Arcade games

[Philip Belben]

Just curious...

There's a shop in Coalville, I'm not sure what it sells (maybe it sells 
games consoles; maybe it's an amusement arcade; maybe both).

In the window this weekend were two machines that caught my eye: an 
original Space Invaders machine from 1978, priced at 895 pounds; and a 
pinball machine from 1979 (branded "Gottlieb") for an 
almost-as-unreasonable 495 pounds.  (I think at current exchange rates 
that's about $1300 and $700 US)

As I was walking home, failing to hum the Space Invaders song, I 
wondered what sort of an active market is there for such machines?  The 
prices looked high enough that they must be aiming at serious 
collectors, or possibly innkeepers who want to create a retro-seventies 
atmosphere.

So do people here know about the classic arcade game market?  Are my 
neighbours of a couple of blocks away being overoptimistic with their 
prices?

Philip.

PS What I remember from the period was the many, many attempts to write 
Invaders-style games in BASIC on the PET and other home computers.  And 
my friend Matthew, after we'd borrowed a Sinclair ZX81 and experimented 
for a week or two, shutting himself away and writing a quite good one 
for that machine in machine code - I helped with the BASIC shell that 
built the initial screen display.  And wiring a phone earpiece to the 
PET user port to hear the sound effects on the Commodore invaders 
program.  And so on...

PPS has anyone preserved the Space Invaders song?  I sincerely hope not.