In my first year of University in 1997 (I studied Animation and ultimately wanted to work with games.. However that never happened - i'm now a SysAdmin) my friends and I discovered emulators. SNES, Megadrive (Genesis) emulators that worked really well and of course MAME. Back then there were different sorts of Emulators for different games; RAGE for R-type and it's sequels aswell as other Irem games like In the Hunt. There was also Callus for CPS1 games, and it was hard to keep up with all the latest releases of emulators, builds, patches etc. In stepped DavesClassics, this site was awesome and it's a shame it no longer exists. It used to be at www.davesclassics.com/ and I would check this site EVERY DAMN day. Eventually they got an irc chat system going and I would join as 'wildcard64' (homage to my Wildcard64 I had just got for my N64) through the embedded java applet on the site - and this is where the spark to start collecting arcade games came from...

One day I was in the channel when someone joined called 'vidkid', we got talking and I found out he collected real arcade games. Man I thought that was pretty cool, he explained how he phoned up Operators and sometimes got things for cheap and also showed me some of the sites on the Internet of where to get games. Being from the UK 99% of those sites were of no use to me, so he went off and gave me this link www.coin.demon.co.uk (which still works today!). In the PCB section I found one of my FAVOURITE ever games, Rabbit Punch and it was only Ł45 too! What was even more spectacular was that this Operator lived about 20 minutes away from me. So one phone call later I arranged a time to come round and buy the pcb - and that's pretty much how it all started. I never ever spoke to vidkid again as the demise of Daves Classics was soon to follow - I remember it had something to do with roms being on the site and a game developer threatening to sue if the site wasn't shut down - a sad shame really. If YOU were vidkid or knows who he is please get in touch.

So I had my first pcb and nothing to play it on.. So I got out the Yellow Pages and started phoning around. Man this was a tough job, most people were not interested in giving me the time of day or told me they had thrown away any spare pcbs or cabinets many moons ago. About an hour or two into my search I phoned up Bognor Pier (www.bognorpier.co.uk/) and was pleasantly suprised when I didn't get a negative response. The person put me on hold so she could get her boss. I spoke to him and explained I was after some JAMMA cabinets and boards and he told me to come down as he had some cabinets out the back I could probably use. So I arranged to meet him at the arcade at the weekend.

When the weekend came I drove down there and met the guy, John. He explained he owned the whole pier (it wasn't owned by a corporation) so they kept alot of their games and if I wanted to buy any I only had to speak to him. We walked out of the arcade and all the way to the end of the pier where an out building stood. This thing was _right_ on the end of the pier, you may be able to see if from their website) Once in there you could actually see the sea through the wooden floor boards, it was pretty crazy stuff. Inside was a load of games. Must have been about 25 JAMMA cabs, a three player 25" screen Super Sprint, an Operation Wolf, an Outrun and some other lesser well known 'dedicated' games. There was a hole in the roof of the place in one corner and pidgeons had come in and their was bird crap all over the place, including on the games - but this was one of the coolest moments I can remember :-)

He wanted Ł25 (about $45USD) a game, and everything was put in working, but was sold as untested if it came out (something i've got used to alot over the years). So I immediately bought 2 JAMMA cabs and did a deal for any pcbs that were not in any games and then went and hired a truck so I could bring them home. I also made a deal there and then for the Outrun, Op Wolf, Super Sprint, a Bally Sente Night Stocker and a couple more JAMMA cabs - all for Ł150 all in. The deal was I would come back the next weekend for these games.

Once I got the games home I paid my 9 year old brother and his friend to clean all the bird mess off the games for $10 hehe. They were really filthy - must have been about a 5 years worth of crap on them. I remember it being a lovely summers day so they cleaned them out in the garden. Once they were clean I couldn't wait any longer - I simply had to plug them in. It's important to note here that at this time I had absolutely no idea about arcade machines. I didn't know about their voltages or what made them work, and looking back this probably wasn't the best idea to do seeing a monitor chassis could have come loose in transportation of the games - or something similar. Anyhow.. turn them on I did and work they bloody did too!! One was Robocop and the other was Carrier Airwing. Well that was it, i was totally hooked for life.

