Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Episode 5-Arcade Edition- Arcade Picker’s Cory Missall

THE PINBALL RESTORER’S PODCAST·podcast_episode·1h 16m·analyzed·Aug 9, 2021
Buzzsprout-8997427
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Arcade Pickers' Corey Missall on restoring vintage arcades and bridging costumes to collecting.

Summary

Matt Lestrude interviews Corey Missall, an Arizona-based arcade collector, restorer, and content creator known for his 'Arcade Pickers' YouTube series and 'Superhero Renzel' character rental business. Corey discusses his journey from building elaborate superhero costumes to acquiring and restoring vintage arcade and pinball machines, including his first major restoration of a Star Wars arcade cabinet and how that led to launching the Arcade Pickers series with local route operator 'Flynn.' The conversation touches on virtual pinball as a gateway to real machines, the arcade one-up phenomenon, and how restoration projects blend technical skill with passion.

Key Claims

  • Corey is 6'7" tall and uses his height as part of his superhero character appeal

    high confidence · Corey stated directly: 'I'm six foot seven' and discussed how his height made him stand out as Batman at the festival

  • The Superhero Renzel business now has over 125 different suits in storage

    high confidence · Corey: 'now we have over 125 different suits and storage that we can pull on and meet people's needs'

  • Corey does 4-10 shows per weekend across the Arizona area with his character business

    high confidence · Corey: 'we go out and do, you know, anywhere from four to sometimes nine or ten shows a weekend all over the Arizona area'

  • Corey owns 13 pinball/arcade machines in his basement

    high confidence · Matt: 'even though I own 13 machines downstairs right now'

  • Theater of Magic pinball machines cost around $10,000

    medium confidence · Matt discussing purchasing a real pinball table: 'When you want to go get the real deal, you're paying $10,000'

  • Flynn, a private arcade collector in Phoenix, has been running an arcade route since the late 1970s/early 1980s

    high confidence · Corey: 'He was kind of a private person, but he was, it turns out, one of the oldest route guys in Phoenix. He's been running a route with arcades since the late 70s, early 80s'

  • The Star Wars Trilogy arcade cabinet was priced at $600 when Corey found it and is now worth several thousand dollars

    high confidence · Corey: 'I didn't realize that $600 for that cabinet was basically like giving it away because they're selling for several thousand now'

  • Corey has left the Star Wars arcade cabinet running in his garage for over a year and a half continuously

    high confidence · Corey: 'I almost never turn it off, so it's been on for over a year and a half now'

Notable Quotes

  • “Just really loved the reward of bringing back the electronics and bringing back these games.”

    Corey Missall @ early in episode — Establishes Corey's core motivation for restoration work and collecting

  • “My wife is actually a really, really good sewer. She can pretty much take anything and sew it into anything. She's super talented.”

    Corey Missall @ mid-episode — Highlights the collaborative nature of his costume business and family involvement

  • “When you want to go get the real deal, you're paying $10,000. And that's kind of heartbreaking to a point.”

    Matt Lestrude @ pinball discussion section — Captures the price barrier issue in the pinball hobby and its impact on new collectors

  • “If that's what it takes it's more of like the kindling to the bonfire of you know hey I've got this little machine let me figure out how it works oh hey there's a real machine let me figure out how that works.”

    Corey Missall @ virtual pinball discussion — Defends arcade one-ups and virtual pinball as gateways to the physical hobby

  • “I literally took that thing down to the nuts and bolts and had the pieces all laid out all over the floor, literally down to the nuts and bolts to where I was soaking the screws in navel jelly to get the rust off.”

    Corey Missall @ Star Wars restoration section — Demonstrates the extreme level of detail and care Corey puts into restoration projects

  • “I'm a big American Pickers fan... I thought, man, how cool would it be to come in here and pick this guy's place?”

    Corey Missall @ Arcade Pickers origin section — Reveals the inspiration for the Arcade Pickers YouTube series concept

Entities

Corey MissallpersonMatt LestrudepersonArcade Pickerscontent_seriesSuperhero RenzelbusinessAmerican PickersmediaFlynnpersonJohnny ArcadepersonRetro Ralphperson

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: Corey Missall appears as guest on The Pinball Restorer's Podcast Episode 5, discussing his Arcade Pickers YouTube series and restoration work

    high · This is Episode 5 of The Pinball Restorer's Podcast with guest Corey Missall

  • ?

    community_signal: Arizona arcade restoration community includes multiple YouTube content creators (Corey Missall, Johnny Arcade, Retro Ralph) collaborating and learning from each other

    high · Corey mentioned reaching out to Johnny Arcade after watching his videos; collaboration with Retro Ralph on LCD conversion techniques

  • ?

    venue_signal: Level One barcade in Phoenix features modern presentation technology (overhead cameras and screens) for pinball table viewing, indicating venue infrastructure investment

    high · Matt described: 'they've got where they've got the cameras shooting down on the top of the pinball table with the screen up above so everyone can see the table'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Arcade One-Up cabinets serve as low-risk entry point ($400 price point) to arcade and pinball hobby, generating interest in restoration and real machines

    high · Corey's entire arcade journey started with Marvel Super Heroes One-Up purchase; he defends the value: 'You're buying something that has new components...less of a risk than bringing something in that has a CRT monitor'

  • ?

    pricing_signal: Star Wars Trilogy arcade cabinet appreciated significantly from $600 purchase price to 'several thousand' dollars current value

    high · Corey: 'I didn't realize that $600 for that cabinet was basically like giving it away because they're selling for several thousand now'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.230

