Storytime With Chris: The Weird, Wild World of Captain’s Auctions

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you know Captain’s Auctions, the giant of online amusement auctions and arcade sales. The reason? Well, that’s mostly because of Chris Campbell.

Campbell has a powerful personality. From his iconic clothing choices (the hat is a staple) which hits the classic skater vibe pretty hard — to his story telling, he’s a kinda laid back West Coast dude that everyone wants to be friends with. When he talks his voice has an easy California drawl. Plus, he actually, like, plays pinball.

I was at the Captain’s Auction expo talk and I was hearing the sorta PG versions of stories that sounded awesome, but I could tell that there was more there. Turns out, I was right (suck on that!) . This guy has forgotten more wild pinball stories than you’ll ever dream of. I had to hear ‘em. And hear ‘em, I did. And now we’ve come to the birth of Storytime With Chris.

Every couple weeks, we’ll unveil a story that he or Cici told me — and you’ll be amazed. That’s it. From Keith Elwin to a pile of bills inside a pacman to a loaded gun! This week? We’re heading to the land of the rising sun — Japan for a lil’ hijynx involving Pachinko machines, Japanese gangsters, and… an infomercial.

The Super Auction Origin Story

Transcribed from an insane interview with Chris Campbell of Captain’s Auctions

Back in the day I was connected with Rob Storm, who ran a company called Super Auctions. They were doing all kinds of auctions about everything. I met him… and quickly started buying games. Things happened fast. I talked him into giving me his building in Fullerton because he was always traveling. I said, just let me have your building. I'll watch over it and he was like yeah, OK.

So me and him started talking. We started doing business with a guy in LA who was importing some (pachinko) machines. (Editor’s Note: Pachinko machines are Japanese gambling games that use these lil’ tiny pinballs and are mainly popular in Korea and Japan. Back to Chris) Okay? So from there, we took his contact and we flew over to Japan and met with some big players in the Japanese Pachinko community.

Yakuza Pachinkos

So here’s the thing… Gaming over there well it’s, uh, not all above board. Our first trip over there was going to be for 11 days and my partner, Rob, was a little nervous, nervous guy. He's my age, but he was like this super nervous little guy. (laughs)

I've been in a lot of situations where I know how to handle myself, but I tell you, Rob was really nervous. So these guys who look sorta Yakuza take us in a car — from Tokyo out about two and a half hours into the blackness. I mean, we’re just driving past farms and shit. And Rob is getting more and more nervous because of the two guys up front that were driving and escorting us.

I think these guys are Russian, but you get the idea. This is exactly what happened.

Like whenever they started talking, Rob freaks out and starts saying, “they’re trying to kill us!” So I told him, you know, in English, how I've got this handled. But the driver just keeps on going and going And Rob is really freaking out.

The 100 year old man in charge of Japanese gaming

So anyways, we end up going out to this farmhouse where there's this hundred-year-old guy and his wife, believe it or not. It's like a fucking movie. And they take us into this house. And there's this little old dude, he's sitting there, and he's not all, you know, intimidating. He's sitting there in a wife beater shirt, and his wife is there and she's hobbling around and she comes in and has these homemade, uh, little mochi balls.

Yeah, dude. I dunno either. Here’s an artistic representation of… something.

I knew I was supposed to have one, so I threw it in my mouth. These things are green, and it's warm and it honestly tastes like shit. And from there, we were good. You know, we were talking about this, that, and the other thing, and it ends up this guy is like plugged in for the entire island of Japan.

So there’s this hundred year old guy out here in his farm out in the middle of nowhere. And he was the one. Like the one who runs Japanese gaming. See with those machines, it’s an export. The Japanese run them to the Koreans, and the Koreans run the parlors. So, anyways, he opens the gates to us being able to meet with some of these people who had just unlimited resources of Pachinko and Pachislo machines, which are slot machines.

NIB Used Games for Japan’s GDP

This isn’t in Japan, but you get the idea.

So the warehouses over there, they're like 70, 80 feet tall. That’s because there's no space horizontally, so everything goes up. Just rows of slot machines piled up. Like, if the stacks fall over, dude, you're all dead. But the stuff was like, in perfect condition.

It's not some slunchy warehouse. This shit is like, brand new. So I had to ask them, like, “What's the deal? We go to places and some of the machines look so brand new, why are they selling them used?” Well, the deal is to keep up their GDP or whatever, the manufacturers, just continue to pump out games — even when there’s no market.

So what they do is they make it, force it, run it into places, and then they'll run it right out the back door and call it used and put it to another market. Wholely unplayed used games. It was crazy. We're meeting all these people and they're taking us out for these like badass dinners and all this. And so we started exporting and importing tens of thousands of these machines.

God, I wish I coulda found this informerical

Eventually, we even created an infomercial. Which could probably still be played out there. It’s this 20, 23-minute infomercial with the skill stop slot machine. This is before anybody was buying these machines. I think like, 2001 -2003. And we were doing the whole, pitch. You buy the machine. Then you have your upgrade bag of tokens and another upgrade bag and all this… So yeah, that’s how we ended up doing business with japan.