On return to the Pier to grab the other games I had to hire the use of my girlfriend (of that time) Dad as we needed a 7.5 tonne truck and my age and license wouldn't allow this. So off we went to pickup the Ł150 deal I made. We started loading the games in and when it came to put the last of the games, the JAMMA cabs in, as they were going up lift, the light caught the sides and I saw the words DEFENDER embossed through the black painted sides. Man that was pretty cool :-) Of course nowadays I could tell a Defender or nearly any other cabinet just by shape but back then I was a n00b and had no idea. I paid John and as we were walking back through the arcade I saw a yellow Midway Pacman machine at the rear of the arcade, all alone but working. I immediately went over to it and it was in pretty respectable condition. John had followed me over and stated they had this machine since new. Infact they used to have about 8 of them back in the heyday but this was the only one left. I knew i wanted this and immediately asked to buy it off him. Unfortunately he said no :-(. So I paid up and then we drove back to my parents house where I promply filled up their garage with what they described as my 'junk' ;-).

That Pacman kept stirring at the back of my mind and what followed was two months worth of phone calls to John where I bugged him to sell me the game. One day he appeared to give up, and said he would think about it. Two weeks later he phoned me backup and said he would sell it to me for what it had made in the last financial year... Which turned out to be Ł175 :-) Man I was pretty over the moon about that as by this time I was pretty up on 'classics' and the prices they were fetching. I still remember wheeling that thing through the arcade with the biggest grin on my face and loading it up into the van. The guy that helped me move the game was called Ben I believe, and he was their engineer. He asked me if I liked the old games and I said I did. I told him what I would absolutely love was a Starwars cockpit, "Oh" he said, "There's one of those in a small arcade down the road".I couldn't believe what I was hearing and promptly got the approximate directions from him and drove there to find it. Well I did find it eventually. It was right by the seafront in a town called Pagham. However the place was closed. I knocked on the door and someone peered through the window - the owner infact. After speaking to him I found the game was not for sale... And so again I bombarded the place with phonecall upon phonecall where I kept getting the answer of "no". One day I phoned and the son answered, again the answer was no, but he said he would try and talk his father around as he felt they needed money for newer games.After that I didn't phone for a while and actually thought I was never going to get it, then a around a month later the phone rang and it was the son. He said they would sell me the Starwars cockpit for Ł700. I was pretty over the moon, even though I had never been in the arcade (it was off season) and hadn't even seen the condition of the machine. So.. I rang around and booked a van for that very weekend, and drove up their to get the game. When they opened up there were some pretty interesting games in there, what was even more awesome was the games were truly in OUTSTANDING condition. The Starwars was a 9/10 and had no wear at all. Other games in the arcade was a truly beautiful Gauntlet that had Wrestlemania in it and an Outrun in a strange looking cockpit cabinet. I was offered the Gauntlet and Outrun for Ł50 each, but declined. I actually sat in the Outrun and wondered what the hell the cabinet was. I knew it must be a conversion and probably had a bootleg pcb inside, but played a few games anyhow. We then loaded the Starwars, paid the money and left. When I got home we unloaded and I opened the Starwars up. The cockpit had a WG6100 monitor inside instead of the original 25" Amplifone and when I put the game into test mode it had some mathbox errors - but the condition of the game was so awesome I was totally and utterly over the moon.

Looking back at that day I really REALLY wish I had taken that strange Outrun cockpit. It was also in pretty damn good condition too, and I later came to realise it was actually an Atari Firefox cockpit.. :-( Doh..

Anyhow that's the full story of how I started collecting games, from the time I first started playing Emulators until the time I picked up the Starwars cockpit must have been around 10 months., but the madness never stopped :-)