When entering the former home of Kevin Mortenson’s family tire shop in Estevan, you’re greeted by the subtle whine of dozens of arcade monitors – a sound that only scratches the surface of his collection of arcade machines.
“We’ll say I got about a hundred and fifty. I don’t have a good, physical, hard count,” Mortenson replied when asked how many cabinets occupy the shop. “I’m just about at my limit.”
Saying Mortenson loves arcade games is a serious understatement. He’s been building his collection of games for nearly 20 years, bringing more and more games into both his shop and his basement. He’s put thousands of kilometres on the road to pick up new machines.
“They’ve all got a little story to them, like the Wizard of Wor came from Fargo, [Millipede] came from Omaha, [Timber] came from Green Bay,” Mortenson said, motioning to different cabinets in his collection.
Mortenson says his passion for gaming and the arcade started during the boom in the 1980s with home consoles, before levelling up to arcade games like Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong.
“I wouldn’t call myself a geek or a nerd,” Mortenson said. “But I’ve always liked playing these consoles, and then the consoles got bigger.”
“Starhawk might be my rarest game, according to Kevin, I didn’t realize that,” Mortenson said as he walked past several of his arcade works-in-progress.
“This, this is a rare game,” his next door neighbour and fellow arcade collector Kevin Kobitz replies.
Kobitz says he only stumbled onto his neighbour’s shared hobby by chance.
“I was walking in the valley, we live on a valley edge, and I noticed a Centipede cabinet in his window in his backyard,” Kobitz said. “I think that’s when we started talking.”
Kobitz keeps his collection of around 30 games in his basement, and after showing Mortenson his collection, he says it may have brought out their competitive nature at first.
“At that time I had way more games than him, and for whatever reason that seemed to almost make it a competition where he had to outdo me, which he has done over the years.”
After amassing hundreds of machines, mostly non-working and either waiting on restoration or use as parts in other machines, Mortenson says he’s looking to downsize his collection in order to focus on a few handpicked favourites, similar to what Kobitz has done.
But after downsizing, he still plans to keep around quite the collection.
“I’d love to thin the herd down to about thirty machines, and someday I’ll get there,” Mortenson said.
In the meantime, Mortenson is getting ready to bring some of his favourites out of the shop and into his basement in the spring, once his son is back from school to help with the hauling.
“I’m getting too old to run these things up and down the stairs,” Mortenson said with a laugh.
Back in the day, the machines took a quarter to play, but now it’s about giving a part of gaming history, and Mortenson’s arcade memories an extra life.
