Who hasn’t taken home something they found lying on the floor next to the trash? DVDs, board games, paintings, furniture… Some people have their house decorated with other people’s leftovers and, with the foolishness, they get out of going to IKEA on Saturdays. But what happened in Chicago seems out of this world: instead of finding a somewhat tatty copy of ‘War and Peace‘, they found… an arcade game of which there are very few copies and which is valued at more than 10,000 dollars.
What’s up, man
Let’s go back to 1983, when Midway released a second game based on ‘Tron’, the relative Disney blockbuster of the previous year. It was an arcade game, ‘Discs of tron‘, set in a handball-style disc battle in a three-dimensional environment and that managed to create a perfect atmosphere thanks to a booth so complex that it weighed more than 315 kilos. It is said to be the most elaborate game of that decade in the history of gaming.
Few were made because not all arcades had room for it, and if you know anything about video games, 1983 sounds like what it sounds like: the crash of the industry. The few machines that were made ended up forgotten in a basement or stopped working. Game over. Well, sort of: in 2008 it was released on the Xbox Live Arcade and more or less preserved for the rest of history.
Back to 2023, when Tim Lapetino, a video game historian who was visiting relatives in Chicago, was told by his nephew that he had seen “a Tron thing” lying in the trash. “When we got to the site, I mumbled “What the fuck?” forgetting that my nephew was in the car with us. And believe it or not, there it was. A ‘Discs of Tron’ was on the street corner.” It had been there for several days, but as luck would have it, the garbage men couldn’t haul it away in their garbage truck because it weighed so much.
In fact, the arcade had a note written on it stating that it would have to be broken first before it could be scrapped. And they were not going to allow it: Lapetino and his friends rolled it from that corner to the garage of the house where he was staying in Chicago, where they verified that it worked perfectly. As chance would have it, this man is also preparing an exhibition on the history of ‘Tron’, so there’s no chance of selling it, whatever it takes. Does anyone else believe in happy coincidences?
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