Saving an Arcade Workshop: The legacy of Automatic Services Limited

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll have read several articles where I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go through old collections or stashes of arcade cabinets. This is where arcade collectors get together to acquire, rescue, save (call it what you will) artifacts from the arcade industry. Often cabinets are abandoned in pretty desolate buildings, or an ex operator decides to sell up some of their old inventory – every event like this has a story and they are all unique. As well as being a great way to acquire arcade cabinets and spares, clambering around on your hands and knees in old, filthy arcade warehouses is a good chance to meet up with other collectors and is (usually!) a generally fun way to spend a weekend.

On occasion, we are able to do some good while we’re at it. So this week, I’m going to share some history about a successful ex-operator, and how this particular opportunity came about.

Mark Shepherd ran a company up north here in the UK called Automatic Services Limited. The company had quite the history, having been started by his father in July 1961. It originally supplied jukeboxes to Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes, keeping our troops entertained during their downtime.

The operation soon expanded its remit throughout Yorkshire and started placing amusement machines, including pinball tables in various establishments across the county. With the advent of videogames in the late 70s, inevitably the business began supplying and servicing the latest and greatest arcade video machines.

Mark joined his father’s business in 1977, right at the start of the popularity of arcade videogames. He made it his mission to learn the workings of the arcade industry and began to put his own mark on the company’s strategy. One of the more interesting things he did was to develop and manufacture his own “Universal” style cabinets, with a bespoke wiring harness and cabinet design, long before the Jamma standard was even a thing. Mark figured that this would make it easy to change games at regular intervals to ensure takings were maximised. It also ensured that any repairs could be quickly and easily carried out – not to mention it also protected the cabinets from being used by other suppliers – as the connectors were unique to Automatic Services, only games supplied by the company could be installed.

The business thrived throughout Yorkshire until the early 2000’s when Mark retired. All the remaining cabinets and parts that he had left was stored in several connected buildings next to his home.

Sadly in the summer of last year, Mark Shepherd passed away, leaving his family to deal with this huge amount of arcade-related inventory. Mark’s close friend Drew and his daughter Lauren reached out to the arcade collecting community to ask for our help in building an inventory of what was there, and to help clear the building out.

My buddy Oliver and I took a trip up to the site for an initial visit, and here’s what we documented:

Working through the various rooms, we ended up in perhaps the most interesting part of the building that we called the “wet” room, for reasons that will become clear. Yep, the roof had caved in and the elements had been dripping in for some time…

So we documented everything, then rounded up a crack team of collectors who were prepared to get involved and help clear the rooms. One of the key jobs was to test the vast collection of Jamma boards that were found. Drew had documented them all and tested each one at his home. Oliver was on hand to provide a reasonable valuation for each one for the family, as well as some advice for the best way to get these sold.

With that done, a couple of weeks later, ten of us rented vans and made the trip back to Yorkshire to get to work to clear out the building. We’d shared the inventory with the guys coming up, and dibs were made on things that people were particularly interested in. But inevitably, we were going to find much more than we initially accounted for!

Its hard to know where to start as there was so much stuff, but let’s dive right in:

Despite being in the midst of winter, we struck it lucky with the weather – it certainly wasn’t warm, but we’d managed to avoid any rain which was a real blessing. We all retired to a local hotel to recharge our batteries after a full day of lifting and shifting 300lb arcade cabinets and prepare ourselves for day two.

After downing a few beers, grabbing a bite to eat and getting a good nights sleep, we returned to the location. The plan for the second day, was to start going through the ‘wet room’.

I mentioned the Star Wars that Oliver and I had identified during our initial visit. After moving a mountain of junk to get to it, we were finally able to take a closer look:

As you can see, we took a mountain of pictures, and there are far too many to share here in full, but here’s just a small selection of the parts we pulled from the building, and specifically the wet room:

Talking of keys, I picked up what appear to be the keys from the Star Wars cabinet for posterity:

As the daylight started to disappear it was time to finish loading up the vans and say goodbye to our hosts.

I have to say of all the experiences like this I’ve attended over the years, this was an epic weekend, hanging out with a great bunch of people. Not only in terms of what we managed to pull out of the building and save, but especially so because of our hosts, Drew and Lauren. A nicer couple of people you couldn’t possibly meet, they were very accommodating, and graciously allowed us idiots to clamber around, hunting things out and pulling these old arcade cabinets from the building. Plenty of laughs throughout the weekend too.

I would imagine this was a difficult weekend for Lauren, but we drove home with a sense of having done something good for the family, and left them with the assurance that all this old stuff – which let’s face it, is just junk to many people – was all going to good homes and would be restored and fixed up. Many of the cabinets will be available for public play at Arcade Archive museum and Pixel Busters arcade, and any parts rescued will go back into the community to be used in other cabinets to keep things running.

One of the things that we are organising is an identifier plate to be placed on the back of each machine pulled from the building, to ensure their provenance and origin is acknowledged and preserved:

So there you have it. This was a great and memorable weekend, which turned up a huge amount of interesting and useful stuff. Everyone went home tired, happy and with a lot of explaining to do when the vans returned home full!

Huge thanks again to Lauren and Drew for allowing us to hunt through the building and take away some great finds.

Do check out the video below that Alex from Arcade Archive has uploaded documenting the weekend, which will give you a better idea of the location and the condition of the building. It includes conversations with Drew, Lauren and Mike who give a lot more detail about the history Automatic Services and some of the the machines, PCBs and parts we found:

We will ensure that the parts and cabinets that we found from the Automatic Services collection are put to good use and get a new lease of life, whether it be operated in a public museum, arcade or home collection.

Thanks for reading this week. If you enjoyed the read, please share this article on your social media feeds – I appreciate it!

Tony