0:00
Begin transmission. Pinball is an all-consuming retro passion formed from the ashes of the great arcade empires.
0:16
Mechanical ghosts that were abandoned and often hidden wait silently to be found. There are those who seek to find them and bring them back to their former glory and preserve the arcade legacy. This is the story of Corey Massal.
0:57
the Pinball Restorers Podcast. I am your host, Matt Lestrude, and here we are on episode number five. It was a long break there, folks, and I'm sorry. I did not mean to be gone that long, but I'm going to be doing back-to-back episodes, and on this episode, I have an interview with Arcade Picker's very own Corey Massal. You may follow his series on YouTube. You also may have used his business, Superhero Renzel. The guy is practically dressed up as every major popular character there is, from SpongeBob SquarePants to Hulkbuster Iron Man. So, without further ado... You tilted my game! You were no fun, Batman! I'm a hero! I'm holding out for a hero till the end of the night!
1:46
Everybody who's restoring any of these old games, I had a Battlezone, I had a Cinematronics World Series of Season in the basement. I got those for free, believe it or not. Oh, wow. But then I got a pinball machine for the other. Started tilting the arcade in the basement. My wife was right about to strangle me, but she said she hadn't seen me so happy in so long. Just really loved the reward of bringing back the electronics and bringing back these games. When I was scrolling through YouTube, and you end up seeing the other guys who do similar stuff. You see Joe's Classic Arcades. He does a lot of various repairs. You've seen a former guest I've had on, Kevin Coughlin, a.k.a. Captain Retro. He's done quite a bit of stuff. I'm always amazed at what you guys end up scoring games for and where the heck you guys find 40 of them in one location. But what I think is actually probably the more interesting part of this, what you do, aside from that you continue down with Arcade Pickers. Tell me about the rental business. I saw that video. In the introduction, I said literally from SpongeBob characters, to the fact that you have a Hulkbuster Ironman. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I heard you talk on the other podcast that you're, are you right around 40, 42 years old, somewhere in there? Yeah, I'm 40. Yeah, that's right. So I grew up Christopher Reeve all the way. I'd pop in the Superman VHS tapes, and there's several pictures of me as a kid with the underoos on, with the underwear pulled over my blue jammy bottoms and the cape on, and my mom still jokes with me because I used to wear it to the grocery store and I'd go outside and play with like full, you know, blue long sleeve pajamas on with the cape and the underoos. And, you know, it's basically a pretty cool story. We, uh, we went to this fall festival over here in Arizona for Halloween time. And, uh, just kind of out of hobby, I was on Facebook or YouTube or somewhere. And I saw this guy did a video about, you know, how to make a Batman suit. And he was taking the foam stuff that you buy to put underneath your workout equipment. It's like EVA foam is like the puzzle piece foam pieces. And you basically, you know, you print out templates and you cut them out and you put them on this foam and you put together a Batman suit and you paint everything black and gloss it and get it all fancy. And so I did that just kind of for fun because I thought it'd be cool to be Batman for Halloween this year. And I thought I'd surprise my kids while we were at this festival. And my parents and law were there with my wife and I came out from the car dressed in full Dark Knight gear and I came in and you know everybody loved it and the natural reaction from the crowd at the place was all of a sudden the line formed and everybody wants a picture with Batman and kind of the thing that made it really cool was that a lot of people don't know but I'm six foot seven so you see this six foot seven Batman over here you're like you know it gets your attention and as I'm kind of walking out of the place when we're heading home the owner of the farm comes up to me and he's like hey, how would you feel about if I hire you to come out here on Friday night and Saturday night, and I'll pay you to come out here and just stand somewhere and let people take pictures with you. So that's pretty cool. Let me think about that. And then when I got home, we were kind of sitting around having some food, and my wife's mom says, hey, you should think about putting this online. There might be more people that want to do this. And that's kind of where it took off. Back then, about nine years ago, we threw it on Craigslist, and Batman will come to your party and put some pictures on there and people started calling and that eventually morphed into, hey, do you guys have Spider-Man? Hey, do you guys have Superman? Hey, do you guys have Captain America? Because if you remember about that time was when all the superhero movies were really just flooding the market. It was Avengers, it was Batman, it was Justice League, all that stuff was pouring out. So we had to get creative. Didn't want to really put a whole lot of money into it at that point because I was still doing a regular day job at that point. And so I just kind of got creative and hit up the Goodwills, and we'd find stuff that would work. And my wife is actually a really, really good sewer. She can pretty much take anything and sew it into anything. She's super talented. So she helped me put together a core group of costumes. So I think the first year we only had Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America. Well, then, as you know, as you venture online and you find other tutorials, I eventually found, you know, here's how to make an Iron Man suit. And that was kind of like the master build if you're building with the foam to where, you're basically doing an adult Lego, only it's a costume. You're cutting out five, six, 700 pieces and hot gluing them together and shaping everything. And it's quite the process, but I eventually got the Ironman done. And then that one, of course, had lights and sounds and all kinds of things in it. So that's what really made it take off was people were like, oh man, we can have Ironman who's six foot seven come to our party. And I put speakers in the suit in the whole nine yards. So kept it going from there. And then I actually met a really cool guy out in the public who showed an interest in what I do. And he's been working with me ever since. So he's kind of like my partner in crime. When we go out, he does the bad guys or does some of the suits that I don't fit into. So him and I roll out on the weekends and we do shows, birthdays, events, movie premieres, school visits, wherever someone needs us. And now actually my son, who I was telling you about, he's 14 now, and so he's 6'1", so for the last couple years we've been using him to do, like, pretty much all of our Spider-Man, and you saw some of the SpongeBob and the cartoon characters. Well, they're not built for someone my height, so we put him in those, and I kind of do the entertainment part of things with the microphone while he's got the suit on, and we have a blast, man. We go out and do, you know, anywhere from four to sometimes nine or ten shows a weekend all over the Arizona area, and people just eat it up. They love it. And what started as just a handful of characters, now we have over 125 different suits and storage that we can pull on and meet people's needs. And if someone wants something that we don't have and we can put it together for them in time, then we'll do it. So it's been a blast. And, of course, we're working with kids, so what more can you ask for than to go out and hang out with kids all day and make them laugh and have a good time, you know? At the same time, you get to be that. You know, you get to take on the persona. I just think it'd be funny if you ever, as Batman ever have to fight somebody, like mock fight somebody as Bane. I don't know where you're at. At 6'7", I don't know where you're finding a Bane.
Kevin Coughlin
person
Joe's Classic Arcadescontent_creator
Holly Missallperson
Jeremyperson
Level Onevenue
Star Wars Trilogy arcade cabinetgame
Marvel Super Heroes One-Up arcadeproduct
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcadeproduct
The Pinball Restorer's Podcastpodcast
Convergenceevent
Theater of Magicgame
Multiballcompany
Comet Pinballcompany
  • ?

    operational_signal: Phoenix-area arcade route operator 'Flynn' has maintained arcade machines on location throughout Phoenix and Tucson since late 1970s/early 1980s with ~100 machines in his collection

    high · Corey described Flynn: 'one of the oldest route guys in Phoenix. He's been running a route with arcades since the late 70s, early 80s...He still goes out and collects quarters from here to Tucson'

  • ?

    restoration_signal: LCD screen conversion is now standard practice for restoring vintage arcade cabinets with broken CRT monitors, characterized as straightforward (VGA hookup)

    high · Retro Ralph helped Corey with LCD conversion; Corey found it 'super easy' - 'just plug in the circuit board, plug in the VGA'

  • $

    market_signal: Real pinball machines priced at $10,000+ create accessibility barrier for new collectors, potentially limiting market growth

    high · Matt: 'When you want to go get the real deal, you're paying $10,000. And that's kind of heartbreaking to a point.'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pragmatic acceptance emerging in community that virtual pinball/arcade one-ups serve as legitimate gateway products despite initial purist resistance

    high · Corey and Matt both defend arcade one-ups and virtual pinball as 'kindling to the bonfire' and legitimate pathway to real machines

  • ?

    industry_signal: Multiple YouTube content creators specializing in arcade restoration creating network of tutorials and collaborative knowledge-sharing in arcade community

    medium · Matt referenced Joe's Classic Arcades, Kevin Coughlin/Captain Retro, Johnny Arcade, Retro Ralph as established YouTube arcade content creators with significant followings

