MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: I can kind of understand why so many beautiful classic arcade cabinets were smashed and trashed.

> > Putting a bunch of arcade and pinball machines, based on the average size of
> arcades in their heyday, into storage could get pretty expensive pretty quickly.
>
>
> Depends what one means by expensive, or what expensive means to them. A lot of people
> did put things in storage. A lot of people ran strapped businesses.
>
> Hell, have you heard the consumer storage figures? Something like the average family
> has a third of their belongings in storage, and this has been so for a few/several
> years at least. In my area there've been ten storage places pop up in the last ten
> years, two of them within a quarter mile of each other.

To the guys who ran the original arcades it was just about cost and revenue, not nostalgia. If it didnt make money they got rid of it. Some were passionate about it but they were rare. Just to pick a number out of the air lets say 10k per year to rent 1000sq ft. Some of these companies probably needed 10x that space to keep all of their inventory. Lets say you could get 50 games in there (thats optimistic). Each one of those games is costing you 200 bucks a year. For awhile there many not worth even that. Remember these are not the restored boxes you usually come across today. They were *well* used games. You know the kind with the cig burned panel, burnt in screen, with a wonky 2nd player controller, and the right cash box did not work at all because some dick poured a beer in it. Also in some jurisdictions since you were an operator they charged you a flat tax rate per machine owned per year. From a pure business POV it would be a waste of money to keep them. Back then if you owned the 1000sqft you could rent it out for 10k a year, or you could keep a depreciating asset in inventory that you keep paying taxes on.

Individual buyers were kind of a pain. They had no clue how to move the things and want a few hours of your time. They probably wanted a particular box and it was always the one in the back of the storage unit. Then they may backout because the 2p controller is snapped clean off. Just so you can offload 1 box. Whereas you can scrap or auction them. Scrapping them means you get a tax writeoff. Auctions could be a pain too as you had to pay some dudes to move a non profit box somewhere and hope you can sell a game that no longer sells. These days something like that is worth a decent amount if you want to mess with it. There are many companies out there that popped up to help the individual buyers. But in the early 90s? That was not so crystal clear.

Dont confuse that with what people packrat away in a storage unit. They consider their stuff valuable so they store it. Arcade dudes were usually just in it for the money. Once the money dried up they got out of it. You probably would find a lot of overlap of the kind of dudes who now sell storage and old arcade owners.

We value the games *now*, but back then not so much. It is part of the history of these things. We can lament 'what if' but those 'what ifs' ran headlong into money.