Mario Bros. Arcade Reproduction: An Encounter With An Original

Marc is right, we will be working on the cabinet this weekend, so I should have a nice update as of Monday or Tuesday. I was in Big Bear the last couple of days with my wife on a snowboarding trip, and lo and behold, they had an arcade there. It was sort of a run-down arcade with lots of beat up classic games like Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, etc. So as I'm looking around I'm thinking, "I wonder if they have a Mario Bros. cabinet here..." I thought that would be great because I don't actually remember seing one in person since I was a child. I really wanted to see any old Nintendo cabinet, so I could compare mine to the original, see how close I was coming. And then I saw it...a row of 4 Nintendo cabinets: Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Jr., and Donkey Kong 3. I was so excited! I played Mario Bros. because I'm really not sure if I ever played the game in the arcade. My fond memories of playing Mario Bros. come from the Atari 7800 version which my brother and I spend endless hours playing. So I proceeded to get the high score on the Mario Bros. machine. I analyzed the details of the machine and I must say that mine looks so much like the original. This particular example was pretty beat up as you'll see by the pictures. The t-molding was thrashed, the side art and control panel were chipping, the buttons and joysticks needed to be replaced, and the colors on the screen were bleeding pretty badly. But it was a fun experience seeing it in person while I'm working on my own homemade version back at home. This makes me all the more excited to get it done! Here's some pictures I took with my phone, some of them look screwy, but if you click on them you can see the full image.