    • 8:11
    Unless you want to do a literal movie route because, you know, Tom Hardy was a lot shorter than Christian Bale.
    8:18
    Yeah, well, we've had that come up and had a couple guys that wanted to do it. But really, I mean, with so many options, you know, we've done Joker. We've done Deathstroke. We do live shows in the city where they'll literally shut down a city block, and they'll have superheroes come out and do a fight, and we try to keep it not so much like WWF, but we're wearing so much padding and stuff that you can actually hit someone or kick someone, and it looks realistic to the kids, so it's a blast. I went to a convention here in Minnesota. It's called Convergence, and I went a few years ago. cosplayers are a huge thing especially when they take on like video game characters and i literally i'm walking around in the this whole center pavilion and the entire group dressed up as mortal combat got to go head to head with everyone that was dressed up from street fire it was a complete group on both sides so i think there's a few videos that float around on the internet somewhere but i've i've always been impressed by the amount of work that a detail that goes into creating those suits those costumes and people have seen that on youtube the guys who made even the one guy recently made a motorcycle helmet that does the full um it's fully mechanized that opens up just like an iron man helmet now i don't know what the safety rating is anymore once you've done that, but it did look cool on the motorcycle.
    9:46
    But, no, so that, to me, that was like, that was such a cool thing. I mean, I do love retro stuff. I do love comics. My kids laugh at me because I can pretty much ruin pretty much all the continuity of Marvel Cinematic Universe because I've read most of this stuff. And so one of the last films we watch, my wife just starts hitting me. She's like, stop ruining the movies for the kids.
    10:08
    I'm like, sorry. That's really funny. We can relate because I actually didn't want, this is shocking to a lot of people, but I actually never read any comics ever. So I don't know any of the comic storylines at all. For me, it was all the movies. It was Superman, Reeve rolls right into Michael Keaton, Batman rolls right into the Tobey Maguire, Spider-Man. And then from there, and Jeremy, the guy who I mentioned who I work with, he does read comics. So he's that guy for me who often is like telling me all these bizarre facts and things and telling my son. And I'm like, wow, I had no idea. I just never had the time, I guess, or the interest to get into it, but collected all the action figures, watched all the DVDs, the VHSs, the cartoons, the movies. And that's basically where I got all my knowledge and my passion for it. And, you know, we really do put a lot of effort into telling people, you know, when you have Batman or somebody come out, like we know, we assume most of the kids have seen the movie. so we know everything about it. We know the storyline. We know how to answer all the questions. We have the correct music playing in the background. You know, we talk like the character. So, you know, a lot of the companies that do similar to what we do, they might just send out the same guy who says, hey, I'm an actor, and he plays Prince Charming, and then he plays Batman, and then he plays some other guy who doesn't really know the character. And as a fan of that character and you're hiring someone to come out, they can spot that right away. And so that's why I feel like we took off and were so successful because people were like, man, it was like actually having this character here. It was great. So, again, just a lot of fun. And it's a tough life when you have to do, you know, superhero characters and then video games. So I thank God every day and thank my wife for supporting my ventures and putting up with my crazy ideas and really being supportive of that. And I'm not going to downplay that. Our wives, anybody who's significant other is involved or has to, quote-unquote, deal with what happens with passion projects. Because think about the amount of time that you spend putting those costumes together. That's a labor of love. That means you've stayed up over 24 hours before just to get one done. Or you just lost track of time. We poorly support the following companies. What are you buying? What are you selling? Multiball. The pinball place. Your premier retailer and authorized dealer for Stern, Jersey Jack, and American Pinball. Large selection of new and used games, parts, and accessories. Find out more at pinballplace.com.
    12:42
    Let me guess, another poorly chosen license piece of crap. Aziz Light! Comet Pinball, the world's largest collection of pinball LED lighting. Back box and play field illumination featuring star post lights, flashers, blinkers, non-ghosting, matrix kits button illumination flex kits and much more at comic pinball.com now back to the show that's happened with that's happened with a lot of the projects especially when i fell into this when i stumbled onto arcade picker because i loved the show american picker i did but there was the thing i never got to see what they did with this stuff and i always felt like that was like the missing component and i know that some of this is to either you know when you buy like game marquees it's either going to be a collected piece as it is somebody's going to put that in a frame or they're going to use it to fix a game that is damaged. It's always a back and forth of acquisition, trade, sell, or fix and repair. And I think I was talking to you the other night, you were actually beating up on a Tron. Did you actually own that or was that at somebody else's place? So basically we have one of those every table all-in-one virtual pinballs. And so I haven't dabbled into the pinball world yet. I know a couple of guys here in the Valley that I'll probably even tell you about who are like the pinball wizards who have 40 or 50 tables at their house. And I've always loved the idea of pinball, but we got basically a multi-cade that had all the arcade games, but it also had the pinball games. And my wife, Holly, she really took a liking to it, especially the pinball effects ones, because you know what those are kind of like pinball, but they're kind of like a video game because there's a lot going on. So she got really attached to that. There's the versatility. This is why I always bring this up. I said, you can't talk about pinball unless you talk about the arcades because that's where a lot of – I'm 40 years old. I remember going to an arcade. And so, yes, you played arcade games. You played pinball machines. You played all this. And so a lot of guys don't necessarily want to talk about virtual because it's not the same. And I hear that. I get that. But let me put it this way. even though I own 13 machines downstairs right now, for me to get a theater of magic, I would have to possibly sell four of those and hunt and then get one that's probably beat up.
    15:07
    And so you have to gauge what you're willing to spend. The advantage of a virtual table is that it gives you the opportunity to play those games, tables that you might not come across. Kevin Coughlin brought it up that he's like, here you're going to play in Indiana Jones. Cool, you can fall in love with it. Now here's the problem. When you want to go get the real deal, you're paying $10,000.
    15:32
    And that's kind of heartbreaking to a point. And it's nobody's fault. One involves, I mean, everything involves circuit boards and an MPU. But when it comes to the real deal, there's physics, there was a physical layout, all that was done, and it's a physical machine. So when you have a limited run, the price skyrockets. Whereas if you can create that virtually, at least you're going to, I don't think it hurts the hobby at all. I think it helps get people into it. Well, no, and you're right. I feel like, you know, now that we do, because during quarantine, when we were on lockdown, that was kind of when we got this cabinet and we were playing a lot of the virtual pinball. And, you know, it was several nights a week. We were, you know, we can't go anywhere. We can't do anything. let's play these games and we really got attached and then when it came to let's go out and there's a real arcade that has the pinball tables because we have a really popular barcade here in phoenix called level one and they've got a lot of the really good classic pinballs and arcades and they've even got where they've got the cameras shooting down on the top of the pinball table with the screen up above so everyone can see the table and we went in there and holly and i had a last. I mean, we played it and we actually are planning another trip back to play it some more. So the end game goal of us getting into virtual pinball was we had no interest at all. And now we're looking at, I would really like to get a good quality table in here as part of our arcade that we can play to have real pinball. Because I know after playing the real one, I realized how different it is. And it's really kind of the same concept with arcades, which when I tell you, you know, kind of how Pickers got started was, you know, the arcade one-up and I know that there's a lot of hate towards that and there's a lot of the purists who just are disgusted by it but the bottom line is it gets people interested in the hobby and gets people started and if that's what it takes it's more of like the kindling to the bonfire of you know hey I've got this little machine let me figure out how it works oh hey there's a real machine let me figure out how that works and suddenly now they're buying and restoring cabinets which is basically what got me into this, Matt, was, you know, I was not really planning on doing arcades. I mean, I grew up, I'm sure, like you did. I think I remember you telling a little brief history of what you did, but, you know, I had the Atari, and we played the heck out of it, and then it was begging my parents for the Nintendo, and we had to wait, like, two years after it launched to get the Nintendo, and then it was, man, Super Mario Brothers all day, you know, playing the heck out of it, and then we rolled that into Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo. So I went down the path of all the consoles up until when I hit about 360, Xbox 360. That was kind of when we were starting a family and we had a couple kids and the game time just wasn't really there and we had bigger fish to fry and more important things to do. So my gaming kind of plateaued off and kind of started to sink down and didn't really have a whole lot of interest in it. still had that core, you know, love for the games. But then my son grew a little older. And when he was about, I think he was nine or whatever, when the PS4 launched, and we got him a PS4 and got him a flat screen. And he kind of rekindled the gaming spirit in our house and was loving that he could talk to his friends online. And he still does that to this day. But I was in Walmart, and I wasn't really planning on doing anything. But you know, I was walking through the electronics, and here's this Marvel Super Heroes Arcade one-up.
    19:06
