The Warehouse — retired cabinets
Cabinets don't vanish from this arcade. When one is retired it goes to the Warehouse: a public section of its own where its serial plate, its contract, its lock and its history stay on display. Still linked, still locked — the floor's history is the floor's proof.
How a cabinet gets here
- A LOADING DOCK cabinet that went quiet. No swaps for 30 days of arcade time and the dock retires it by itself — GAME OVER. See The Assembly Line.
- A House cabinet the House retires — a decision the House makes in the open, never by a clock. The retired contract keeps its locked liquidity as the trust credential it always was.
THE LAST BREATH — a cabinet leaves empty
A retiring cabinet still holds one thing that is not the House's: its HIGH SCORE pot, which is 30% of every fee its own community ever paid, sitting there in COIN-OP. It does not go to the House and it does not go to the PRIZE COUNTER. It goes to the people who earned it.
At the moment of retirement the machine fires one final round for the whole pot — the last breath — and whatever nobody claims inside the claim window is burned to 0xdEaD, publicly, rather than returned to a pot that will never roll again.
Two details, because they are the ones a reader would otherwise have to trust us on:
- A pot too small to pay one proper prize fires nothing and is burned instead. The board publishes that last place takes home at least the HIGH SCORE floor, and a round that paid less than its own advertised minimum would be worse than no round.
- The burn is an operator step, not an automatic one, because a pot is a wallet and the site holds no key for it. The intent is written on the cabinet before it happens, so it can never be done quietly.
Why the counter cannot have it: the counter pays bitcoin, and COIN-OP dropped in there would either sit unusable or force the House to sell the mother to refill the shelves. Selling the mother to pay prizes is the one thing this whole design exists to prevent.
CONTINUE?
A warehouse cabinet is not dead. If its community and its volume come back, the House brings it back to the LOADING DOCK and it plays again — the CONTINUE? screen is the arcade's oldest promise.
What stops, what stays
| Stops | Stays |
|---|---|
| The four machines (REFILL, HIGH SCORE, its own jackpot, and the rent it paid) | The serial plate and every link on it |
| The boards | The contract, the locker, the burn log |
| Its jackpot pot (a retired cabinet's pot never trips) | The story — every round it played |
| Its HIGH SCORE pot — emptied by THE LAST BREATH before it leaves | The final round, and the burn tx for whatever went unclaimed |
No cash value. A retired cabinet is history, not an asset the House holds or promises anything about.