The Aussie Pinball Arcade
Aussie Pinball Forums => General Discussion => General Pinball Discussion => Topic started by: 4_amusement_only on May 17, 2015, 11:05:56 PM
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I answered an ad and picked up in excess of 100 Lesuire Line, Cash Box International and Cash Box Australia magazines tonight. Very hard to find so many in one hit. I got them off a daughter of a Traralgon, Victoria Ex operator.
Meticulously collected and organised. These magazines are intended for operators or industry specific people so it's interesting to read about current day going ons. In the Aussie Cash Box magazine, there was one article about a guy walking into a bar and shooting the jukebox into submission, another talking about the possible need to accept credit cards for gameplay instead of cash (early days of swipe cards). Another ad talking about the closing of Gottlieb and the sales to be had from that. The talk of the new Capcom Breakshot and how it's earnings are and how similar it's playfield looks to GTB's Sure Shot. Just a lot of information regarding our hobby and it's industry that would otherwise be lost or forgotten about.
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Nice pickup
Kinda like reading some old flyers, when the focus is on earnings and ease of maintanence
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It would be great to have this scanned and available to all as PDF but I imagine that would be a HUGE amount of work.................
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I have a few of these too Chris, very interesting reading and I like the way the international cashbox has the Aussie edition inside! Great pick up!
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You will be reading for hours with this lot. I have a heap of the pin game journals and a few other operator magazines that I flick through occasionally
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Yep certainly many hours of reading ahead!
The preservation into PDF I could gradually get done over time.
There is an interesting recurring story that goes across the Aussie mag for a couple of years between 95'-97'. It involves the declining state of operations for operators. They talk about 'survival' games, must have games of which are three or four; Daytona, Sega Rally and Time Crises. Lesuire and Allied was one of the main distributors at the time and also one of the main operators, Intencity being one of their main forts. This is where it gets interesting. L&A made a deal with Sega to have sole distributorship of importation of their product, excluding any other operator in Aus. Nobody else could bring in a new must have Sega machine. This is fine if they were just distributors selling on, but they were also one of the biggest operators, thus creating a monopoly.
A couple of other big operators/distributors started a fundraising campaign and many people stumped up the money to take Sega and L&A to court. This dragged on for many months and eventually L&A won on the controversial judgement that the product was a 'cinematographic production' (a movie) and thus copywrite laws came into effect on basis of this. L&A was declared sole distributor and could sell the product at 'any price' they liked! Doom and gloom for everybody else in Aus and many got out of the game after the writing was clearly on the wall. Those Sega games were vital for their survival.
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Very cool bit of info. In amongst my stash I found a typed letter from hankin from the 70s trying to get all the operators together to stop the proposed ban an amusment machines