    So it hitting both chords for me It hitting Super Heroes and Arcades all at once and i thinking man this thing only 400 bucks yeah and that what i don when i was 20 okay so 20 years ago i really wanted a raiden game because you know what i love vertical scroller shooting games even though you know galaga klax and so forth but i loved raiden and you know what you never you could never have enough quarters to get far enough into that game and i want and my buddy found out about this coin op auction and so we went there holy crap uh you could buy six player x-men it was 150 bucks just get it out of here because you know nobody has the room for an item that size you're gonna put it in your garage because you're not getting it in the house that's i just remember the pricing now let's fast forward it's been 20 years okay so when you buy this is the other reason i think that people buy it bought the arcade one up and people can hate on this. You're buying something that has new components. And we can all make the argument about the fact that it's cheaply made, but it's less of a risk than bringing something in that has a CRT monitor that was left on for 24 hours a day for 15 years with life and then sat in somebody's basement for another 10. And so when I saw the price, to your point, that price point, 400 bucks and I could have this in the corner of a game room next to a dart board and yeah I ended up I brought home Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles right off the bat I still have it down there I still remember the conversation there was no reason really to buy it and there wasn't really a place for it but I just I told Polly I said you know can I talk to you real quick and I don't normally do this but I just said you know there's this cabinet it's 400 bucks I really want to get it. We can afford it. And she said, go ahead, babe. I can tell you really want it. I love you. Go get it. So I went and got it and I kind of brought it in and I didn't have, this is what's funny. I didn't have the riser. I didn't even know what a riser was at that point. So I just had this four foot arcade, which I, you know, I'm six, seven. So it was hilarious because I'm basically having to sit down on like a, like a, a small chair to play it. And kids didn't really have much interest in it. It was mainly just me. But then like you said, I went in and go, oh, there's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one. So same conversation. Honey, I really want this. You know, I'm not going to get a whole bunch of them. I just want these two. And got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then from there I got onto YouTube and started looking at, you know, hey, these things are cool. Let me look them up on YouTube. And then I started to see all the modifications that were going on and all the different things you could do with them. And it kind of reminded me of how I was interested in the Batman and the Iron Man suit. And I really didn't know where to start or what to do. And I was watching these videos and I noticed that Arizona actually has several arcade guru people here that, you know, they're online. They have channels. They do stuff like this. And so I reached out to this guy, Johnny Arcade, who lives about an hour from me. And I said, hey, man, I watched your videos. Is there any way you could help me get started on this? And he was super cool and was like, you know, yeah, no problem. And if you could build an Iron Man suit, dude, you can do this, no problem. So I tackled it, and I modded that first Marvel Super Heroes unit with the light-up buttons and the Raspberry Pi and all the games and the subwoofer and the speakers. And then at that point, now I felt like, oh, man, this thing is gnarly. You know, it's like got neon lights on it. It's got all the games. It's awesome.
    22:44
    And then I did the same thing with the Turtles, which was a lot more complicated as far as drilling wood and longer wires and more stuff and it was more fancy but then I said well you know I really like these and so that prompted me to I remember the night I was just kind of in the lounge chair in the living room reclined back and I was searching through marketplace and I went back I remember you know usually marketplace you just go scroll down for five minutes or so and you know whatever's on there new you take a look at but I actually went back about six months on the feed in Marketplace, and I saw a guy selling Star Wars Trilogy, the deluxe edition, so the big one, the giant sit-down one with the huge screen, and he's got it priced at $600.
    23:30
    And it says, may or may not work. I'm in the military. I'm out of the state. It's being stored. My dad's storing it. If you want to buy it, come take a look. So my son and I went out there one day, and the guy was there, and it was actually in an airplane hangar for people that own their own private planes. During COVID, there was a safety protocol where they weren't allowed to have anything inside the hangar other than the aircraft. So obviously up until that point, people were storing everything they could in their hangar because their plane only took up a quarter of the hangar. So he's got these, I think he had a Stun Runner and he had a Star Wars in there. But I mean, we're talking, at this point, I hadn't worked on any real arcades, but this thing was roached out. I mean, it had cobwebs, rust, you know, the screen wouldn't turn on. It just looked really bad. It looked like, like you said, like, you know, basically let's throw it in the dumpster. But at that point, I didn't have the eye that I do now. So all I could do was plug it in, and the spark was when you plug it in, the force feedback joystick kind of did its thing. It started calibrating like up, down, left, right, and then I let it sit for a minute while I was talking to the guy about it, and all of a sudden we hear the sounds come on, the attract mode. And so I'm like, well, it works. I know it works, but I have no idea how to get this thing going. So I tried to negotiate the price. And at that point, I didn't realize that $600 for that cabinet was basically like giving it away because they're selling for several thousand now. But I told the guy, okay. And I told Holly, I said, there's this cabinet. I think I can fix it up. I think I can get it working. And then we can sell it and we can make some banks. So she says, okay, you know, go ahead and get it. and it was a son of a what to get it here because it was so heavy and huge, but we got it in the garage, and I literally took that thing down to the nuts and bolts and had the pieces all laid out all over the floor, literally down to the nuts and bolts to where I was soaking the screws in navel jelly to get the rust off, and I sanded down all the rust on the cabinet, and I got everything fully restored, which was basically the same as getting an Iron Man suit ready because it's all cosmetic, so I had no problem doing paint and taking things apart and putting them together. But now I'm like, okay, the screen doesn't work. So I had had a brief acquaintance with Retro Ralph, who's another Arizona YouTuber, and I knew that he had a lot of videos about arcades and whatnot. So he actually helped me figure out how to do the LCD conversion, which I didn't realize was super easy. I just thought it was some complex thing. So he's like, no, you know, you just plug in the circuit board, plug in the VGA. So I plugged in this little 10-inch monitor, and boom, I've got the Star Wars screen on this little 10-inch monitor. So I thought, oh, great. So I went and bought a huge flat-screen TV that fit right into the original case, hooked it up, hooked up the VGA. I actually replaced the subwoofer, put new speakers in it to add surround sound, and that was my first big arcade that was like, man, this thing is loud. You can get in it. You're in the Star Wars game. And so we played the heck out of that thing. Even in 110 degree weather, we'd go out in the garage and play it in the heat. We had, you know, a portable AC blowing in your face so you could play it. But then, you know, I told Holly, I said, I don't really want to sell this, babe. I'm really sorry. And she knew how much blood, sweat and tears I had put into it. she knew that I had spent, you know, I think I spent about two months restoring it, and she said, I get it, you know, I get it. She's like, hang on to it, so I was super excited about that, and it's still back in the cove in my garage. There's one little cove that kind of, it sits right in, and it's back there right now, and the funny thing is, I almost never turn it off, so it's been on for over a year and a half now. It's just on in my garage, and I have it on, and I know how to fix and repair it so if anything goes out, it's great. But, you know, from there, it basically got me into, hey, I can do this again. If I can do this on this, I can do this again. So I started looking around at stuff. And the reason Arcade Pickers really got started was I started messaging with people. And at that point, I was kind of working with Ralph, who is big in the arcade community and was known for repairing monitors, repairing PCBs, getting everything working, and he has a home arcade. So I was working with him, and he asked me, he said, Corey, there's this killer instinct that I want, but it's an hour and a half drive from me, but it's right by your house. Do you mind going over there and checking it out? So I go over to this guy's house, and we'll call him Flynn because that's his name on the episode. He was kind of a private person, but he was, it turns out, one of the oldest route guys in Phoenix. He's been running a route with arcades since the late 70s, early 80s. So he still goes out and collects quarters from here to Tucson. He's got machines in pizza places, arcades, everywhere you can think of, laundromats. So I pull up to his garage, and I'm overwhelmed. You know, I'm like, oh, my gosh, this guy has 100 arcade machines, and some of them are just out in the elements. Like, they're just sitting outside. Some of them are out in a covered canopy in his driveway. And so I said, you know, Ralph, this is insane. You won't believe what this guy has. And so that got me thinking, you know, I'm a big American Pickers fan. And at that point I was kind of watching through all 14 seasons or whatever on Hulu. So I thought, man, how cool would it be to come in here and pick this guy's place? And so I told Flynn about it, and he's, you know, he's, nah, not really. You know, I've been private this whole time. I don't really want to do it. So I kind of had to break him down a little. I had to give him a call, swing by, get him buttered up a little bit, and then finally he says, you know, okay, I'll do it, but I don't really want to show my face, and I don't really want to talk a whole lot. I'll just let you guys do your thing. So Ralph at that point was kind of like, I'm doing a ton of Arcade 1-Up videos just because it's trendy and that's what's getting reviews, but I really am not interested in Arcade 1-Up. So he had made that clear to his viewers on YouTube and kind of said, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'm going to take a break, but I'm sick and tired of Arcade 1-Up. Because at that point, they had kind of labeled him as the Arcade 1-Up guy, which he didn't want. And they were more or less telling him, here's what we want you to say. Here's what we want you to do. We're going to give you free product. And because we're giving you free product, we feel like we kind of own you. And he was rebelling against that. And I understood that. So I pitched the idea to Ralph, and Ralph had the resources, and Ralph had the connections to say, yeah, let's do this. So I said, all right, I'll be the guy that gets the place lined up. I'll go talk to the owners. I'll get them ready for us. You know, I'll do the legwork on all that. He's going to bring in the equipment and more or less the financial power to pull the trigger on it. And so we went and filmed that first episode, not really having much of a game plan. I mean, we literally just kind of showed up at his house with the cameras and we ordered a couple pizzas, and we ended up being there for about five hours, and that turned into a 20-minute episode.
    30:41
