Today I bought a Nintendo Donkey Kong arcade machine on Craigslist for $300. I didn’t need one. In fact, this is the third one I’ve purchased in the last seven years. The first one is still living in my garage. I bought it in April 2000 from a vendor in Oklahoma via eBay for a whopping $600; it has been hacked to play Double Donkey Kong and other after-market goodies. A few years later, I bought the second one, also from Craigslist, in San Francisco from a woman with green hair who lived on Page Street. It was just a matter of convenience: she was four blocks away from my apartment and, again, I didn’t need one but what are you going to do? I didn’t even need a hand truck to get it home; just rolled it on the back wheels right on up to my apartment building in the lower Haight. I told my girlfriend it had followed me home. I can’t remember what I paid for it. Might have been four hundred dollars. I cleaned it up, put on some new reproduction side art and took it to work. It was a big hit. At the time, I believe we were in the middle of a wave of prolonged downsizing so it was a welcome relief to many in the building to be able to play a free arcade game located in the break room (that game eventually grew into an entire conference room of games before the room was eventually commandeered and turned into a Sarbanes Oxley compliance office). I sold that game to a friend; though his stewardship of it was short-lived and he eventually sold it to someone else. So it goes.
Fast forward to the present. Why another Donkey Kong machine? Why now? Today was my last day with the company and I suppose I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Donkey Kong will do that to you. Also, the game was looking pitiful and in need of some TLC; as some have a soft spot for animals down on their luck, I guess I feel the same way about classic video games. I couldn’t bear the thought of this game ending up in a landfill or in the back of someone’s storage shed, unloved. It played blind and it was delivered by a deaf man. Some wise guy had placed cellophane tape over the speaker grill (was that to prevent the kids from poking pencils into the speaker cone?). The game was missing the marquee. I happened to have an extra one. But that wasn’t the half of it. When the guy showed up at my house, the first thing he pulled out of his truck was the top of the cabinet–I’d never seen that piece disconnected before as it’s usually nailed on. I thought he’d be pulling the game out piece by piece and I couldn’t possibly turn the guy down; he’d driven more than 80 miles to my house to deliver the game. The next thing he pulled out of his truck was the metal bar that holds in the monitor bezel at the top (not sure why someone had taken it off but there it was (I had assumed the part was missing). Without this piece in place, someone had strategically placed some duct tape right on the front bezel; it was crusted over. Next out of the truck were the back door and, finally, the game itself. And inside the game: the original arcade manual and in pretty good condition. I had my work cut out for me. In short order, over the next couple of hours, I was able to complete the following:
- Take out the monitor and replace with a newly capped Sanyo monitor.
- Re-fasten the top of the game.
- Re-install the bezel guard.
- Cleaned the game with Tuff-Stuff.
- Replaced the jump button.
- Lubricated controls.
- Fixed light (but the starter went out after a while–need to get a new one).
- Installed marquee.
- Cleaned the bezel and the speaker with Goo-Gone.
Wow, almost good as new! Now it just needs some reproduction side-art and it’s good to go!
I added some credits and started a two player game and lost the next hour or longer in game play while outside the fog slowly crept in.
