Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?

There is this video where they destroy a classic arcade machine that's in great condition, too. Here is the video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9tHPyIcCLA I honestly found this extremely disturbing mainly because they did this right after the creator of Pac-Man died. Way to give a tribute.

Is it OK for me to make the subject clearer?

Sure

I'm slightly bothered by people destroying stuff, but in practice it shouldn't make any difference to me whether the machine is destroyed or sitting in someone's basement.

It bothers me every time I see someone smash a CRT screen. Do people not realize there's lead in there?

If I had my own place, I'd snatch up every working CRT TV I could find on the curb. My pet peeve.

I'm pretty annoyed, and probably more annoyed then I should be, but it just absolutely disturbing that someone took a chainsaw to an important piece of history. I know, it's only one machine, and there were at least a million manufactured, but just going to keep losing them to those people who make those "60 in 1" cabinets. These 60-in-1 machines are such a big problem where I live, that everywhere that once had original arcade machines sold all of their original arcade machines to get this one with multiple games that probably isn't even legal. Now call me old school, but I like playing on original, non-pirated machines, and I don't know how these companies haven't caught on to this guy and taken legal action.

To build a wall of TVs and then crash through it with a motorbike?


On topic: It bothers me more when something unpreserved (like a prototype or something unreleased, on eproms) winds up just sitting in somebody's collection, and I think there are some collectors who know this and do it on purpose.

They destroyed it to get a million views on YouTube. You may not like it, but you're actually helping them by sharing that link. (Adsense doesn't care whether you liked the video or hated it, as long as you watched and got advertised to.)

I think it's a waste, personally, but I don't really care that much if someone else wants to make waste like this. If it was something rare or unknown, sure, but this is Pac-Man. There's still plenty of those around in collections, well preserved and maintained.

With it having so many views, I suppose it's possible that seeing that might influence someone to preserve or restore a game sometime in the future (that would be neglected otherwise), and balance would be restored. Who knows.

There are a lot of worse stories you can hear from arcade collectors. One common theme seems to be where an arcade route operator (think someone who puts a few games each in dozens of locations, rather than a big arcade building) will own hundreds of games, when one breaks down if it doesn't make enough money they'll put it in storage rather than fix it. Then they won't sell it to anyone, in fear of creating competition for their business. And it will just sit in a warehouse where it eventually gets wet, rats nest in it, the roof caves in on it, etc.. My own story like that was a few years ago there was a warehouse selling all their games not far from me. They listed Konami's Life Force, and Haunted Castle, with some water damage, I'd take those for $150. I looked up their location.. it's right next to a river. He ended up selling the entire lot to one guy anyways, and that guy said almost all of the cabinets were ruined, moldy and crumbling apart. Like 3+ semi trailer loads worth of cabinets.

Pinball was illegal in some places, you can find old pictures of city officials standing near piles of smashed pinball machines. Even in Chicago, which was pretty much the capitol of pinball manufacturing. It was surreal listening to an interview with Steve Kordek (who started his career in the 1930s) talking about times the factory bosses thought police were looking around nearby so they'd shut all the lights off and tell everyone to be quiet. OK they're gone, get back to work. Obviously in later years they made them legit, for export only before it was legalized.

This sounds like a fun idea for a horror movie: a huge creepy dark warehouse full of ancient zombie arcade machines. LATE AT NIGHT, ONE OF THEM STILL WORKS

Googling showed me nothing about the creator of Pacman ,Toru Iwatani, having died. But the Namco founder Masaya Nakamura apparently did back in January.

Whoops, my bad. I must have confused the two. I should get my facts straight.

Still sounds like a better movie then Pixels... I'd actually pay real money to go see that. And to bring that Pac-Man machine back from the dead they have to score 10,000 points only to find out that they disabled the extra lives with the DIP switches. Now that's a real horror movie.

This is the most pointless and offensive promotional video for a stupid mobile app I've ever seen in my entire life.

Flat earthers, Bill Nye, and now this. I'm starting to think social media is literally going to be the thing that destroys all of human civilization. Like...people making obscene amounts of ad revenue on Youtube by...destroying things? Effed up. How the hell does this guy have 4m subscribers? I don't have words.

Because this is 2017. I'm pretty sure that's what old people thought of the Angry Video Game Nerd back in 2006. "How does this guy get so much money from playing Video Games? Our society is going down the drain!"

Oh yeah, that thing that started when you were 2 years old at most?
Pretty much no one ever said any kind of variation on what you just wrote. Playing games, totally like destroying a 1980s cultural icon with low number of preserved units to promote a mobile app, yep.

I don't think AVGN made much money off his videos until a few years later. Actually, I don't think he makes very much money now. Most of his collection was bought back when retro games were cheap. Nowadays their price has skyrocketed.

In 2006, the big fad was to wait in line for an XBox 360 to smash in the parking lot. 12 year old me found this hilarious.

I was only joking, of course I'm disturbed by the fact that they can get away with this! (Not the AVGN) My parents grew up in a small town. Since it was a small town, they could work for anyone in their town because they knew everybody. They would work for quarters and then bike down to the 7-11 to play Pac-Man, as a matter of fact, that's how they met! So the fact that this game is what brought my parents together only to see it destroyed only makes it that much more painful to watch.

Speaking of which, these MAME machines are totally illegal, How would I go about reporting them? They're being sold everywhere. What should I do? Should I just ignore it?