    So we threw it online, and it had a huge reaction. I mean, first one goes up, it's 30,000 views. Boom. I mean, it just took off. Everybody's buzzing about it. It was on the New Times magazine here in Phoenix all over. It was mentioned on several blogs and other YouTube channels, and people were doing reviews of the episode, and we're like, man, We had no idea this was going to happen. When people get into this hobby, which is arcade or amusements or coin-op, one of the things is you hit the nail on the head there, which is just start. You don't have to be an expert. And I want people to feel comfortable tackling something like this because if you decide to own something like this, whether it's a vintage video game or a vintage pinball machine, at some point something's going to break. Because, you know, again, we're older, those games are older. And so you're going to end up having to do the research. But networking, that is a huge part of it, is just getting to meet other people. And you can meet people who are really well known for this. I was in the music industry. And, you know, even though you were in a band or locally well known, when you got to meet National Acts and you wanted to talk to these guys about music, it was like they didn't want to talk to you about that. and so what I noticed is with this hobby it doesn't matter if the dude's 90 years old is you know showing up at pin expo or showing up at like you know southern fried arcade expo or something like that they are just as excited to talk to the 10 year old who just got a hold of pac-man or just going back to like a cocktail top bowling game which god those things are horrible to fix because it's just so one-dimensional but they're just as excited to talk about that stuff and so when you guys did this oh yeah i caught that premiere i was like holy all right this is awesome because there are there is a huge interest buzz or the popularity around this is because people are kind of sick of seeing classic cars and classic junk. And I love classic cars. I own them. But I think people got sick of seeing stuff from an era that you're 75, 80 years old to really appreciate. And I know that even with arcade stuff, we're getting up there too, because if you've seen the age of any of the current or former designers, like everybody from Eugene Jarvis, you know, like Larry Kamar. I mean, we're all getting older. That's just, you know, that's the realities of the world. And so I could see that this being like, I remember this. We're all retro junkies. These are people who do speed runs of Nintendo games on Twitch. Of course they loved this. And so, I mean, trust me, we thought it was awesome. No, that's great. And, you know, so you're exactly right. There is something I'll tell you as far as, and I know you'll know about this, a lot of people loved it, but what I'm learning when you put yourself out there and you put your personality out there is that just as many people that love it, there's going to be, if not the same, a little less people that hate it. And whether it's jealousy or whether it's purist mentality or whatever it might be, we have those people, which is fine. You're going to get that with anything. So at that point with episode one, I was kind of one of those guys who was letting some of the negativity get to me a little bit, like some of the comments, some of the feedback. There were several online blogs about, I can't believe they didn't show this cabinet. They weren't paying attention to these classic ones in the background. I can't believe, for example, what happened was I ended up purchasing an empty shell of a California Speed for $250, and I purchased a Dragon's Lair original cabinet that had been converted to a choplifter, but it wasn't working. And I bought it for 400 bucks, I think. So I bought these two cabinets and I kind of voiced on the show, you know, this California Speed doesn't have the game board, doesn't have the computer, doesn't have the controls, doesn't have anything. It's just the wooden shell of a California Speed. So my first thought was, and I said it on the show, I'm going to make this into a Batman Raw Thrills cabinet because no one's going to be able to afford a $7,000, $8,000, $9,000 Raw Thrills Batman cabinet but if I turn this into one someone will want it and they'll buy it and that will give me more money to keep this show going. So at that point I kind of got labeled the guy that's like oh he doesn't care about preserving these things. If it was me I would have spent the $2,000 to order every little piece and nut and bolt to make this thing back to a California speed. And I get that. And if I do come across cabinets that I can do that to, I absolutely will. But I don't always have the knowledge, number one, and I don't always have the resources. And the big one, the elephant in the room, I don't always have the cash. And some of these guys do, you know, the older guys who they got a bunch of money sitting around and they just want to restore old cabinets, and they might do one a year. I get that. But I'm looking at doing five or ten restorations a month to fund this show. So if I find an empty shell of a California Speed, you bet your britches I'm going to turn it into, which I have it in my living room right now. I ended up not selling it because it was so cool. It has Batman, H2O Thunder, Initial D, all the Fast and the Furious, all in one cabinet. So if someone wants to come play a driving game, hey, man, play whatever one you want. They're all on here. And this thing is brand new. It has chrome trim. It has LED lights all over it. It has speakers in the seat. So I really felt like I took something that was going to go to the dump. And, I mean, I'm not even getting into the Bondo work that had to be done on the cabinet. I mean, the normal Joe would have said toss it. I had to use two cans of Bondo just to get the thing back to where it was, you know, a sturdy enough cabinet. So that really kind of labeled me at that first episode as, you know, he's not a purist. You know, he doesn't really know what he's doing. He just wants to tinker around with these things and turn them into something freaky. And I did the same thing with Dragon's Lair. You know, I'm not going to go buy a $1,000 LaserDisc player, and I'm not going to go buy an $800 Dragon's Lair LaserDisc, and I'm not going to spend a fortune on putting everything all back and end up spending $3,000 to restore a cabinet that was $400. So what did I do? I put a PC in it. I put an LCD monitor in it. I put all the original artwork and everything on it to make it look like a Dragon's Lair. And I had it to where when you turned it on, it booted up, and you could play Space Ace, Dragon's Lair, or Dragon's Lair 2. And guess what? As soon as I posted it online, a guy drove all the way from Texas and couldn't get his money out fast enough to buy it. But I had all these guys online saying, I can't believe you ruined this, you scumbag, what the heck. I mean, we're talking just vulgar stuff, Matt. And I had never really faced that with anything because everybody really embraced the superhero thing. So when I had all this hate coming at me, I really had Ralph telling me, you know, just ignore it. It's fine. I understand where you're coming from. They don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Just ignore it. Don't worry about it. So we roll into episode two, which was in Tucson, and it was David Sullivan. He's an open book, so he has no problem putting his name out there. He shares a warehouse with the guy who owns Cobra Arcade here in Tucson which is one of the largest arcades in the state And they have a warehouse that has over 150 cabinets in it And when you go in they not slouch They all really nice cabinets So we go in there, and, you know, I'm not coming in with thousands and thousands of dollars. I just want to go in and show people this guy's collection, and if I can buy some stuff, great. So the first thing that catches my eye is a House of the Dead that he's got three of, and I go to the crappiest-looking one, and I said, you know, how much do you want for this? And I think he said, it doesn't work. It won't boot up, so I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I'll sell it to you for $200.
    38:55
    So I bought it, and then I bought a Tekken 2 for $150. And I said right on the episode, I said, no one is going to want to buy this from me and have to deal with the PC crashing and the hard drive crashing and the CRT going out and the guns quit working. And so I probably shouldn't have said it on the show. I should have just done it. But I said, I'm going to put Nintendo Wii software in this because you've got the wireless guns. And I'm going to put a loud sound system on it. And I'm going to put a big flat screen on it. And I'm going to put not only House of the Dead, but House of the Dead 2, House of the Dead 3, House of the Dead 4, Ghost Squad, Target Terror, Big Buck Hunter. And I'm going to put all these games on there. And again, the same thing. I restored the cabinet. I did all that. And there was a guy that came over, and he couldn't get his money out fast enough. And guess what? He was so happy because he's like, I don't have to fix anything. Everything's super easy. I just lift up this compartment. I just put, you know, I've got access to the Wii right here on the back. I've got wireless guns. Everything works. But the hate that came from everyone about, I can't believe you didn't buy everything you needed to restore that back to a house of the dead. Shame on you. And even the Tekken, you know, it actually had no screen in it. It was just an empty cab, but it had the game board. So I put a flat screen in it and kept all the original artwork and buttons and everything on it. And there was a guy that drove over here from somewhere far away and picked it up and was like, I've been looking for one of these for my son's room. Thank you so much. We love it. I love that it has the TV in it. We don't have to mess with the CRT. And that's kind of been my theme is if I'm going to sell to Ma and Pa Jones down the street who aren't arcade enthusiasts, but they want to have an arcade game, and if they're going to put a House of the Dead in their arcade, they want to have 30 shooters on it. They don't want to just play House of the Dead. I'm not selling to collectors. If I was, I wouldn't be somebody who's less than two years into the industry trying to sell to a collector. It's a whole other breed. But those guys really, they started to get to me and Ralph was fine with it. But then we got to the point where episode three came. And again, we found another guy here in the Valley, Derek, super nice guy, been collecting since the 80s. He's got about 100 cabinets in his house, in his garage, and in a trailer. And the first thing when I went over there, you know, at this point, we're thousands and thousands of dollars into investing into this show between editing, truck rentals, paying for restorations, paying for gas, you know, everything just adds up quick. So I don't have as much money as I would normally like to have. So when I go in, naturally, I'm like, what do you have that's affordable. So he said, I have this GORF cabinet. I just got a trailer with 40 or 50 games and this GORF was in there. There was actually a couple more GORFs in there. He said, this one was in standing water, two feet up from the bottom. He said, everything inside is probably fried because it was in standing water. The wood was fraying apart. It didn't have a screen. All it had was the cabinet and the joystick. And I mean, we're talking, it looked like it was in a graveyard. And so I said, this is actually before Ralph got there. They were, for whatever reason, they were hours late to that shoot. So I said to him, you know, if I buy