SarahW

Thanks for agreeing with me. I have to say, this has to be one of the worst things I have done, short of buying a beautiful tailless, blind-in-one-eye crested gecko from a petco for 16 dollars (and the manager offered me that price!). The guy wasn't at all displeased with the offer I gave him for his games. He was more upset about the HD DVD player, he didn't even know that blu-ray had won the format war and thought for sure he'd get like 50 bucks for it after we told him it wasn't a 360. He wasn't looking for a large amount of money from the NES carts, and he didn't really get much. I think he got something like $30 for everything, and there was a lot of it... Oy. If the guy had wanted store credit for more videogame stuff, he could've gotten $30 for the Stadium Events cart, and probably $30 more for everything else, but he wanted cash and didn't really care what he got. By the way, at one point in time I *did* have an atari 2600 and a Jaguar, but along with about half of everything I own, they got destroyed in the floods that swallowed the midwest last year.

Thanks for everyone's opinions- the good, and the bad. On its acquisition, admittedly it was a poor decision. The guy that brought in his box was filled with stuff that was in really bad shape, in copious amounts, and he admitted to just cleaning out his house of videogame junk just to make a buck. Some of the things he brought in had bugs on them, they were filthy and needed a lot of cleaning, which made me really not like the transaction to begin with, but it wasn't really right of me to do what I had done. However, he was only going to get 10 dollars in cash for that game had we bought it in the system the way that it was supposed to have been. 10 dollars is a ripoff too, honestly, but in that instance he'd have been ripped off by the company. The reason we bought it in the way we did was because we tested it to make sure that it was really what it was... but we couldn't get it to work. It wasn't after a little bit of research that we found out it needed the power pad to function, so we bought it in as a defective game. After a while of having this game, we went back and told the district manager what we had done and asked if he wanted us to pay the company the 100-some-odd that the store sells it for, but he didn't seem to really care. So we attempted to make amends for what had happened, but what's past is past. We can't find the guy who sold it to us. We don't even work there anymore. Not sure if that's going to change any opinions, but I felt like setting that straight. I think in my initial post I came off a little boasty for something that was performed in a shady manner, and I apologize for that.

My fiancee and I pseudo-recently came into possession of what a lot of you probably know as "the rarest NTSC NES game" in existence, Stadium Events. We both were working at a game store that still accepts trade value for dated games, unlike Gamestop who is already starting to consider not accepting PS2 games. Needless to say, we managed to acquire this game from an un-knowing dip for $1.95, plus our employee discount (seriously, the guy came in with a box that obviously had been in his basement for a few generations... he tried to sell us an HD DVD player for an xbox 360 completely convinced it was the actual console, too. There was nothing else in his box of value, the rest of it was complete junk). Now, my fiancee, AJ, just so happens to be what I would call a "videogame connoisseur", in that he collects rare games worth collecting. That being said, he *was* working on a complete NES and SNES set, and as everyone knows, the NTSC Stadium Events is one of the hardest pieces of the puzzle to complete the collection. However, given that he graduated last year in Aerospace Engineering and he still does not have a job (in his field), the money that could be had from that copy of Stadium Events seems very appealing. The student loans monster is creeping up from behind and starting to jab him in the back. A little less than a week ago, we noticed (FINALLY) a copy of Stadium Events, the NTSC version and not PAL, went up on Ebay and sold for $1,300. That's a good amount of money for some crappy ass game that collects dust on the shelf (Actually, it's in a shadowbox... *sigh*). With that bit of information in mind, we come to the question at hand here.. To sell, or not to sell? From his standpoint, it is more or less "how much does this game really mean to me and how much am I going to let it go for if I were bribed".... ..For me, it's like some kind of investment opportunity. Obviously, we are talking years here, but given how much this game has spiked in value, logically speaking it should only continue to go up... But where do you set the bar? One of his friends also has a copy of Stadium Events (it walked into a game store here a week after AJ managed to get his copy, but his friend ended up paying $180 for it)- but he is convinced that if he sits it on his shelf and forgets about it, in 10 or 15 years it will be worth some crazy value (he estimated 10,000. I told him he was out of his mind). In that amount of time, I could see it maybe, at BEST, doubling in value to something around $2k, but I would fully expect the both of us to be well-established and living better than this, given that he's a rocket scientist (I'm going to college for studio arts as a silversmith, which obviously isn't going to pull as much as him, but combined I expect to at least be making decent bank.. plus our side "business" of breeding rhacodactylus geckos! <shameless plug> http://www.designersgecko.com </shameless plug>). In 10 or 15 years, $2k should only be something like finding a $20 in your back pocket. Well, maybe not that much of a trifle, but I mean, considering what kind of financial straits we are in now, it seems as though the money could go to better use at this time rather than later. Honk if you get me. So, after deliberating about it, it has come down to this. Should we sell it, or hang on to it?