I had said a few weeks back that I had put a stop to anymore arcade purchases until I had all of my current projects in hand. Then something pops up and I find myself buying another cocktail.

A fellow collector sent me a message a couple of weeks back with a link to an eBay auction. It was badly titled and only had three pictures, but I saw it was Nintendo and immediately sent a message to the seller. These were the pictures from the listing:




Straight away I saw the intact instruction cards and green joystick balltops and knew I had to have it. The seller had a Make Offer option so I shot across an offer and waited… I say waited, I messaged the seller about 5 minutes later asking them if my offer was too low, to send me what they wanted. I received a message back and we agreed on a price.

Just under two weeks later I was travelling down the A1 to go and collect it. All the information I had was the very sparse eBay listing and a confirmation that “it worked last time we tried it”. I was buying pretty much blind, but from what I’d seen, I wanted it!

Just over two and a half hours later, I exchanged cash for cocktail and threw it in the boot of the car:


I got the cocktail home and set it up in my kitchen so I could give it a once over. When I picked it up, the couple told me that they’d had it pretty much from new and to be fair, it looks that way.


It has the normal wear on the control panels (much less on the Player 2 side!), but aside from that it’s in great condition. The instruction card was the part that caught my eye in the original listing as I’d been searching for a good scan for my other Space Fever cocktails… :


The other part that caught my eye was the original set of green joystick balltops. A very rare part not seen very often due to the abuse they normally get in their natural habitat (local pub):


As no Space Fever cocktails were officially released in the UK, they were all imported from Japan, power converted and then adjusted to take old 10p pieces. This cocktail still has all of the original Yen decals:



Next was to open the lid and see what lurked inside. I got given the original keys when I picked it up, which were the original Takigen keys to match the original locks! I opened the lid and was amazed at how clean it was. This cocktail also has one of the gorgeous striped, coloured overlays covering the monitor:


These were a later addition to the older Black and White cocktails to try and modernise them a bit as all the other games being released around the same time were colour.

All that was left to do was a quick check of connections and switch on the power. A couple to seconds of the monitor warming into life and I was greeted with Space Fever in all its glory:


I carefully removed the overlay to see what state the monitor was in underneath:


Not that it shows very well in that picture, but there is no burn on the screen. The picture is also nice and bright and a quick adjustment of the volume knob stopped me terrifying the household with the sounds of lasers and aliens!

A few more pictures will show you the amazing condition this cabinet is in:




A normally bent coin door is a straight as the day it was made and the same goes for the latches on the inside of the lid that are normally bent and scuffed. It even still has the red ink inside of the serial number embossing!

Unlike most of my pickups, this cocktail needs very little attention. There’s some cleaning to be done under the glass where something has been spilled:


And the legs need some attention… Someone has “fashioned” taller legs at some point in this cocktails life. They are functional, but not pretty:


All in all, a quick clean and a leg swap and this cocktail will be perfect. I don’t think I’ll find a nicer example again.