Satan’s Hollow

I’ll admit it: I had never played Satan’s Hollow prior to buying it. I knew that it was a fairly collectable game, and I’m a sucker for all things horror – so when a broken one popped up on Craigslist for $100, I jumped on the opportunity, knowing that I could always sell it if I didn’t like it or couldn’t get it running. This was the first non-working game that I ever bought, so I was a bit intimidated about troubleshooting it and bringing it back to its former glory.

When I picked it up, it had definitely seen better days. There was no marquee, the whole cabinet was white (instead of red), and the game itself was completely dead. Here’s what it looked like at the time:

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The iconic side art was gone and stencils were not available, so I tracked down the original paint codes and painted the cabinet red. At the very least, the game was going to be its original color again:

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I located an original marquee (which I later replaced with a repro), and replaced the black light on the control panel with a white light that I covered with a red sleeve in order to give it an evil, red glow. Cosmetically, the game was looking much better, but it still didn’t work.

After a lot of help from some folks on KLOV, I figured out that the problem was a bad diode on the bottom of the power brick. Once that was replaced, the game fired right up, and after some adjustments to the monitor, Satan was officially back in business! The monitor colors were a bit washed out, so I did a cap kit (another first for me at that point), which made the monitor look brand new again.

After that, I happily played Satan’s Hollow for a few years, but something in the back of my mind always bugged me: what if the original side art was still under that white laminate that was on the game when I bought it (which I had painted red)? Only one way to find out…

Oh, my!

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