Grandmother Buys Old Building In Japan And Finds 55 Classic Arcade Cabinets 133
An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery.
Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.
Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't; although there are '80s cabinets in there, the hardware in a lot of the pictures is late '90s or early 2000s vintage, and one of the articles suggests it has been closed for about ten years. Given that there's been a recession on that entire time, it might be that the value of the space didn't justify the cost of clearing out all those machines.
Re:neat, but was probably in use to 2000's (Score:3, Informative)
the whole story is over romanticized and not even technically true, there are posts about it on some of the arcade collector forums with more information
www.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=63536
I find it more fascinating when pieces of rare Japanese culture appear outside of Japan
mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2014/06/07/whac-a-bison-vega/
there was a bubble bobble 2 prototype arcade machine from nearby there dusted off only a blip of time ago too
Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:5, Informative)