this from you, can you take any of the parts off of it? And he said, yeah, I can take whatever I can use off of this and put it into the one that will work. And I'll just sell you the cabinet. And I said, great. So I said, I'll take it. So then when we go to shoot, we're live on the show and Ralph's been wanting a GORF. I knew that, but we get to that one and he says, how much do you want for this? And I said, well, hold on a minute. I already kind of talked to him about this one. I said, I'll give you 50 bucks for it. Just kind of to be funny. And Derek says, okay, it's yours, 50 bucks. So this was all on camera and I could tell Ralph was ticked when that happened because I didn't know if he wanted it or he didn't want me to buy it. He knew what I was going to do to it, but there was no way to restore this thing back. There was just absolutely no way. So the episode goes on. I ended up buying a Captain America and the Avengers, and I bought a Goonies. So I bought three cabinets, and Ralph was pretty upset about the Gorf. So at the end of the episode, I just said, you know, hey, I know you like the Nintendo versus cabinets. Why don't you buy that one? Even though I bought it on the episode, why don't you pay for it and you can have that one? This Gorf is so wasted. Ralph doesn't know, at that point, didn't know how to do Bondo work, didn't know how to paint things or restore things. So I said, I'll restore this thing back, and I'll put a multi-game in it, and somebody who wants it can have it, and they can at least use the cabinet. Well, that leading week after that episode, I did restore the GORF, and I spent about a week bondoing it, sanding it, painting it. I got it back to where it was beautiful. It had the light control panel. It had all the lights and bezel. I put a beautiful flat screen in it, and I put a Raspberry Pi in it that had 20,000 games on it. And there was a guy that came over who couldn't get his money out fast enough. Older guy had a bar at his house. Man, GORF is my favorite game. Does this play GORF? Absolutely. It also has all the other games. Oh, my gosh, I'll take it. He was just ecstatic. Didn't want to work on it. Didn't want to fix anything. Just wanted the cabinet. Well, then I got roasted by these guys online. I mean, they literally went on to my marketplace post that had nothing to do with arcade pickers. It was just my own personal name. I'm selling this cabinet on Marketplace. and they were just literally almost threatening me. I mean, you better quit doing this. We're sick and tired of you ruining these cabinets. You're disgusting. I can't believe you're doing this. So I'm not the kind of guy that's going to stand down to that. So I got into it with them a little bit in the chat and was just like, why don't you mind your own business? Why don't you stay off my chat? You know, I was kind of just clowning them on there, like you guys aren't really bothering me. I don't care. This is ridiculous. so then the next morning I get a text from Ralph that says, here's a screenshot of what you were – it was a screenshot of our conversation that we had on Marketplace. And he said, I can't believe you did this. This is ridiculous. I hate what you're doing to these cabinets too. I'm going to need some time to process this. So I'm like, wow, okay. That's fine. So at this point, the episode hasn't aired yet, but it's getting ready to air in a week. So I kind of waited until a day or two before the episode's going to air, and then Raoul still hasn't called me, texts me and says, I canceled the after-the-show live stream. I'm disgusted with what you've been doing to these cabinets.
    45:38
    I don't think I can do this anymore. So I said, well, I think we should have a conversation about it. We've got a lot invested in this. so the episode airs everyone loves it mixed opinions with the purists and whatnot but the majority of the people loved it the guy who we filmed with Derek was heartbroken because he was counting on the after the episode and his family was all over and they wanted to watch it and Ralph canceled it the day before without telling anyone or anything until the last minute and I'm not trying to turn this into a bash Ralph thing I'm just kind of trying to play out how this evolved I was just more or less confused by it because I thought it was such a great idea and so successful. But at that point, I got put on social media without even having a phone call or anything, and I got it put out there. I'm no longer interested in this. If any of you want to continue to watch it, you can, but I'm not going to be a part of it. So thank you so much. Have a nice day. So to this day, that was back in April, I still have not had a conversation with Richard Ralph.
    46:47
    When these guys are purists about this, they think the process of getting some of these games back is easy, I'm aware. Like if you can get all the boards, if you get a working set or get a recreation set, it's fine. It's not the end of the world to fix something. but if you're from the perspective of a business what it realistically will sell for once you're done if you try to hold out me and Todd Tucky talked about this you try to hold out for a museum restoration if you don't already have that client set up who wants that Jeff Miller the pinball pimp He did an Evel Knievel. It was a $16,000 game in the end. And yes, it was better than brand new, completely restored, top-notch, period. But he had a client already lined up for that project. He can't do that to every game.
    47:46
    I had an Atari Battlezone that this thing, oh, man, short of, well, here's a little embarrassing story and my wife doesn't even know about this when i hauled that thing into my house and finally started but i drilled through and finally got the the locks off i opened it up 40 mice ran out of the thing thankfully i was in my garage and i hadn't already hauled it to my basement which is actually where i do most of my work i'm in Minnesota. We have winter. Oh, man. It took probably 16 hours just to get the mildew smell and seal to abate the rodent piss and biohazard aspect of this. I've heard stories of guys who get games that the termites got to it. You always have to gauge what you want to do with something. I don't hate on guys who take a completely hashed, like this game I got. If I had taken this and made a virtual pin, you really can't hate me for it. There wasn't really, I had to literally recreate the game.
    48:58
    And so if you can do something that's ready-made, I get it. And there are guys who take old EM pinball machines that, look, you open up one of those EM games, there's 2,000 feet of what they call weave wire. it typically doesn't go bad, but if it does, good luck. I've seen guys taking Arduino Raspberry Pi and they've converted it to solid state. And they bring the game back. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I feel like it's a tragedy there because it could have been kind of a split of both interests. Like, you know, the two camps could have been satisfied, like, like an explanation, hey, like, dude, this game is so gone. And we know there are peers out there. If we have a guy who wants us to bring this back to an original house of the dead, you know, we would do that. But we don't have that client. We need to still operate as a business. And so what we're going to do is we're going to do a mod on this. In the hot rod world, guess what? Hot rods are not restorations. Hot rods are modifications of classic cars. Rat rods are modifications of classic cars. you go to a car show nobody's hating on those guys you know and so people have to keep that perspective and so to me that's kind of a tragedy i do hope that you guys at some point could possibly figure out that that's the camps if you want to do purist that's fine but you know even todd tucky is converting he converts a lot of games to multi-cades um he hasn't i haven't seen them do a virtual pin but their games they just won't fix them you know they'll just cannibalize it for parts and so you have you have a choice you can either cannibalize it or make it something else and i guess that i i don't know where the pure absolute purest i'm like is if you're that guy instead of being the one hating on it be the guy that's willing to buy it from you you know stop hating on it. If you got money, do this. You know, because you wouldn't not, you wouldn't be upset. No, I really wouldn't. I would have, you know, I would sell it to them for what I bought it for. If they said, hey, I want this cabinet. Here's your money back. I'm going to restore it. Great. I'm happy with that. Everyone's happy. Everyone wins. No problem. But, you know, you hit it on the head with that as far as it being a business versus a hobby. You know, I understand if it's your hobby and you have a day job and you're just, you know, working on this a few nights a week and you don't care when it's done and money's not an issue, that's great. But when I'm trying to come up with thousands of dollars to keep a show going, I can't do that. You know, I've got to get them moving. And the way I saw it was, you know, there's a guy who has a beautiful Gorf cabinet in his bar. It looks like a Gorf cabinet. It smells like a Gorf cabinet. It plays Gorf. But at the end of the day, it's got all the other games on it, too. and he's happy with it. And, I mean, I've had a couple of other guys here in the Valley who called me. I had one guy that had a Mortal Kombat 2 original cab. He bought it, and when he brought it home in the U-Haul, for some reason the CRT went out and broke.
    52:10
    And he said, Corey, I've had this cabinet in my office for five years, and it's never worked. So he said, can you fix it? I said, I'm not a CRT repair guy. I can't fix it. I said, what do you want to do with this thing? And he said, I want to be able to play all the Mortal Kombats. He goes, it takes up a whole corner of my office. Can you put all the Mortal Kombats in this? And I said, I can do that. I said, not only that, but I can put a bunch of other games on it too if you'd like. So this is what I've done with several of them. As I leave the Mortal Kombat game board in there, I don't change anything with the original cabinet. I just put the flat screen in, I hook up the controls to the encoder, and I get him working with a PC or a Raspberry Pi that has all the games on it, and he can play them all. And then you know what? Down the road, since it's in his office, if he wants to sell it to a purist or if he wants it to go back to original, everything is still inside the cabinet. He just needs the CRT, and then he's good to go. I don't ever rip things out or gut things or sell them on eBay or try to make a profit like that, and I could, believe me. I've had cabinets where I could have ripped everything out of it, and the guy would have had no idea as long as it played what he wanted, and I could have made double my money selling everything inside. No, I told him. There was another guy in Phoenix. He had an original Asteroids. He said, Corey, it's been in my bar for over 15 years, and we don't play it. Can you put a bunch of games on this for me? So I said, sure. I left all the Asteroids stuff inside. I didn't change anything other than I hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi. It still played all the games. And both of these guys, they were older guys. They called me months later and said, Corey, thank you so much for doing this. My wife, my kids, my friends, we're all over here playing this. Everyone comes over on Friday night and we have some beers and we're playing all the games. We're playing Ninja Turtles. We're playing Donkey Kong. We're playing all the games. I can't thank you enough. In fact, my friend wants you to do the same