Local professional treasure hunter Patrick Scott Patterson left the Ad Astra Arcade Auction at the North Texas Fairgrounds with an unexpected rare find in late April.
He won the bidding to buy a Mr. Do! arcade game cabinet covered with black paint. As Patterson was hauling the arcade cabinet out, someone from the auction told him he had just bought a 1980s Sega Samurai arcade cabinet.
“I was like, ‘Oh wow,’ when I took a look at it — I can actually see underneath the paint where you can actually see some of the original [Sega Samurai] art,” Patterson said.
Patterson spent about 60 hours in May stripping off the 40-year-old black paint to unveil the Sega Samurai artwork.
He decided to opt out of using paint strippers and chemicals to remove the paint. Instead, Patterson used Clorox antibacterial wipes, a ton of elbow grease to remove the black paint and an automotive adhesive remover to restore the original control panel.
Patterson is still feeling the soreness of taking the paint off the cabinet. He said it felt like 1984’s The Karate Kid movie training scene where Daniel LaRusso had to buff Mr. Miyagi’s vehicle.
“It was very much wax on, wax off in every spare moment I got for the past four or five weeks span,” Patterson said.
Patterson owns Denton-based We Got One, an online collectible shop, and goes around thrift shops, yard sales, storage locker auctions and estate sales to find rare inventory.
Patterson is well known as a former professional wrestler, “The Hardcore Kingpin” Scott Phoenix, during the 1990s and early 2000s. He has also worked on several video game documentary films and television shows.
Released in 1980, Sega’s Samurai is a game where players control a samurai defeating enemies before fighting a master samurai.
The Sega Samurai arcade cabinet Patterson bought is missing the original glass artwork, motherboard and other parts that were removed when the cabinet was converted into Mr. Do! in 1983.
Mr. Do! is an arcade game in which a player controls a clown who has the ability to dig through tunnels.
The Killer List of Video Games catalog estimates that no more than six Sega Samurai cabinets are known to be owned. According to Video Arcade Preservation Society lists, Patterson is one of two known collectors to own a Sega Samurai cabinet.
Patterson doesn’t expect to find the missing parts and wants to sell the arcade cabinet. He said selling the arcade cabinet would be tricky since there aren’t reliable sales data due to its rarity.
He said one did sell in 2021 for $9,900 at the Captain’s Warehouse arcade auctions in Banning, California.
As of now, no one has reached out to make a deal, but Patterson said he knows people have viewed the item online. There will need to be a mutual agreement between Patterson and the buyer for a fair price.
“I think there’s possibly some people that are waiting to see what I want to do,” he said. “And of course, I’m kind of wanting to know what they want to do.”
Patterson’s TV appearance
Patterson will make an appearance on MeTV’s Collector’s Call as the appraisal expert for Linda Guillory’s Guinness World Records-sized gaming collection.
While Patterson will appraise her collection, he will also make an offer for an item she doesn’t have.
“They brought me out as the expert appraiser to try to give a relative idea of the value of selected items that will be featured on the show and as the collection as a whole, which was very difficult to do,” Patterson said.
The episode airs at 5:30 p.m. Sunday on MeTV.
Wake Up with the DR-C: Get today's headlines in your inbox
Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.
Error! There was an error processing your request.
