Rushing Heroes “Restoration” Story

I actually finished this machine several years ago, but reviewing my site I noticed I never talked about this on my site. I’m now listing this machine for sale on Craigslist and thought that it would be good to show some nice detail for any potential buyers. Also I didn’t want to lose my thoughts about this project. It was the first time my son and I worked together on a game restoration and I had a blast!
This story really falls into a Conversion story, since we didn’t actually restore an original machine, but we rescued a trashed cab and made a nice arcade game out of it. I picked this game up from a friend of mine who had to clean out a garage he was storing it in. It was a converted Joust that had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in it last. The cabinet was trashed. The control panel was hacked with three buttons per player, all the paint was chipped with rust underneath on the metal parts, and the wood around the bottom of the cabinet was split and had water damage. I never really had any serious intentions of restoring it back to a Joust. It would be too expensive and WAY too much work since I already had a nice Joust. I kept it around to maybe make a multigame or something out of it but never really did anything with it. Fast forward a couple years and I came across an NOS Rushing Heroes conversion kit on ebay. It looked like a cool game so I picked it up. I thought it would be a great project for me and my son to work on together. The cabinet was already wired for Jamma, and the control panel was already drilled and modified for the correct control scheme.
The first thing we had to do was strip the cabinet and repair the wood. We did a lot of sanding and bondo work to repair all the damage. The cabinet was very solid. I really love the design of Williams cabinets.

This thing was pretty beat!

The metal was pretty rough!

I had some great help with this one!

Sanded and ready to paint

That was one UGLY control panel!

After all the repair work was done, we added the new artwork and finished the game up. It really turned out nice! I also picked up a Run and Gun 2 PCB, which is the basketball game based no the same platform from Konami. I have both mounted inside the cabinet and can play either just by swapping the harness between games. The games are really fun to play but the best part of this whole thing was the time my son and I spent together building it. Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to do this more and have more stories to share between us!

The control panel looks much better

Turned out great!

In the gameroom next to its long lost brother

For more details of the restoration process check out my Rushing Heroes photo page.
If you’re interested in purchasing this game, please check out my Craigslist Ad