"As a teenager I must have put hundreds of quid into it..."
Andrew Baker's love of Double Dragon started an international business...
| Andrew Baker's first foray into cabinet collecting came during a quest for a fruit machine. Working on the assumption that having a fruitie in his home would be more economical than banging his readies away down his local pub, Andrew set off to buy one - and returned home with an arcade's worth of coin-ops. "When I went to pick up the fruit machine and saw a warehouse full of old videogames, I just couldn't help myself. I bought the lot - about 50 game boards and 20-plus cabinets. The idea was that I'd start selling them on locally, but through the internet the business swiftly became international. We now have customers in Korea, Hong Kong, America and Germany." Andrew gets many of his old boards and cabinets from outfits that deal in big-money, up-to-the-minute kit. The problem is, these guys usually only sell in bulk and sight unseen. One day Andrew got home with a new batch of game boards and found that ten were World Cup `90 and another five were Lethal Enforcers - and all of them without the light gun. A disappointing haul - but, of course, he might just have easily have lucked across some lost classic. In the early days, Andrew sold his machines to a mixture of mates and local kebab houses, but soon found that this was too much hassle with little or no payback. He was just about ready to jack it in when, in a last ditch attempt, he decided to advertise his wares on the Internet - and he hasn't looked back since. "You can spend the same as you would on a Playstation and a handful of games getting an arcade machine", he argues, "but a year down the line it's worth £100 more than you bought it for, while your Playstation has either been replaced by a new system or taken a massive price drop. You won't lose money on game boards. If you bought Pac-Man today for £100, in six months' time when you're bored with it you can part exchange it or sell it for £100 or more. You can't fault his logic. "The game I say I'll never sell", he says, "and the first one I bought, was Double Dragon. I was at a supplier and noticed it sitting in a pile of games that were to be thrown out. As a teenager I must have put hundreds of quid into it, and all the home computer versions I'd seen were pants, so I couldn't believe my luck. I guess I played it for a few hours every night after that, with the wife. Soon we'd got so good we changed the rules to force us to complete the game without losing a life, then without getting hit. The advice I'd give to anyone buying a machine is to play it like you would at an arcade - put money into it, so you don't finish it in a day. That way you won't get bored of it quickly"
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