I’m not actually sure that I should be writing this post. I’m still buzzing with excitement. I’m worried that, by writing this, someone out there is going to happen upon it and make it theirs, and then I will be very sad.
Kasul and I were out hitting the thrift shops on the sunny spring Saturday, as one does. One of the places we were looking to go to happened to have recently closed for awhile. Bummer.
So Kasul went looking online for other places of a similar nature and found Cruz’n Retro, a new-to-us used game and toy store right next door in Vernon.
Nice place! They had a bunch of old arcade games set up, just as you walk in, but none of them were running, which is too bad. I’d have liked a chance at Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, but it wasn’t to be.
Game selection trended toward XBox, but they had a decent PS2 selection and a pretty amazing Switch selection. I didn’t find much interesting in their N64 or SNES games. He did have some GBA games behind the counter, so I grabbed the GBA port of the NES port of the Xevious arcade game. I have the original on MAME, but that is formatted for vertical displays.
But let’s get back to the Vectrex. There it was, sitting on an original 1982, 44 year old, retail display stand. Beneath it was a cabinet filled with boxes of new controllers, and games in new condition. I was blown away.
The owner noticed my interested, took off the slip cover and turned it on. The familiar Vectrex whine filled the place, and the CRT spun up its crisp display.
The owner told a story of a woman who was disposing of her husband’s things. This was the second retail display they had; the first was stored too close to a furnace and was damaged. The guy pulled out a case full of detoxed Vectrex games with the cartridges, overlays and manuals in baggies. Apparently the boxes had been flattened and stored away and the wife would be bringing them by at some point.
These were not the most amazing things.
The husband was a collector. He hadn’t just bought these displays, he had a new, unopened Vectrex, and a pristine, complete-in-box 3D imager. This is a bizarre little device that spun colored disks in front of your eyes to both add color to the monochrome vectors, and provide different images to each eye for a 3D effect. Nicole Express did an article about how it worked and the new compatible imager kickstarted a few years back.
None of the stuff was for sale; not yet. I don’t know if he knows if he will part this collection out or sell it complete. I know the stuff will be pricey. This is an incredible find. I’ll have to keep stopping by to find out what he’s planning to do with some of those games. And that imager… at one point, people were probably tossing these in the dump or sending them to Goodwill. They are precious now and will continue to be so.
Anyway, thought I’d share. If you find this store and make an offer and take all this stuff away, I will hate you forever, but I imagine you’ll be okay, with your 3D imager spinning disk eyewear.
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