I find this kind of stuff completely disgusting. I don't mind taking apart a classic cabinet for parts, but stuff like running a hammer through a well functioning arcade monitor really pisses me off. These things aren't being produced anymore and are getting harder and harder to come by. There are people out there who can't afford arcade machines, and would LOVE to have an original Pac-Man cabinet in their home. In the end they probably made more money this way than they would have by selling it, but that hardly justifies anything.

I recently sold my old wood cabinet, and one of my requirements for the buyer was that they kept the CRT monitor intact and wouldn't ever consider replacing it for an LCD or similar. I know it's ridiculously idealistic of me, but in the end a friend of mine bought it, and he loves it for what it is, which makes me happy.

Didn't Mao Zedong make China basically destroy everything that showed the existence of any culture before he showed up and changed up the place? Maybe this is just modern people doing that to themselves subconsciously. I can't wait to see the videos of "watch me burn old original family photos from the attic". Now that, I'd watch.


Same with 6-year-old me, but I saw anything as funny if the person showing it to me was laughing hard enough (@ my brother). Still do.

I think its one thing to destroy something new that is being currently manufactured, but to destroy something that is vintage that's another thing.

I could easily see the guy making such videos as:

Let's see what's inside a T-Rex skeleton from millions of years ago. Takes a hammer to it.

Let's see what's inside the Declaration of Independence. Cuts it with scissors.

Let's see what's inside the Rosetta Stone. Drops it off a building.

Let's see what's inside the Mona Lisa. Starts rubbing off the paint with paint thinner.

Let's see what's inside the Egyptian Pyramids. Blows it up with a nuke.

I don't think the adsense revenue from the views on such videos would cover the cost of purchasing those items, Erockbrox. ;P There are some very real reasons this isn't subject to such a kantian escalation to the extreme case.

You can easily find a Pac-Man for under $1000, I think. I'm sure there's many thousands of working Pac-Man machines in existence at the moment. (One of the most successful arcade games in history.)

I'd never want to destroy something like this, myself, but I can't say that I haven't wasted $1000 worth of something that probably someone else would value and would prefer I'd kept.

Would it for this? I thought YouTubers who weren't PewDiePie only got pocket change, or at least that's what they act like.

Regardless, I still think this guy's an asshole. Only thing I can say is at least he didn't destroy the PCB. If he does this to an Irem game, he'd better hope he doesn't live anywhere near Nacogdoches.

Yes, I think the over a million views it has would cover it, plus whatever he makes from other merchandise (someone mentioned advertising for an app?) as a bonus.

You know what else is funny, he said that the operators guide was cool and that he should keep it. Do you know what was inside that operators guide? How to open the machine without using a chainsaw! I guess people now days will do pretty much anything as long as they'll get views.

Unfortunatelly, that's the society we're living...
Videos like a guy bathing in Nutella or in instant noodles get lots of views, even if these things would be better used if were eaten, specially by hungry people.
Heck, there's even a guy who do junk videos with a toy similar to slime and other who had cut his 100k Youtube board and got tons of views!!
For many people, what matters is the spotlight and nothing else!
I really don't like o see these things being made, but I just don't care that much.
In the end it's their money who's being wasted.

He should join this guy then. Haha

I agree though. I LOVE watching iphones get destroyed in multifarious ways, such as being run over by a tank for instance. But old, precious stuff that will never be back? That were not manufactured by thousands of depressed, suicidal corporate slaves? I really don't like it.

I wonder how many people have made brand new Pacman PCBs (for example), given the current tend of people remaking the C64 and ZX Spectrum.

I can't speak for Pacman, but somebody has managed to recreate Space Invaders on breadboard.

From the purist point of view, that you could drop into a factory original cabinet, probably nobody. But if you do a search for "60-in-1", there is an extremely common bootleg board that uses standard JAMMA wiring that you can buy for maybe 30 bucks (at that price I was tempted to buy one until I heard the sound emulation is terrible in some of the games I was interested in). So there have been quite a few people converting their Pacman's and other classic games to JAMMA run this bootleg board. So there is probably an oversupply of Pacman boards (and quite a few of those boards from BITD were bootlegs also). I'm pretty sure you can set it to boot into a game and hide the menu. So if you see a Pacman game in an arcade, you might never know if it's an original or not.

FWIW, people actually have made brand new reproductions of Pacman and other cabinets. I mean just the wood cabinet itself, BYO paint and internals.

What I have seen though is some people have made reproductions of individual ASICs on some of the classic games, I believe the chip that generates the starfield in Galaga was one, since they apparently fail sometimes. And someone was plugging an FPGA into Pole Position board to work on reproducing every custom chip on there, with the goal of making an entirely new PCB. Because that game seems to be notorious for it's massive power consumption and board failure.

Perhaps the time has come to strike.

1. Put an NES emulator on a cheap JAMMA computer (search for raspberry pi jamma).
2. Add coin modes to homebrew games.
3. Hold location tests to refine each game's balance.
4. Sell the homebrew multigame as a conversion.
5. Snitch to the owners of copyright in the games commonly appearing on multis, claiming that terrible emulation is making the classic games look bad.

Would you not agree that poor emulation, especially with regards to input latency, damages the impression one might have on a homebrew game at such a location test?

That's why you use a good emulator, one optimized for latency on the particular hardware, as opposed to the "they just didn't care" mentality of some of the pirates.

I agree, but I bring up that point in direct contrast with most "it just works" solution available for the Raspberry Pi.