thing. Can you help him out? That to me is a victory because now the machine, he wasn't going to sell the machine. He didn't want to sell the Mortal Kombat. The guy didn't want to sell the Asteroids. They liked the cabinet. They just wanted to play it. So I said, great, I can help you with that. You know, and I don't charge him an arm and a leg to do it. I just document it on YouTube and show people here's how you do this if you want to. And that's great. And, you know, we kind of went through some of the negatives. And I understood a lot with why Ralph was concerned with that. I understood that he kind of had an image to uphold on his channel of I'm a purist and I don't do this. And he didn't really want to get entangled with me as his other personality on the show. So it was probably for the better that he went on and did his own thing. And on the other side, he wasn't really a haggler either as far as negotiating and price and things like that. And I am. I don't have a problem with that. And it makes people uncomfortable when you're doing that. And, you know, we did have to haggle with people and negotiate with stuff. And he wasn't comfortable with that. But the silver lining was, along that way, not only did I learn a lot about how to fix games and what different parts are on games and how simple they are to fix or replace or repair, but I scored a bunch of sweet cabinets that I normally wouldn't have had. And some of them I kept, some of them I sold. But like you said earlier on, the community, the camaraderie of meeting these guys and coming over to film with them and having lunch with them and they're friends now. I mean, I just had Derek from episode three called me last week and said, hey, Corey, how you doing? Hey, it's good to hear your voice, man. Hey, guess what? I just picked up a trailer full of games, and there's two driving games on here that I don't have room for. Do you want them? I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, I'll bring them over right now. They're on the trailer. I said, how much do you want for them? no you can just have them so he comes over and drops off a jumbo jungle or whatever the sega safari one and a crazy taxi he just dropped him off and said here you go and he said is there anything else you're looking for because if i come across him and i don't need him i'll just bring him to you i mean this is just a guy who you know i barely know but now we've become close friends and he's helping me out with favors and david in tucson from episode two he'll call me up hey man I got this and I got that. Are you interested? Those are things that you can't find on Marketplace and you can't find on Craigslist. The only way you're going to get those deals is from networking with the community and making friends. So that was the big positive that came out of that.
    56:47
    And now I have a full-size Captain America. I have a full-size Time Crisis dual screen. I have a Batman driving cabinet. I have a Star Wars trilogy. I have a Ghost Squad. I have an Atari pole position sit-down driving cab. All these cabs that I wanted to keep, and we'll play them until we're sick of them, and then we'll move them on, and we'll get another cabinet and put it in its place. And it's just been a lot of fun for my family and I to play in when we want to play them. And when we have a get-together, like, you know, a few weeks ago it was the NBA playoffs. The Suns were in the finals, so we had people over, and people loved playing the arcades. You know they came in they were like to hell with the game let play the arcades you know it fun Let play some NBA Jam Let play this Let shoot Let have fun So that really been the silver lining And I really do wish Ralph the best and I didn't mean for that to have a negative tone to it. I just, I guess more or less was using your platform to kind of explain the situation because it never really got explained, and a lot of people were confused by it, and they didn't understand why we're not on the show together anymore. And my son and I have tried to keep it going, but one of the biggest obstacles has been trying to replace the thousands of dollars of equipment that Ralph already had from being a YouTuber that we needed to purchase. And we also needed to get the time to be able to go out and do it. And now one of the biggest obstacles I have is having the space to bring stuff home when we purchase it, and it's 120 degrees outside. So if I can't work on the cabinets on a regular basis and get them moved out and they're just collecting up, I've got to start getting stuff out before I can get more stuff in. So we're really gearing up for a huge fall and winter. We've got people reaching out left and right who have huge, massive collections from anywhere from route guys to hardcore collectors. Come on over. Whether you buy anything or not, we'd love to show our collection off. And they like watching the YouTube video of, hey, a guy came in our house and showed our collection. This is our hobby that we've had our whole life. We want people to see what we've done and what we have. And we'd like to buy something if we can, but if we can't always buy something, that's great too. You know, we're fine with it. And I think you'll see moving forward we're going to try to make our episodes tell more of a story. You know, there's certain things we're looking for. There's certain needs that we want met in the community. So we're going to try to do those things instead of just kind of going out and winging it. There'll be a little bit more organization to it. So I'm excited about that. And, you know, there are some cabinets that we're hunting for for people. And one of the most unique things about the show, which we really need to capitalize on more, which I thought was a great idea, is anything that we purchase on the show goes directly onto our website so people can go on there and buy that marquee that they need or that cabinet they need or that artwork they need or whatever it is. And if they see something on the show in the background that we didn't touch on, we can get a hold of the owner and say hey this person is interested in this cabinet or this whatever you had in your house we didn't even talk about it but they saw it and they want it and that's actually happened more than a handful of times already where we've connected somebody with something they were looking for and they were so thankful and said man i would have never found this thank you keep it going we love we love this we want to see you guys go to more places and maybe there's more stuff we'll buy so that's really the exciting part about it and uh we've dabbled into the console part of things a little bit on the show, but I think moving forward in the next few episodes, we're going to really focus on the arcade stuff just because there's so many places to go and do that where somebody in a different area might not even have anywhere to go and they just love coming along for the ride to see everything.
    60:34
    There's nothing against the console collectors. I happen to be one and I'm not like a truest I'm not a purist here.
    60:42
    The minute that a retro gaming device, a modern one, was available on eBay, yes, I bought it. There's actually a funny story about this. I had had a Nintendo, and my brother held on to it forever. It seemed like every video game system my sibling made off with. As an adult, I bought a bunch of these off eBay. and I found out about like multiple hundred game-in-one cartridges. Whether they're licensed or not, I'm never going to know, but I ended up with them.
    61:17
    So I picked one of these up. There was this little corner bar that literally is, it's like going to the bar from the movie The Great Outdoors. It's called Hoagie's. It's in St. Paul. It belongs five hours away from where it is. But we were really good friends with the bartender and not just sitting there getting ham. We actually just liked the guy. and they have two huge flat screens on each side of the bar. And nobody's really watching the games on the one. They're all watching the game on the other. And I'm like, hey, Mark, I'll be right back. So I literally lived like five hours down. So I went up, I grabbed that vintage, that retro Nintendo, threw in the 501 game cartridge. Me and my friend hooked that up. And we're just sitting there on the right side of the bar, at the bar, playing Excitebike and setting up and customizing Impossible Courses, failing miserably. And we're there for a little bit. We're talking to the bartender. We're having a few drinks. And then we look around. The entire bar is no longer watching the football game, but is actually all watching us fail at Excitebike. And then people are asking, hey, can I have a turn at that? Can I have a turn at that? And so that became like a thing for us. It was like every Sunday night we'd do that. And so when I got the Retro Genesis, we did the same thing. And it was just nobody charged for this. If you had a game, bring it. It was just an environment to play and have fun.
    62:42
    But I've never been the guy who's got to sit down on the Internet and track down the rarest of console games. And it's not because I don't have that interest, but to me, I love the idea of arcade games. I like games that people didn't always, you know, find. And I know that there's a lot from the true kind of heyday of the early 80s that people have to go after. I mean, Pole Position was like one that almost every place had. And thankfully, those are still ones that you can find that are relatively intact. But games that I want, that I personally would love to actually get my hands on, that I think were better fighting games was Pit Fighter.
    63:29
    The graphics quality, I mean, for that game when that was introduced, the graphics quality was insane. There was always that one rich kid who had $15 at the quarters. He just set the stack on there like a scene out of a Western where the one guy comes in and just sets the giant heavy gold coin down and is like, all right, well, I'm not playing this. Crap.
    63:50
