Victim of a Woot-off, in a good way - 12 Midway game cabinet lands for an early Christmas

I always had a bit of a distorted reality of success and goals in my childhood, but that is to be expected, because you are a little kid.

The one that has lasted into my 30s, as a sign of 'making it', was a real Robotron 2048 cabinet. Strange, I admit. I never actually planned on owning one but it is always one of those little goals you setup for yourself to stay motivated. As time passed, less cabinets have survived in workable condition. MAME cabinets and emulators definitely fill a little bit of the void, but this game was always a bit of an oddball due to the dual joystick layout. It doesn't translate well to gamepads or keyboards.

Robotron has a long history with my family and our Rockford neighborhood back in the 80s. We'd typically play all day on a quarter or two in the downtown area. As with most early 80s video games, it focuses on game play instead fancy graphics. It is a little bit of a programming marvel because programming was started and completed over a weekend. Not many games that still hold up today have that kind of history.

By chance, I was watching a Woot off happen and I saw an item that I never even knew existed, the Midway 12 Game Tabletop Classic Arcade System. The price was much less than a real cabinet on EBay, so I took a chance on it.

Features:
14” full color CRT monitor with 12 Classic Arcade Hits built in
Accessible AV jacks allow you to plug in and play any of your other home video game systems
Dual Control Panel for Head-to-Head Play
No assembly required, plug and play

Built in Classic Arcade Games: Defender, Defender II, Bubbles, Splat, Sinistar, Rampage, Satans Hollow, Root Beer Tapper, Timber, Wizard of War, Joust, and Robotron.

It arrived this past Friday and much to my surprise, the kids have latched onto the cabinet like no other game system I've ever seen. They are literally fist fighting over who gets to play on the game system. The original Robotron only had about 18,000 upright cabinets produced and around 5000 sit-down versions produced. It looks like this product also had a limited run because our game is labeled "387 out of 486".

There still is a real Robotron cabinet at the GameWorks location in downtown Seattle, and every few months when I'm in the Redmond area, I try to make a quick stop over there to play on an original cabinet. I might not need to do that anymore with this at home. The trips to GameWorks have turned into a bit of a ritual, much like my trips for hot Thai food at Thai Ginger.