once saw old pong arcade machine for sale on ebay for 40 bucks, though shipping was 50 putting it out of my price range at the time

Only $40? That ...seems really low for an arcade machine. Are you sure?

Why would it be more, collector value aside?
 

Man, back when I worked to an honest to god arcade a few years ago, things were awesome. We had Initial D, which got all kinds of love, DDR, which was our supreme attraction, a decent mix of silly ticket games and light guns and racing and fighting games. (I wasn't a fan of Tekken 5 arcade machine but everyone else in the bloody world played that thing).

Then the stupid company said we weren't making enough money and didn't renew the lease, so it went and closed up. It was probably because the company stopped moving machines around for us so we didn't get a new machine for 6 months. Gotta keep things changing sadly enough, even old machines that just haven't been there in a while.

The derth of Pac-Man is some of the arcade owners own fault, I was in one one time that was charging a buck a game to play Pac-Man. Nobody's gonna pay that when they got like, Carn-Evil for 25 cents or whatever.

Anyway, this one antique's depot I went to a lot about ten years ago had an Asteroids machine for sale, but I couldn't afford the 400 bucks they wanted. I was there again recently, they finally sold the thing. So somebody somewhere is playing some Asteroids.

I can't believe they had pong for 40 bucks, it was probably a typo or something. That or they just really had to move it out of their house or something.

The lack of Silent Scope in this thread is disappointing. Every arcade should have a Silent Scope machine.

BUT IT'S A MURDER SIMULATOR

I love the big Virtual On machines, myself. Way better than playing the game on a home system.