Remember back when the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California sadly closed its doors and auctioned off all of its games? The auction was so large and contained so many rare games that it garnered national attention...and of course the prices of the machines went through the roof.
That auction was run by the California auctioneer Captain's Auction Warehouse. I recently received notification that coming up in October, Captain's is running its second largest ever pinball auction, after the aforementioned Banning collection. By my count, the company is set to auction nearly 300 pinball machines from a single large collection on Saturday, October 15th. The auction will be conducted both live at the Captain's warehouse and on-line, which makes things much more convenient for people who are not located in California, but...also will probably make the prices much higher.
I've personally been to a couple of local arcade and pinball options in person, most recently the one at Kalahari resort in the Poconos last fall, but I don't like to bid on things on-line. The prices for on-line auctions tend to be higher and you can't really inspect the things that you are bidding on very well if you don't physically see them in front of you. Having said that, I will be following this one with interest to see what sort of cool games show up and what the prices are like for future reference.
Below I've shared a few pictures of the games that I saw in the auction that I thought were cool. Scroll down to check them out. As a disclaimer, I just heard about this and thought that it sounded cool. I received no promotional consideration for mentioning it, but I would take some if anyone wanted to give it to me LOL.
I've been going to Captain's Auctions for years. Back when Dan Dotson used to be the auctioneer before Storage Wars went on the air. And back then, there would be maybe 2-3 pins for sale and they would go fast and cheap. When Dan left for SW, Chris got his license and started selling his machines. He became well educated on the market and knew how to push people to get maximum profit for the auctions. He knew that pins were starting to sell at high prices and pushed for more at his market and worked hard to get to where he is. But his auctioneer style is not desirable for the buyer. At one point, I had a great…
I bet that's the Hercules from up here at the Olympia Pinball museum (which I've played)..and I heard that MANY of these machines 'from a collector' is, potentially, a LARGE shipment of machines from a group of guys in the PNW. 'likely' this is the case for this particular auction..doesn't really change the fact that these auctions are the silliest thing to come to pinball..who in the hell pays 11K on a Monopoly pin???
Being a former resident of SoCal, I frequently went to the Captains' auctions. Only once did I purchase a machine. They hype everything up so much and everything sells for way-over price. I used to live 2 hours from Banning and frequent the establishment twice a year, what a shame that was, seeing it close. The only machine that I bid on during the Banning auction was for the Gottlieb Q*bert pinball. I think it finally sold around 15k.