Today I scored a free game. Free as in zip, zilch, nada, etc.. $0 is a great price, because that’s exactly what I have in my wallet right now thanks to Christmas! I was looking through the RGVAC newsgroup yesterday morning and my timing was good because I spotted a post for a free Moon Patrol cabinet shortly after it was listed. I picked it up from a wicked nice guy who is a collector with no room for this one. It’s beat to hell, but it’s free and a Moon Patrol, and that’s good enough for me. This was not my favorite game, but it was up there. If I remember right I think I used to play this one at an Uncle Tony’s pizza. Mmmmm…Pizza Anyways…

Some bastard painted it black and converted it to an Aliens at one time or another. It still had an Aliens sticker on one side. Black seems to be the color of choice when ruining classic games (it’s the new purple).

This is SUPPOSED to look like this:

It has the absolute most generic marquee you could possibly come up with:

What game is this? Why it’s a “Video” game, of course! Like the monitor wouldn’t have been a big enough clue. :/

I started stripping everything out of the cabinet, and am almost done with that. The monitor bezel was from Stargate, was upside down AND was cut narrower to fit this cabinet. Freakin’ sweet!

The locks were there, but locked and the keys were long gone. I grabbed my drill and drilled the lock out for the coin box. Piece of cake. Coin box was empty though. I went around back and tried drilling the back lock. This lock must have been made out of titanium, because I drilled the crap out of it and it still held firm.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to get this lock off. I spent way too long on this, and then something about 10 inches over to the left caught my eye:

For those of you not familiar with this, it’s a screw, and I’m an idiot.

Here’s the control panel before and after stripping all the crap off:

It looks like swiss cheese now. Lots of holes to plug…should be fun.
Here is what it looks like with almost everything stripped out, and with a new clip on marquee light from home depot

This project HOPEFULLY will be relatively cheap. The guy I got this from had a Moon Patrol board that I bought for $20! I’ll need stencils to repaint the cabinet which I can get for $75, some paint, a marquee, control panel overlay, and monitor bezel. I don’t know if the monitor is any good or not, but I’ll find out when the time comes. It has some burn in but I can probably hide it with smoked plexiglass (Thanks for the tip Mark)

Oh…I almost forgot. It has a wee bit of water damage on the bottom which I’ll need to bondo the crap out of: