Space Gun

Let's go back to the early nineties for a moment. The summer holiday was always in the family car, and we often took the ferry to Denmark. Not an easy situation for someone who tends to get seasick, like me! It was on one of these holidays, I think it must be the summer of 91, that a particular arcade game saved me. I was puking my guts out on the rolling Denmark ferry until I discovered Space Gun.
I realized that I felt OK as long as I was concentrating on the game! So I played it for hours. And it more or less saved the rest of my stomach contents until we were back on land.

I never forgot about Space Gun. It was available on the home computer of choice at the time, the Amiga, but it didn't really feel the same without the guns rumbling. When the internet became more widespread I searched for the game, and drooled at pictures of the cabinet. The advent of MAME also gave me an opportunity to play the original arcade version, but the mouse was still no substitute for the positional guns.

Fast forward to 2013. I was searching a Swedish site when I found it. The sales text said something like "Your chance of owning a real arcade cabinet!", but to me it wasn't just any cabinet. Space Gun!

The cabinet looked great in the pictures, so I asked the seller if anything was missing or not working. "No, everything is working, nothing is missing". OK, I was hooked! I had to have it.

The game was at least 800 kilometers away, so I got a friend who lives closer to pick it up for me. And that's when the problems started.
I went to look at the cabinet in my friend's home some weeks later, and I quickly noticed that something was missing. The pedals! And the door panel above them!
I hurried to contact the seller, and his reply was quite surprising. "Oh yeah, the pedals are still here". Why didn't he mention anything if he forgot to give them to my friend? He also said that he never had the door panel. So much for a complete cabinet. But I would soon learn that things were even worse.

Luck would have it that my cousin was going the same direction shortly after, and he could pick up the pedals. And now I realized that this cabinet was neither complete nor fully working. The pedals' wiring harness was badly cut and spliced, and the pedals didn't work at all. The game is playable without the pedals, but one of the guns can't go left, and the other doesn't vibrate.

And there you have it. My intention was to buy a complete and working Space Gun, and that is certainly what I paid for. But now I have one more problem game on my hands! I hope to have it fully up and running soon, but I need to finish some other projects first.
I frankly don't think I learned anything from this, but I should have learned not to trust pictures... and sellers.