bojay1997

I would echo this. I completed my collection a couple of years ago and I think I paid roughly $15-$20 per issue for most of them, $100 for a copy of #1 in really near mint shape and between $75 and $100 for the three specials. Of course, that also involved some bulk buys and double and triple buys to get really nice VF/NM copies that were newsstand editions as opposed to ones with mailing labels, so I am certain I spent well over $1,000 getting the complete set. I don't think $1,000 is totally crazy for this lot although the condition is below what I ended up with and I've seen full runs go for $600 - $750 two or three years ago, but not recently.

Meh. I don't think high, early auction bids necessarily represent "bad" bidding. If anything it lowers the probability of a side deal as it clearly shows the seller there is a healthy market for the item. It may also prevent crazy bidding at the end. On the downside, it could encourage shill bidding by the seller.

Agree and it's not even the launch version box of that particular game.

Trying to predict the modern game market is foolish. There are so many collectors and sealed collectors that have massive collections with lots of duplicates, you are likely to lose money in the long term as they will all eventually dump them. Obviously, if you had done this same thing in the 8 bit or 16 bit era, you'd probably be sitting on a goldmine now.

When you say the "person", do you mean the original programmer? Aren't the rights usually held by the publisher or developer and aren't those rights really hard to track down since they often get bundled and sold to multiple other companies over the years? Chain of title is a nightmare even sometimes for big entertainment companies. I can't imagine the complexities involved when the companies are defunct and the rights in various elements (music, underlying code, etc...) are scattered to the wind.

He is this really horrible reseller who happened into some harder to find Colecovision and Intellivision stuff a number of years ago claiming he only had one of each item and who made deals with various forum members to sell it. He then backed out on those deals claiming that someone else had bought the items. He then reappeared and claimed he had a "friend" who had the identical items and who was willing to sell them at substantially higher prices. Essentially, he is a time waster and a liar who tried to maximize profit by jerking people around.

. He sure is. This is the same alias he used when he popped back up two years ago. I would suggest everyone avoid dealing with this guy. Just do a search under his old user name Ozma Wars to get a better picture of his shady practices.

Very cool. Did anyone ever find out what happened to those file cabinets full of Atari art and other materials that Sotheby's tried to auction in 2007? My recollection is that those were mostly not originals, but I would be curious to know if there was any original art in the trove and what ever happened after it didn't sell.

What are you talking about? That's not an "appraisal", that's what one user who isn't even in this current thread estimated at the time. I'm not saying what you have is worthless, but it's also not what you have described it as or believe it to be. Bottom line, somebody with access to NAP components burned a bunch of games from other manufacturers using those parts and some collectors may find that interesting but many will not.

None of that could possibly be accurate. You have games from competitors of Atari which were formed by employees that Atari was upset to loose and indeed tried to take legal action against. While developers probably did and still do share what they are working on with employees of their competitors, doing so is a violation of the NDAs developers sign and potentially damaging to their employers. Indeed, NAP was a competitor to Atari and Activision and Imagic and there was never any agreement between them to help each other. Where did you even get this story from?

When all of this calms down, can someone explain how these are any different than all those piles of EPROMS that show up on Ebay from time to time that various developers burned of existing games? Wasn't use of the term "prototype" just a euphemism for someone in-house at a competing company illegally copying games for their own use? I mean, I get that whoever burned these used NAP materials to make the copies, but other than the curiosity of using those materials, the games themselves are just really pirate bootlegs, aren't they? I also thought this issue was discussed in connection with these specific games four years ago now... http://atariage.com/forums/topic/198885-my-new-prototypes/

I think you're one of the very few Atari collectors that would say that. I would also question VGA's ability to confirm shrink-wrap authenticity on very rare games like this, especially with few if any other factory sealed versions out there. They can obviously look for signs of appropriate aging, but I think it would be difficult to determine if the wrap on these games is factory or something a retailer or distributor did at some point.

Yep, I think you are going to be hard pressed to find many Atari collectors who want VGA graded games, especially given the low grades on most of them. It also looks like you have a Pleasant Valley Video Off Your Rocker there as opposed to a true "prototype".