    Arcades were fun as adults because we get to go as a group of people. and play, especially since we're all adults. We have wallets. We can actually beat some of these games. So, no, I hope that you guys get to continue doing that. And so your son, so Jacob, is getting involved. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, with their age, it's so different as far as, you know, they're not getting together as friends and playing games. They're online with kids that they may or may not even know that are anywhere in the world and they have their own community. And, you know, I go, you know, if you were to ask my son, you know, who are your best friends, he would say a bunch of nicknames that aren't even real first names, just kids that he's been playing with for years. And so I've been trying to tell him one of the most important things as a gamer when you're young like he is that maybe you agree with me is when we grew up and it wasn't the same for everybody, but you always had your console and you wanted that next console. So a lot of times you'd take it into the game store and trade it in and get the new console and get rid of all your games and move on to the next system and repeat and repeat. And that's how I lost all my consoles was I was constantly trading up. Oh, mom, I can trade this in. It's only a little bit. Hey, I can bring this in. In my 20s, I'd bring in my PlayStation and trade it in for the PS2 and repeat. And I always told them I wish I would have just hung on to the consoles and just saved up and bought the consoles so I had them all because here I am as an adult going back and trying to get all those old consoles and those old games that I got rid of. So I'm trying to teach them that as we go out, like, you know, build your collection and get your games that you really enjoy playing and you like and keep them and keep your consoles in good condition and, you know, have a collection so when you're my age, you don't have to get all that stuff. You already have it. And we've run across those guys that are in their 40s that did hang on to everything and all the boxes and all the styrofoam and everything, and they've just kept him in good shape, and I've just told him, you know, that's how you do things, and it's just a lot of fun, and to try to bring him back to those days when, you know, we were playing Nintendo at home on the carpet on the CRT with the wood grain with our friends all sitting around taking turns chucking the controllers at the wall and whatever when you die, and then my dad comes in and says, hey, you want to go to the arcade because he's new to games, and he wants to play. And my dad would take me down to the mall. I lived in Linwood, Washington, and he dropped 20 bucks on NARC, and we'd sit there and play NARC. And I'd think, man, these games are so far above and beyond what we have at home to play with. I just love them. And now to have those console games at home and those arcade games at home, it's just a lot of fun, and it brings everyone together, and it's the nostalgia of it. I'm like you. I don't really, like you said, it's something you do with friends and something you do with people as a group, you rarely will find me playing my games by myself, even though they're here and I work from home and I can play them whenever I want. I don't. It's usually, hey, you know, honey, on Friday night, when we get everything done at 8 o'clock at night, you know, let's have a couple beers or let's have some pizza and let's play some games. Or, hey, we got some people coming over, let's play some games. And that's really where we cherish and have the fun. And he sees that and I tell him, you know, who knows what it will be like when you're our age and what kind of technology you guys will have with this VR and all this stuff going on. But hang on to your stuff and collect what you've got and meet people out in the community, and you'll find things fall in your lap and things will go your way, and it'll just be a lot more fun. And he really enjoys it. He's just at that age, you know, where he's in ninth grade and he's not really sure what he wants to do or what his interests are. He just likes to have fun. So we're definitely going to embrace that father-son relationship as we continue to film, and he's getting to be quite the little film master with getting all the angles and the B-roll. And I do all the editing at this point. And to be honest with you, maybe it doesn't match the production quality that we had when we were paying a professional editor an arm and a leg to do things, which he did a great job, but it's just, we save all that money and now I'm at the point where I don't necessarily need to go buy and sell a bunch of cabinets to keep it going. I can actually wait until I see one that I really like or I really want, or I know someone that is looking for it, or I can put it somewhere and put it to good use so we're not just burning money and spinning our wheels and working our heads off, you know, to try to get everything together. So I hope this new coming season is a lot more calm and a lot more fun and a lot more enjoyable, and we can really shine. So I think everything happens for a reason, and I'm not sad that things ended up the way they did with the direction that the show is going. And we've actually had a couple of people that are actual reality TV show people, like producers or writers, as crazy as that is, reach out to me recently and say, we really enjoy the show and the concept. Can we sit down and talk to you about some ways that you can improve it? All on their dime. They're not charging me for it. I had another guy come and say, hey, I'm a producer. I produce Babyface. I produce Mariah Carey. I have access to the largest number of copyright-free music in the world. I'm going to give you access to all of it for free. So we've had people step up and say, hey, we want this to succeed. We want you guys to have fun. Everyone enjoys it. We just want it to be the best possible version of the show it can be. So that's what we're going to do moving forward, and I hope it really takes off, and not from a financial aspect, but from a people-enjoying-the-show aspect. and yeah and think at the end of the day no matter what the project is you should have fun right no well you're right and todd tucky was right in your interview with him you know there's always going to be haters and you just move past it and that i just had another guy a really successful guy in this industry tell me that you know he just said if you want to be successful with as many people that love you there's going to be the people that hate you there's no way to just get the people that love you only you have to take the people that hate what you're doing with it. And the other thing that you really hit home with is people want to be a personality, you know, they want to be an individual. So when you get to know someone and you get to know why they're doing this, what their personality is, and you know, what motivates them as a person versus what do you know about arcades and pinballs, then you really form a bond and a friendship with that person that never goes away, you know, so it's just a really important part about even making YouTube videos with people or podcasts or whatever you're doing is just every person has a story and a history and you know I'm sure me and you could probably throw 20 things out there on the table that we never would have guessed about each other that led to our interest in what we do and why we do it so it's just a really important part of doing it and goes right along with the having fun part is getting to know people so I appreciate that you're doing this and I enjoyed all your podcasts you know it's especially when you're working on arcades and stuff it's nice to just put some good content on and have something good to listen to that pertains to what you're doing, you know? It's a niche hobby, you know, and I guess that's why I've always so shocked at like the amount of drama that happens with it. It's like, this is amusement, umbrella of amusement. It's supposed to be fun. Well, dude, I mean, if you think of it, it goes with anything, right? I mean, you do classic cars. We bought a pop-up camper, and Holly wanted to restore it and make it look beautiful. So she went on this Facebook group all about pop-up campers. There was all these ideas about how to bling out your pop-up camper and make it look modern and brand new. And she couldn't believe that there was even drama in that. Like she had to leave this group because people were like just degrading people and arguing with people and fighting over how to remodel your pop-up camper. So at that point, I just kind of realized it doesn't matter what you're doing. There's going to be drama. You just have to move forward and ignore it and have fun. And if you're having fun doing what you do, then it's going to be successful and it's going to move forward no matter what, you know. When it's about a hobby, they obviously like it enough they want to share either information, their stories, them playing it. Like, hey, this is something I'm really into. Check it out. They want to talk about it. They want to show something about it. And so I'm always happy to talk to anybody, especially content generators, because, as I said, they're just like in these hobbies. It doesn't matter if the guy's 80 years old. He worked for Midway when he was 50 just assembling the cabinets. He's still excited to talk about games, and I like that. And I like the fact that you can branch off into other topics. I think moving forward at some point we'll probably decide to just either be friends or, you know, still be acquaintances because we did learn a lot from each other, and it's nice to have resources in the community. And, you know, I'd be lying if I didn't say I went and did an Arcade Pickers episode this weekend with somebody who's best friends with him that collaborates with him on a regular basis. So, you know, it's just, it is what it is, and I more or less explained it to you just to kind of explain the history of what's going on with that show and that, you know, really it's just the beginning. The best is yet to come. So I thank you for your time as well, Matt, and I look forward to building a friendship with you. And if there's any pinball parts or arcade parts that you're searching for, please don't hesitate to let me know because I'm out there on a regular basis hunting stuff down. Oh, yes, not a problem. And trust me, there's always something. I have yet to get a ramp for Mario Andretti for some odd reason. 1995, nobody makes it. The game I got, ooh, it's hideous. That will be probably my next, like, rehab. It's functional. That's the only good news. That's the end of the good news. This one's going to be a nightmare.
    73:53
    Well, one of our upcoming episodes is going to be this guy named Jake, and he has, I think he has about, he must have at least 40 pinballs in his house, and he's got some ones that he's spending a lot of money on that are custom that you can't even buy. So I think you'll really enjoy that episode. But if you ever need anything, I'd be happy to ask him because I know he sells and has people that he knows that sell the parts. And they're, like I said, the people that aren't on the Internet or that you can access easily. You have to be part of the community to get access to some of the stuff. Yeah, as I said, build on that. And I hope that you get to build with the show. I'm going to continue to watch Arcade Pickers. And on top of that, I want to see what your son does. I want to see what tickles there's going to be a game that will call to him and I want to see, I'm curious to see what that is he's excited and we're going to be hitting the drawing boards here as far as a game plan and what we're doing moving forward so we're excited so we appreciate the support from you and from anybody else listening that can get on and give us feedback in the comments or help spread the word about what we're doing that's greatly appreciated do you do the Batman voice? Kind of curious. I can do a little bit of Batman.
    75:10
    It's not who you are underneath. It's what you do. As it binds you. Oh, that always tracks me up. All right. Well, I appreciate it, Corey. You have a good night. All right, Matt. You too. All right. Cool, man. Take care. Bye-bye.
    75:31
    Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our interview with Arcade Picker's very own Corey Massal and proud owner of Superhero Rental. So if you need a hero, this is the guy to call. If you want to check out some vintage arcade picks, some console picks, check out his YouTube channel as he continues the series with his son, Jacob. And we also wish the best of luck to Retro Ralph as he continues with his series, Chasing Nostalgia. So it was a long interview, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed. I have back-to-back episodes. I have Ryan Wenger of Comet Pinball on next, so please check out episode number six. But this is episode number five. We're concluding it. This is Matt signing off, and keep it flippy and keep it fun. Who's your daddy? Big Daddy Enterprises, your source for pinball electronic repair products featuring boards from Flip, X-Pin, Alltech, and more. Wiring parts, E-Proms, replacement displays, flipper rebuild kits, and more at BigDaddy-Enterprises.com. This has been a Ruby Butt Production Ruby, get out of the litter box!