March shipping update

Zach here! It's been a while, hasn't it? We're still here in Japan, still working on machines and moving towards our goals. In fact, we sent out our first container all the way back in October, with almost all the contents going to an arcade in Texas. A few other people's orders made it on to help fill up that container, and those machines are getting forwarded to their new owners now. Once that was complete we began acquiring more inventory and taking more people's orders. In the end, we managed to finish pre-selling an entire container last month, and after some hiccups getting our booking sorted we managed to get a container secured and delivered to us on the 13th.

In October we had additional help, but this time we loaded the full container by ourselves. The weather was clear and sunny, but after a painless drop-off, the load started inauspiciously with our forklift immediately running out of gas as soon as we drove it forward a few meters to allow the container doors to open. Luckily we have a gas can that we were able to take to a nearby station and fill up. After a few minutes the forklift was refueled and we were ready to get to work.

The first things we loaded in were some LCD sit-down cabinets and dedicated machines, dropping the leg levelers and filling the gaps to make sure everything is stuck in place. In front of that, the bulk of the container was all New Net Cities, twenty in total. We tried our best to wrap these in a way that will keep them from getting scratched up, and once they're in the container in rows of 3 with the legs down, they're pretty much completely immobilized. I could reef on them hard and they wouldn't budge.

In front of the New Nets went everything else; some Astros, some Aeros, and a couple of SNK Candy cabinets. Once that was all packed, we stuffed some boxes in front with various accessory items and called it a wrap.

All in all, it was an exhausting day of shoving heavy cabinets around and getting on my hands and knees to extend leg levelers and jam cardboard in and around everything to keep it secured, but it went as well as I could have hoped. We aren't very experienced with container packing yet, but based on the results of the first container, we're confident this one will also arrive with everything just as it was going in. The supposed landing date is April 12th, but of course the actual unloading date may change.

This container is bound for the port of Seattle and will be distributed to the dozen or so unique buyers from there, and we are currently planning on sending another one along the same route about two months. That container should have more extremely high-quality repainted Aero Cities, as well as a lot of Astro/New Astros we got in that need heavy cleaning but are overall good candidates for sale. Watch our site/discord/arcade-projects thread for more info about what will be available on that container.

Going forward, we don't intend to exclusively serve the US. If we can find someone who can receive and unload a container based somewhere else (for example, Canada, the UK, mainland Europe) then we would be happy to work with them on arranging a sale, either a whole container buyout or negotiating a group buy to individuals. If this is you, let us know through our contact form or on Discord! Also, if you are associated with an arcade and are looking for machines from Japan to operate, we can offer competitive pricing on LCD cabinets like the Grigio as well as CRT machines that have some burn-in but still have good picture quality and have already had the necessary preventative maintenance done to go straight on location.