an Intel 8080 if I were in Waco. In Dallas I know
where to get them. And people call us. Say
Commercial Music has a customer in Amarillo or
somewhere, the guy will call Commercial and say,
"Hey, where can I get a photo-optical isolator, an
ILD 74?" So Joe tells him, "Well, you don't
necessarily need an ILD 74, you can use an ILTC
6-it's the same thing, just made by a different
company in Houston." So the guy says, "Well,
where can I get one of those?" And the guy has no
idea where to get it.
Joe then turns around and says to us, "Can you
put a couple of ILD 74's in a piece of styrofoam and
mail them to this guy in Amarillo?" And I say, "I
don't want to do that," because it's too much
trouble. And he says, "Do it anyway, because the
guy has had the game down for three days and he
can't get it fixed." That puts us into the parts
business, which I don't really want to do. But the
guy's got a broken game and he's got to get it fixed.
You can get the part in Dallas from probably ten
different sources at $3.00. You can go to a
distributor and buy them for $10 apiece, or you can
do without them. What do you do?
PLA Y METER: So even on the Phase III games,
you can get the parts from the distributor?
BUSH: Yes, you can still get them from the
distributor, but they are generally a little bit more
expensive. Another thing, I've found out: the
distributors have quit buying from the manufac-
turers in a lot of cases; they've gone out and bought
from the general electronics industry. And they're
stocking industry parts rather than manufactur-
ers' parts. They have brought their prices down,
too, by buying right.
PLAY METER: How do you see the role of the
service company in the industry's future?
BUSH: This is an age of specialization and the
industry that we're associated with and we have
been moving that way in a hurry in the last three or
four years. When did Midway come out with Gun
Fight, two years ago? There has been a major
turnaround since then. We weren't prepared for
Gun Fight. When the first microprocessor games
came out, we found we didn't even know what a
microprocessor was. We didn't know anything more
about it than any pinball mechanic, but we had to
learn because they were bringing them to us at the
rate of eight or ten a day-you either learn pretty
quickly or you end up with just piles and piles of
boards. And it was either the distributor had to
learn how to fix them or we did, or Midway was
going to have to fix everybody's boards. Midway
couldn't fix everybody's boards, so we did learn
how to fix them.
The games are going to get more and more
sophisticated and I don't really think the
distributors or operators should even worry about
trying to fix their own games. They ought to rely on
the service companies to take care of them. We can
afford to hire the sophisticated help; we can do the
volume of business to pay the sophisticated help . •
NEWIBELITA
LIGHTWEIGHT PORTABLE
COIN COUN TE R
YOU WANT IT THE INWSTRY NEEDS IT 0000
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CONVERSION E< UIPMENT FOR ALL
MAKES OF IDEO GAMES
FOR MOR INFORMATION - CALL OR WRITE US TODAY
*
NEWIBELITA
LIGHTWEIGHT PORTABLE
COIN COUNTER
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innexpensive
coin tray support
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fast
only 9 pounds
long last ing
PAC I
6 GAMES ON
ONE' LOGIC ' C.
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54
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