Our 7/23/13 Purchase: The DDR Max 2 Machine from Crystal Palace (Rancho)

Sean and I were searching eBay recently when we came across a Dance Dance Revolution Max 2 machine (Japanese cabinet) with memory card slots for $1,000 located in Las Vegas, NV! The listing said the monitor wasn't working but for $1,000 and considering the machine was located in the same city as us (so we wouldn't have to pay much to transport it) it was still totally worth it! I messaged the seller, Rick, to let him know we were interested in purchasing the machine, ask whether he'd meet with us to let us take a look at it beforehand, and ask if he knew which former DDR machine location it'd been removed from. He told us it'd come from:

Crystal Palace Skating Center
3901 N Rancho Dr
Las Vegas, NV 89130
(702) 645-4892

He said they wouldn't be replacing it with any other dance games at that location but that the DDR Max 2 at Crystal Palace on Boulder Highway, where Sean and I had been to skate and see their machine a few months prior, still had theirs for now. Crazy. Sean had never been to Crystal Palace on Rancho before and I think I'd only been once so for the past few months we'd been planning to visit and play DDR there. Now we were buying their machine!

So we made our arrangements and visited the machine over the weekend. It was being kept in a storage unit at Storage Depot.

Storage Depot
6240 S Rainbow Blvd
Las Vegas
(702) 876-2730

We didn't/couldn't plug it in to test it or anything but everything looked good enough to justify us paying $1,000 for it. We still needed a way to move it though. Obviously, we didn't want to spend money renting a moving truck until we'd checked out the machine so we made plans to return to pick it up on Tuesday. Being eBay sellers ourselves, we were aware that the percentages they charge when you sell an item really add up cost-wise on large transactions so we asked Rick how he preferred to be paid. He said we could just pay him $950 cash instead since it would save everyone on expenses and transaction security wouldn't be much of an issue with an in-person exchange.

Rick and his Storage Depot storage unit with DDR Max 2 inside:

I'd already researched truck sizes, rental costs, rental location proximity to our house and Storage Depot, taxes, discounts, mileage fees, etc. It didn't take long since I'd done it several times before to pick up many of the other 8 arcade machines at our house - DDR Extreme, DDR Max 2/5th (we switch it out), ITG 2 (dedicab), DDR Solo 2000, TechnoMotion: The 2nd Dance Floor, PIU Extra Mix, Dance Maniax 2nd Mix, and Beatmania 4th Mix - but it was my 1st locally purchased machine so the pros and cons of each rental company's costs made my choice a bit different this time around. This time, Penske was the way to go! With a daily rental fee of $31 for a 12' truck, a convenient location between our house and Storage Depot, and a mileage cost of about $0.39 per mile, our total cost - including gas - wasn't much more than $50!

Holiday Royale Suites (Penske rental location)
4505 Paradise Rd.
Las Vegas, NV 89169

Tuesday came around and Sean and I got our Penske rental. Danny met us at Storage Depot to help us load up the machine and Rick pulled up a few minutes after the rest of us to let us in, collect his $950, and let us out of the gate again. We'd each loaded DDR and other machines for transport plenty of times so it didn't take us long at all to get this one loaded up, strap it in, drive it home, and move it into our garage where it'd keep 4 of our other machines company, at least til we fixed the monitor and decided whether to resell it for a profit (since we already have 3 other DDR machines) or keep it and sell one of our others instead. Anyone looking for a DDR machine, let us know!

The new machine, all loaded up and ready to go home with us:

Our garage just after moving this new DDR machine in. Excuse the mess!: