Wells-Gardner

[gonzothegreat]

This is something I can sink my teeth into!

I used to be a BIG videogame collector. Consequently, I became rather familiar with WG monitors (as well as the other big name Electrohome). I never knew about WG's TV sets until one day while dumpster diving I saw a chassis in the trash that was obviously a TV (old rotary tuner) but it bore an amazing resemblance to a K4600 monitor chassis (multiple vertical boards). I suspect the K4600 monitor used in many early vids was just a tunerless version of the TV I saw years ago.

On a related subject, one of my greatest videogame finds invovled a gent who used to work at the WG plant. This was about ten years ago and he had just left WG. Anyways, they let him pick junk out of the scrap pile after he left. The stuff he pulled was probably of little interest to TV collectors but to me it was &$#@-ing GOLD. 33" videogame monitors. Dozens of boardsets for the arcade game "Tempest". Then there was a strange wooden box with some cords hanging out. He opened it up and inside was the complete guts of an Atari "Space Duel" (a color version of the arcade game Asteroids). He said it was a special jig they made up for testing the special color vector scan monitors they made for Atari (I think it was the K6100). I bought it for $15 and took it home. Since I didn't have the monitor to use it with, it sat downstairs for a few years until I took a closer look at it. The serial number on the boardset was "0016". AFAIK this is the earliest remaining Space Duel machine known to exist. I considered tossing it in a SD cabinet I had restored but the historical significance of the jig was just too much to consider.

Quite a character. I think he also had a side career in the porno movie business. Now I remember his name "Bob Hartlieb".