Addams Family Pinball

Vintage pinball business is going FULL TILT

Enter the world of vintage pinball machines, original Pac-Man video games, and juke boxes with virtually every 45-rpm record that ever serenaded Mainers from Ma Beane's car-hop diner in Skowhegan to road houses and taverns all the way to the western mountains in Rangeley and beyond.

The crowded showroom at Lyons Appliance, built in 1963 at 12 West Front St,. in Skowhegan, is a little shop of wonders.

"I do enjoy working on them; it's fun to take an old juke box or a pinball and turning them back to how it was working originally, it's fun to do that," Tom Jr., 41, said during a recent tour of the store and a warehouse full of more stuff on Spring Street.

Donkey Kong. Skeet shoot. Stratavox. Cigarette machines marked "50 cents" for a pack of Marlboros. Juke boxes, too, complete with remote, push-button consoles for each restaurant table.

There are 1940s radios and walls of 45s dating from the very earliest pressings. The records number more than 20,000, with titles from artists that range from Pink and Megadeath to Bobby Darin, Patsy Cline and the Statler Brothers. In the back room are 1,000 older records owned by Tom Jr.'s grandfather.

"They go right back to the beginning -- right in the beginning when they first started coming out in '53, '54," Lyons said of 45s, the small records with the big hole in the center. "They all came out of the old juke boxes. We still have 78s that go back to the old-style, trash-can juke boxes -- we still have a ton of them. My grandfather and my father would buy Top 40 records every week."

Lyons estimates he and his father also have four or five working Pac-Man games for sale and five more in storage that he doesn't think he can get working again. In all, there are 60 or 70 video game machines, 20-30 pinball machines and 20 juke boxes dating back to the mid-1950s, including one that looks just like the one on the TV show "Happy Days."

"People grew up with them -- any of the 80s games are classic ones, we grew up with them," Lyons said. "Pac-Man was the first color one to come out -- and then the song "Pac-Man Fever" hit and it just exploded."

Depending on the condition of the painted box and the game itself, a Pac-Man game can sell for $600 to $1,300. Ms. Pac-Man can sell for $1,200. Donkey Kong and Centipede can run $800 to $1,500 per game.

And these are not games that the Lyons picked up along the way -- they are the originals.

Ian Bogost - Write a Platform Studies Book

Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested authors - ones that would be great to write about. These are a few platforms or families of platforms that seem to us to have interesting technical aspects, diverse and important historical connections, a good amount of worthwhile cultural production, and a number of adherents:

In case there's anything that seems puzzling about this list: A platform, as far as the Platform Studies series is concerned, is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media. (This is pretty much what Wikipedia defines as a computing platform, too.) So BASIC, Java, and Flash are as much platforms as the mainly-hardware consoles and computers that are listed, as are the operating systems on the list.

If any of these interest you enough that you'd consider writing a book about them, please contact me and/or Nick . If you have a favorite platform that we haven't mentioned and want to suggest that someone write about it, please leave us (and any potential authors who are reading) a comment. You can also do so at Nick's blog, where a startlingly similar post offers a startlingly similar invitation.

* Results not typical.

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