I walked up to the counter at the antique mall with my Batman bank and a pack of Japanese Pokemon cards for my son. There was a bit of a line to checkout, so my family decided to wait for me in the car. Finally, it was my turn and the woman entered the items into her computer and said, “That’ll be $12.” I handed her my debit card and she said, “Sorry, there’s a minimum purchase of $15 to use debit or credit cards. Do you have cash or do you want to look for something else?” Lady, this is 2024. Not only does it not make sense to have a minimum purchase to use a debit card anymore, but I definitely don’t have cash on me. So, I opted to go look for something that would get me over the hump.
The shop was kind of a bust as far as my type of collectibles. Other than the Batman bank, the only other thing I’d been remotely interested in was a couple of G.I. Joe puzzles that were two parts of a four-part mural, but I wasn’t about to spend $20 on puzzles that might be missing pieces. (Besides, then I’d have to try to find the other two puzzles to complete the mural and it would just open up a whole can of worms I wasn’t prepared for.) I only needed $3 more dollars!
I went back to the booth where my son had found the Japanese Pokemon cards, figuring I’d just get him another pack. Naturally, that was the only loose pack they had; everything else was big gift boxes that cost $15 or more. Again, I only needed $3.
I frantically walked down the aisles, trying to find something, when I happened upon a booth that had a box of old magazines. Surely I could find something in there that would be worth picking up for a few bucks. I didn’t have to flip very far before I found a stack of old issues of RePlay Magazine.
If you’re not familiar (and why would you be?), RePlay is an industry magazine dedicated to the coin-op business. So, if you run a Chuck E Cheese, or a bowling alley, you might subscribe to RePlay to see what new arcade games, pinball machines, or carnival-style games are coming out. It’s always been a very niche magazine, but I’m sure back in the glory days of arcades, it had a rather substantial subscriber base.
The issues in the box were mostly from the early 1990s, which would have been cool, don’t get me wrong. But instead, I decided to find the oldest one they had, which turned out to be September 1987. The price tag said the magazine was $4, so I grabbed it and went back up to the counter to checkout.
As you can see on the cover, this issue is a special Directory Yearbook, meaning most of the pages feature photos and contact information for people in various departments at the manufacturers of coin-op games. So, a good 75% of the issue looks something like this…
If you needed to know who the Director of Design at Data East Pinball was, who the CFO of Atari was, or the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Nintendo was in 1987, this was the place to go.
SIDE NOTE: Because I'm me, I had to look into these guys...
According to pinside.com, Joe Kaminkow has worked on 51 pinball machines over the span of his career. He seems to specialize in games built on pop culture properties like Batman, Starship Troopers, Godzilla, South Park, The X-Files, Baywatch, WWF, TMNT, Back to the Future, Star Wars, and plenty more. He was the designer of the first Data East pinball game, Laser War, released in April 1987.
John Klein joined Atari in 1985 and remained CFO until he left the company for personal reasons in 1989.
Howard Lincoln had a pretty interesting career. He defended Nintendo from a lawsuit brought on by Universal Studios saying that Donkey Kong infringed on King Kong. For his work, he was made Sr. VP and was instrumental in bringing the NES to the United States and helping make it the success that it was. He later became CEO of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.
There’s also this guy, who absolutely looks like the person you’d picture as Sales Director for American Shuffleboard out of Union City, New Jersey…
Part of the directory is just pages and pages of general contact information for manufacturers that read more like a phone book…
So, if your brand new Ikari Warriors game has gone on the fritz, here’s how you can contact SNK Corporation of America to have them send out a repairman…
But the issue also contains many pages advertising the newest games and novelties that were available for the arcade in 1987.
These pages inspired an idea for a series of posts here on spacemonkeyx.com – I’m going to go through these machines page-by-page for the pinball and video games, as well as a select few of the arcade and novelty machines. We’ll take a look at the history of the game, I’ll dig up some photos or YouTube videos of gameplay, and we’ll all just generally take a trip back to the arcade of 1987.
I’m working on the first post starting with the pinball machines you see above, so check back soon!
