Shocking ebay prices! 2

[importaku]

LOL wata grading, yeah wanna see the receipts of the auction house of it really selling that copy and it's not just an internal attempt at falsely inflating the market between wata grading buyers so their lol "investments" appear to have more worth. Because lots of shady crap goes on in those circles.

The irony is they can't grade that game or any other sealed game accurately as all they are grading is the outer box, the contents could be worn to hell from rubbing around in the box so how can they truly grade something as mint do they have xray vision? With a trading card or a comic it's different as it doesn't have contents shuffling around.

[wakka]

There's got to be more to that, like money laundering or something. No way is any copy of Mario 64 worth that much. There were probably 20 million plus copies of that game manufactured, there are probably still plenty (in relative terms) of mint sealed ones around.

[Hirst]

I'd really like to send some laughably poor condition junk game to that stupid company for grading, get it all sealed up and graded in one of their dumb clear boxes with the holographic sticker and what-not but it's a battered copy of Bubsy 2 with a value of £1.50 on a good day.

[Brad]

I mean: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57804089

Sure.

The auction house said there were "fewer than five" copies in such good condition.

And how would they know that? I'll answer my own question, they couldn't know that and they don't know that.

[phillv85]

Like has already been said, there’ll be shipping boxes full of sealed copies of Mario 64. They might be aware of less than 5 of that grade, but I’d bet anything on there being hundreds of them out there.

[importaku]

If you look at the one in the auction one of the corners of the game box looks busted so it's no way as mint as it's grade suggests. Could be the light though making it look like that.

[Sketcz]

The auction house was Heritage Auctions in Dallas, apparently:

https://www.ha.com/

What would be the best auction houses in the UK to sell extremely rare gaming items? Sothebys? Christys? Pewelshnies? Agathapys?

I actually have one item which might be valuable. Might be time to cash in I reckon, while this over-inflated bubble has yet to burst.

How do these things even get this big? I never saw news of the auction before this. Who was bidding? I mean, it's not like I saw Kotaku or Polygon say: Next week is the super rare auction, everyone be sure to check it out! The press only covered this after the fact.

Which makes me think those bidding are professional auction buyers/sellers, not anyone who knew games. They saw a sealed game, Mario, launch title, thought: this would make a good speculative investment.

I think a lot of gamers on twitter who are now fawning over this development are failing to consider speculative investors. Interest rates are so low now, you can make bigger returns buying stuff like this then flipping it.

[phillv85]

This is very much an American thing. I've been following these sales for a while and all they want are American games. There's all sorts of rumours that these games are being hugely inflated by Heritage Auctions themselves, as they own WATA and the guys behind it are the first ones that spent these huge sums ($100K on a sticker sealed SMB for NES if I remember correctly). I don't know how true those rumours are or if there are actually a bunch of people with far more money than sense buying these things but it does feel a little shady.

[Sketcz]

This is very much an American thing. I've been following these sales for a while and all they want are American games. There's all sorts of rumours that these games are being hugely inflated by Heritage Auctions themselves, as they own WATA

They do?!

I had no idea. That does sound shady.

[phillv85]

Sorry, maybe not own direct, but there's some of the same people involved in both from what I remember Pat Contri saying.

Here it is, Jim Halperin, co-founder of Heritage is an 'adviser' for WATA.

https://www.watagames.com/team/3

More here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/b...-heritage.html

[wakka]

The whole thing seems incredibly shady to be honest. There's definitely more to it. If that Mario 64 had just been stuck up on Ebay, it wouldn't have breached 10k let alone 1.6 million.

[Hirst]

I reckon if somebody had every single US release N64 game new in box it would be lucky to hit 6 figures.

[Hirst]

Also got to be said that there's nothing more joyless than a fun hobby being infested with "investments" and market value obsession.

All this sucking out all of the fun from something so some dweeb can point at a sealed-up box on a shelf and say they paid whatever for it, it's just grim. I wish games were just like films where when they run out of them, they will just start producing more copies. I'd love if I could just go out and buy a brand new Slap Fight MD for £39.99 instead of having to do it on a flash cart. Collectors could then argue with each other about it being the "first pressing" or whatever while everyone else just plays loads of games and has fun.

[wakka]

I know what you mean, but that kind of is how games work. Megadrive games, for example, have been reproduced over and over in various formats and compilations, or via services like Virtual Console. And there are growing numbers of repros available, too, for valuable stuff like Vampire's Kiss.

Between all that stuff and the ease of accessing high quality illicit emulation, I don't think we're short of ways to access older games.

EDIT: Although, rereading your post, I guess you're saying that you want easier access to physical versions of stuff.

That's fair enough. To be honest there is probably a gap in the market to produce repros more comprehensively, although negotiating the rights is probably the challenge - especially where defunct publishers are concerned. I'm not sure who you'd speak to at Time Warner Interactive about producing a repro of Slap Fight and whether they'd be bothered about having the conversation with you.

[Hirst]

I think the rights would be easy enough in a lot of cases (what with the rights being secured for things like emulated versions of the games being sold, compilations etc). Usually somebody is sat on the rights and if there's some way of getting some money for nothing they'll do it, like that MD reprint of Grey Lancer. Licensing could be troublesome for some games though, especially as it gets newer and you get into things like CD audio. You can end up with stuff stuck in limbo for years, happens with films and music (but not as often nowadays).

Just frustrates me that we have the technology to easily do it, especially in the case of the CD/DVD based games, but we don't. The demand is definitely there for it, based on folks knowingly buying the (often quite shoddy) repro games on places like Aliexpress.