CRYSTAL CASTLES GAME FOR SALE MANUALS

The track ball was spotted with dirt so I took it all apart to clean the rust off the rollers and clean the ball. The coin door was a mess as usual, but I spend some time refurbishing coin doors some months ago and have 7 or so ready to drop in. I tossed the monitor in the trash and bought a brand new WG 7400 from Happs the next day. And what did I end up with? An monitor with an adjustable width, no blue, and really bad Double Dragon burn in.

Ten solder connections later the old part was out and the new part was in.

Order kit #2 to convert an upright Dig Dug, Kangaroo, Food Fight and Arabian.Happs sells a limited amount or repair parts for WG monitors, but they do sell width coils which I ordered and received within a week. Order Crystal Castles kit #1 to convert an upright Missile Command. Atari Coin Connection newsletter Volume 8 #2 Spring 1984

CRYSTAL CASTLES GAME FOR SALE MANUALS

They sold for $2,095 and £1,895 respectively, before being heavily discounted just months after release – perhaps a sign of the ailing market at the time.īut interestingly, it was one of the first Atari games to be produced as a conversion kit, to be sold alongside the full upright release.Ītari’s beautiful Crystal Castles upright cabinetĪ few months later in 1984, clearly looking to squeeze every last drop out of the potential of Crystal Castles, and with some fanfare, Atari announced the kits in their Coin Connection newsletter, sent to operators and distributors across the USA:ĪTARI INTRODUCES CRYSTAL CASTLES CONVERSION KITSīentley Bear is back! Now he’s gathering more gleaming new profits, adding new players to a wide base of older games……And he continues to deliver irresistable character appeal that keep players making swift tracks into both arcade and street locations! Each kit includes all the electronics, hardware, instruction manuals and graphic materials to completely convert your games. It was a decent enough success for Atari, with the production of 4,880 upright and 500 cocktail cabinets. One game released in 1983, was Crystal Castles. With earnings on the decline, arcade owners were focused on profit maximisation – conversion kits were very much at the forefront of their minds, rather than splashing out on brand new hardware every time they wanted new playthings for their customers to get excited about and drop coins into.īetter to get a slice of that ever increasing pie, than none of it at all.

The industry was slowing down, and operators were much more cost conscious. Put simply, arcade cabinet conversions, hacks and speed up kits were not good news for the company’s bottom line.īut by 1983, they realised that this market had to be catered for. Arcade cabinet sales had taken off, and with the release of several arcade titles during those years that sold in the tens of thousands, they realised that their business model was entirely based on operators buying new hardware when the shelf life of their games was up. Many conversions were badly done, leaving ugly cabinets in their wake, and a headache for collectors some 40 years later to sort out! But not all conversions were created equal…Ītari, the darlings of the coin-operated industry, were running the gauntlet between 19. This was common practice, albeit something of an underground activity by profit-wary arcade owners. When an arcade machine got to the end of its play life and stopped taking money, why buy a whole new cabinet, when a simple swap of the game’s PCB, controls and artwork would convert a game into something new? Put simply, this was a way for arcade operators to maximise their profits. We’ve looked at arcade conversions here on the blog previously.

Crystal castles game for sale