My buddy (Kristoff on here - although hasn't been active on here in ages) and I bought a 4 slot big red and set it up in his parent's basement - this was sometime in 1999. Well, he "bought" it, but I fronted him the money. lol. Eventually, when we ran a local mom & pop game shop a couple years later in College, we set it up in the store and got a fair amount of play on it. He had a pretty decent MVS library, so we used it to run some local tournaments as well. We didn't make much money, but we also didn't charge many people as we'd usually jump in and play with them.
There were a few other Big Red machines at the local arcades around Cincinnati back then, but most operators stopped updating the games around 1996. That's why we had such a turnout at our game store - other SNK fans in the area found out there was one Big Red around that had current SNK games they could play (usually) for free.
Ended up with a neat little community we built up over a year and a half or so because of that machine. We had a pretty hardcore posse of fighting game nerds, and we all played together for a few years after he eventually sold the MVS and EB bought the store. Hell, I still play fighting games weekly with Kristoff and another friend we met through the community we built over 20 years ago. Good times.
I've always been an AES guy personally, but I do have a crazy fondness for the Big Red machines because of this for sure.
