Yesterday was the auction for what remained of Good Times Emporium. The entire stock of the place, from go-carts to arcade machines to the fixtures from the laser tag course, was cataloged and laid out in a warehouse down in Brockton. It was a little sad to see the beast splayed out like that as little more than an arrangement of parts, but my fascination with the event as a whole was more than enough to outweigh the shame of the thing.

When all was said and done, the entire Good Times inventory amounted to a little over 1,200 lots. Generally speaking, the arcade machines came first, then it was on to the more fixture-based amusements (like go-carts and skee ball), and the on to furniture and hardware. The auctioneers moved at a pace of about 100 items per hour, which obviously held the promise to make it a very long day. It became apparent very quickly that staying for the duration of the auction wasn't going to be necessary.

The process of the auction was a marvel in itself. Managed and executed by this group Super Auctions, these guys were the real deal. There were five of them working the room, spread out through the crowd of a couple hundred people. The clerk and lead auctioneer were in the center. The clerk was seated at a little desk decorated in circus clown decor, and the auctioneer stood up on a ladder, equipped with a headset mic that piped his rapid-fire bidding announcements through a portable megaphone speaker propped up across the room. Then surrounding these two were three others, standing on ladders and countertops, pounding Red Bulls, and eyeing their particular region of the floor looking for bidders. When they saw a card go up, they'd belt out a quick "HEP!" sound, prompting the auctioneer to bring the price higher. They also took it upon themselves to occasionally berate timid bidders who felt the stakes were climbing a bit too far from their wallets.

The start of the auction immediately separated the men from the boys. The casual geeks, arriving with hopes of coming home with a new fixture for their apartment, were quickly outpaced by a more serious class of shoppers, many of whom had traveled from as far as Florida to take a stab a procuring what they no doubt saw less as an entertainment device and more as a legitimate tool for boosting their income. Being firmly from the casual camp myself, I shared in a general wave of shock and despair that took hold of the room as the first few lots were rolled out. When The Fast & The Furious sold for $5,100, I knew I'd made a grievous miscalculation in my hopes for the day. I said a quiet goodbye to the items I was most hopeful for, namely the Tetris arcade game and the Fortune Teller kiosk, which sold for $350* and $1,400, respectively.

Not everyone shared this perspective. Some who knew the score saw that the prices were high, but relative to their understanding of how these things usually sold, were still a win. The most dramatic example came from the winner of lot 157, the Airline Pilot sit-down game, which is essentially more a flight simulator than an actual game. It sold for $2,500, which is apparently about 1/3 of its typical going rate. This was exclaimed exuberantly by the winner, who leapt up the closest auction assistant's ladder to shake his hand, knocking full beverages and paperwork to the ground in his wake.

While I was woefully under-equipped to document the affair, I did manage to grab some audio along the way, like this clip of the Ms. Pac-Man sale, which escalated, came to a tie-breaker, and ultimately sold for $1,000.



*While I admit that this was within the budget I'd set for myself, I started to consider the 13% buyer's premium tacked on to every purchase, and then compounded with the task and cost of finding a way to get the thing back home. Unfortunately, this thought process wasn't completed before the auction came to an abrupt end.