‘Tron’ fan finds rare ‘holy grail’ arcade game abandoned on sidewalk
Growing up, Tim Lapetino loved the movie “Tron.”
…
Lapetino became a designer and writer with a passion for the history of geek culture and video games.
It also left Lapetino with a white whale: an arcade machine based on the movie that became vanishingly rare after the game’s 1983 release. Lapetino never found “Discs of Tron” at any of his childhood arcades. He finally played the game — on a machine that is now a collector’s item worth thousands of dollars — as an adult at a museum.
Then what happened?
Then, on a May outing near his home in the Chicago suburbs, he came across a “Discs of Tron” cabinet abandoned on the sidewalk.
“If you were to ask me if I had a sort of ‘holy grail’ arcade machine that I would want to own someday, this would be it,” Lapetino told The Washington Post. “… To drive up and see it sitting on the curb, I just couldn’t believe it.”
What did he do?
Lapetino confirmed that the game was abandoned and quickly enlisted the help of friends and family to transport it back home. He got to the arcade machine in the nick of time — a notice from a trash pickup service taped to the side instructed its previous owner to break it down before disposal. Nevertheless, it was in good condition. And when he tinkered with it several weeks later, he discovered it still worked.
What luck!
Lapetino is not a collector of arcade machines and did not own one before his unlikely discovery. They’re bulky and expensive, he explained. But if he would ever make an exception, it would be for “Discs of Tron.”
Lucky indeed.
Lapetino said he spoke to a person at the house where the machine had been left out and confirmed that they were throwing it out, saying it was broken.
What did you do?
With the help of his brother, Lapetino strapped the roughly 700-pound cabinet to two dollies from a hardware store and wheeled it down the street back to his home. He left the machine in his garage for several weeks. In late June, he and Zespy inspected it to see if it was still working. To their surprise, it only took a few hours of tinkering with the cabinet’s wiring before the decades-old machine sprang back to life.
Any other surprises?
Lapetino’s luck continued. He and (James Zespy, a friend of Lapetino’s) inspected the interior of the cabinet and saw that it had only been played about 2,600 times, according to a counter inside the machine. And the coin mechanisms inside the machine were spotless. Lapetino’s free “Discs of Tron,” rescued from the street, had barely been used.
And since then…
He has also showed the game to his two children, who love it, he said. His 11-year-old daughter currently holds the high score.
“I’ve got to log some more time on there, apparently,” Lapetino laughed.
LOL
As for the game/arcade machine itself…
A sold-out listing for an environmental “Discs of Tron” on a vintage arcade store priced it at $11,000. Sellers on eBay have listed the game’s circuit boards alone for over $1,000.
What will you do with it now?
The machine will be great firsthand research for Lapetino’s book, which will discuss the “Tron” arcade games in detail, he added.
And first with hand gaming experience too.
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