I often come across interesting snippets of info and news as I keep my eyes and ears open for a new story suitable for publication here on the blog. For the most part, these don’t warrant a full article. So I thought I’d try something new, and pull these bits together and share them in a single post.

So let’s see how this goes. I can see it being a regular thing – perhaps monthly. Let me know in the comments section below what you think of this idea.

Anyway, let’s take a look at December’s news!

Over in the USA, collector Philip Matuszak shared pictures on Facebook of a classic arcade cabinet he’d picked up. It was an original Atari Millipede cabinet that had been converted at some point in its life to a Golden Tee.

As is often the case with these conversions, the operator had painted over the original side art with black paint:

However, there is a solution. Using a paint stripping product such as Citristrip it is possible to get great results without damaging the original artwork underneath. Philip was good enough to share this part of his restore:

Meanwhile something interesting has turned up over in Japan. A listing appeared on Yahoo Auctions (Japan’s equivalent of eBay), that appeared to show a dual monitor cocktail cabinet built by Taito. You might be familiar with the Nintendo “Red Tent” cabinet, allowing two players to play head to head opposite each other whilst sitting down:

The Taito cabinet appears to follow the same design idea. Here’s some pics from the auction:

What a great thing to turn up. Interesting to see what it goes for.

Lossiemouth is a small fishing port town in Scotland – hardly down in the history books as a hotbed of classic arcade gaming. But someone posted up some pictures of a stash of Bronze Age arcade cabinets, looking for interest from the collector community here in the UK. The cabinets were discovered in an abandoned house somewhere in the town. Things have gone rather quiet since, but I’m pretty sure this raid will happen at some point, but meantime, here’s the pictures he shared:

Elsewhere, Twitter user Marcin Wichary shared a bunch of photographs that he had taken during the 90s of arcades and related repair shops in his native Poland. The pictures are very interesting, and a few gems are shown including this Testarossa themed driving cabinet. at a guess I’d say it was a bootleg Outrun?

The rest of the photos can be viewed here. As an aside, Marcin posts some great content, not just arcade related. You can follow his Twitter account here.

Sad news from the USA. Legendary Berzerk/Frenzy player and world record holder Joel West has passed away. I met Joel a few times and he always struck me as a genuine and principled man, who took his gaming very seriously.

An inductee of the Videogame Hall of Fame, Joel was one of the central characters featured in the documentary Chasing Ghosts, which featured his now famous quote about Berzerk:

Watching Joel play Berzerk live was quite something. He was a world-class player and will be fondly remembered. If you want to read up more about Joel’s life, here’s a tribute piece penned by The Charlotte Observer.

2019 is upon us, and with it came an audacious attempt on the first day of the new year by Johnny Gallegos of Utah to achieve 100 million points on Robotron in a single game. Although he came up short in the end, Johnny scored an amazing 68,999,700 points after an 18 hour run. the mental stamina required to play an 18 hour game of Robotron is simply beyond my comprehension. To watch Johnny’s incredible run, go here.

The History of How We Play (a fantastic blog by the way) posted up a great article about Steve Job’s brief time with Atari. It goes into some detail on Job’s involvement with Atari’s Breakout game. Read A Breakout Story here.

And finally, a couple of cool pictures here from Stern Pinball’s Instagram feed. Here’s Gary Stern himself, personally delivering a new Beatles pinball to Legendary programmer Eugene Jarvis just after Christmas!

So there you go. Let me know if this Classic Arcade “newsfeed” idea is something you’d like to see more of in the months to come.

See you next time.

Tony