This pop-up mailer was included in a batch of documents I purchased from Art Mallet, or artfromny, as he’s known on the forums. Bally Midway had a good advertisement system in place, sending post cards to customers on their mailing list whenever a new game was released, amongst other things. This card is for the new release of Mappy, a whimsical game with a trampoline bouncing mouse in a house of burglar cats, fun stuff. The card is in great shape, with vibrant colors and a cute little three dimensional effect. A nice piece of arcade history, enjoy.

I picked up this little 6″ x 8″ spiral bound book, titled “Notes & Quotes”, simply because it had token images on the cover. The text alluded to more information about tokens and the business side of the arcade industry as well. With a blog named “Tokens Only”, I thought it only fitting to get some token data up on the site.

I had only seen the cover image on eBay and wasn’t sure what to expect, but when it arrived I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has token info, marketing strategies, business projections and even touches on the psychology of arcade tokens, circa 1982. (more…)

Operator notes are odd little items I’ve found in cabinets, manuals, industry magazines and of course in bulk arcade paper buys. In a recent batch of arcade paper, I came across this crude chart made by an op who was obviously trying to narrow down his next batch of game purchases. A lot of time was spent writing out little details about a number of games in an effort to maximize his return. (more…)

Here’s another piece from the big batch of arcade paper I picked up on the road trip to St. Louis. Pat C. was holding onto the box for me along with a HUO Pengo for Jeff R, so we made the trip. I’ve been slowly sorting through all the stuff, when I came across this wacky little item, a promotional product catalog produced by Bally Midway. (more…)

I have been sorting through the big box of arcade paper that was my part of the haul from the road trip to pick up Jeff’s HUO Pengo. There are some really odd things in the lot, the first bit of info was about the wild and wacky Arcade Outpost. This time I want to share some industry info I found about anti cheating devices. (more…)

I’m a big fan of Willis artwork and consider myself to be an arcade history buff too. Unfortunately because of collector attitude towards most things Willis, these two subjects rarely meet. I would like to change that just a little. A recent eBay win has shed some light on the history of Willis and that companies place in arcade history. While this information may be known to some of the die hard collectors out there, it was new information to me. My enlightenment started with this little piece of documentation:

A true piece of 80’s cheese, for sure, but if you can get past the airbrushed silkscreen fantasy cover, you will find a few nuggets of classic arcade history. (more…)

I got lucky back in 2005 and was able to raid a small warehouse near my old house in the City of Chicago. In that raid I found a lot of misc paperwork, inventory notes and technical documents made by the staff technician. I found this monitor flow chart on the work bench. It’s 11×17, dated 1982 and laminated. Not a bad little flow chart. Crappy jpg below, but the PDF is great.

Grab the two page PDF version HERE. If you use this chart for repair work, please leave a comment and tell me about it. If you want to re-post this to your site, that’s fine, just credit my site.