Nine cabinets, one garage, and fourteen years of hunting down the machines that raised me — this is how a stack of quarters became a museum.
Summer of 2011: I paid forty dollars for a Donkey Kong cabinet with a dead monitor and a joystick held on with duct tape. I didn't know how to fix either one.
Three weekends and one YouTube rabbit hole later, Kong lit up in my garage for the first time in fifteen years. That hum is the reason I'm still doing this.
The first save. Bought broken from a garage sale in Ohio, restored over three weekends with a new flyback and a hand-soldered harness.
Found in a shuttered bowling alley outside Toledo. The two-player button mashers still argue about high scores every Friday.
Hauled home in a borrowed pickup after a six-hour round trip to Cleveland, sight unseen from a marketplace photo.
The centerpiece. Six months chasing an original cabinet before one turned up at an estate sale two miles from home.
From one broken Kong to nine working machines
Logged by hand in a garage notebook
My wife was not amused about a busted Donkey Kong hogging the garage — but game on.
A blown capacitor almost ended the hobby before it started; a stranger's forum post from Michigan saved it.
Six friends, four working cabinets, and a folding table of pizza — the point it stopped being "my hobby" and became "our thing."
Word got out. Neighbors started knocking on Friday nights just to hear the attract-mode music.
Fourteen years, tallied
These cabinets aren't decorations. They're the only place my dad and I ever talked without an agenda — just high scores and bad jokes.
Nine machines, fourteen years, and a garage door that's always open on Fridays. Come see what a hobby becomes when you never stop chasing it.