer to me than the Milwaukee Super Auction, I thought I’d give it a shot.

The auction was located in a fenced off portion of some trucking companies warehouse and everything was packed in pretty tight. I didn’t get to the location until about 10am, when it was slated to start, but there were few buyers on the floor and it was fast to register as a bidder. There were a number of operators looking for cheap equipment and a few home buyers. I had my eye on a couple of crane redemption type games as I thought it would be a fun item to have in the game room. There was only one classic game on the floor and that was a Super Pac-Man, in good shape overall and working. I was going to watch it, but being the only classic on the floor, I figured it would bring too much.

Click for franklin_park_auction photos.

The people that run the arcade auction for the Michael Angelo Auction Co were very nice and personable overall. The super slow pace the auction moved at was a little annoying, but I think the auctioneer was just trying hard to make some sales. Not everything was selling as they had reserves, ridiculous reserves in this economy. When the auctioneer said to everyone, “If you’re waiting for that $50 or $75 game, you’re out of luck at this auction…” that pretty much ended my interest. Very few items sold for $100 and nothing less than that price that I recall.

While I didn’t buy anything, (the cranes all went in the $300-$500 range and the Super Pac-Man for $300) I didn’t walk away empty handed. Most if not all of the machines were Namco inventory and my son found a handful of Namco tokens and I found a Namco redemption ticket.

Tags: arcade auction, michael angelo, video game auction

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Arcade Events, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.