There seems to be one particular Brooklyn based seller who has multiple copies of Tournament Tennis, Evolution and a number of other harder to find games sealed. He also has some commons. Not sure of his source or if he is just a long term collector that bought lots of multiples over the years.

I've heard this analysis before, but the reality is that sniping helps the buyer as well as the seller. From the buyer perspective, it provides protection against shill bidding since most sellers are not going to risk getting stuck with the winning bid in the last few seconds. From the seller perspective, there are many buyers who get caught up in the last minute rush and tend to overbid compared to what they would bid if they were given days or hours to think about their maximum bid. They essentially see sniping as one shot to get the item, and may pad the bid with something well above what they would really pay if they were calmly thinking about the value of the item. I agree with you about bidding your max and never feeling bad about being outbid. I do the same thing and never worry about losing an auction by a few cents or a few dollars as I know that chances are, the winning bidder likely bid much more than I was willing to pay.

The bidder seems to be on a Colecovision spree. He spent $1200 last night between a sealed Qbert's Qubes and a sealed Nova Blast from the same seller. He has spent thousands more over the past few weeks with this seller and others, all on boxed or sealed CV games.

Midtown is pretty good, but I would recommend waiting to see if it goes up on sites like Cheapgraphicnovels or Instocktrades as they tend to discount 40% and Instock provides free shipping and no tax for most states.

Looks like this is now available to preorder through local and online comic shops via Diamond. It's Diamond JUL161468. I don't see a listing for it on Amazon or other booksellers.

Sadly, he was selling on Ebay during the peak of all his promoting of GameGavel several years ago at the very time he was trying to get people with high value and truly unique items to list on GG to drive traffic. I recall specifically calling him out about it on some other forums and I was roundly attacked by Mike Kennedy apologists and Mike himself when I pointed out the serious hypocrisy of asking people to take a chance on his startup business while selling his own high value items on his self described target and major rival, Ebay. Frankly, I'm also pretty disgusted with organizations like SC3 in Southern California that continue to welcome him with open arms to their meetings as a distinguished guest while seemingly ignoring the fraud he attempted to commit with the Chameleon twice on crowdfunding sites and again at the ToyFair.

They bought out the complete inventory of Telegames UK a number of years ago. My recollection is that they assumed or they were told that it was mostly NTSC only to discover that much of it was PAL.

Pretty sure he won the non-working rebadged LD-700 that was on Ebay with a few pieces of Halcyon paperwork and the Football disc. Of course, he promptly canceled the sale which was a dick move IMHO and it was resold for a bit less to another buyer.

Agree. While I don't know Mike personally, his public persona has always been delusional IMHO and based on everything his former and current partners and business associates have posted, he is someone who has no problem taking money or time from people who he decides to use, all with no guilt when he uses them up and throws them off to the side. That isn't someone who deserves redemption or forgiveness. It's someone who is a danger to himself and anyone naive enough to believe his lies and deceit.

So once again in the guise of being a bigger person, you're throwing Steve under the bus as having been there all along implying that he should have seen the warning signs. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, the only one here that did anything wrong and deserves 100% of the blame is you. Your repeated stories about getting scammed are full of holes as others have pointed out. The worst part about all this is that you have never once taken responsibility for attacking the people who had enough common sense to question your absurd claims or for blocking all those who posted warnings on Facebook or urged you to stop the project. Your reputation is gone and I hope for your sake that you finish whatever you owe to the Retro Kickstarter backers and fold the magazine and then disappear from the classic gaming community once and for all. There is simply no way that you get a second chance here or anywhere else. Your lies have literally been exposed in the media around the world and you are completely delusional if you think anyone is going to ever trust you again.

Or he just heard about all the scamming this guy has allegedly done in the Commodore community and decided it would be any easy way to deflect blame and guilt for his own attempts to perpetrate a massive fraud. Personally, I don't believe a word Mike says and I hope nobody ever gives him a penny for any project in the future as he is proven that at best he is incompetent and at worst, a world class scam artist.

If you're talking about the Ebay auction that just ended, you really just ended up with a non-working rebranded Pioneer LD-700 and the game laserdisc without all the other necessary and very rare components. Frankly, if that's the auction you are talking about, you overpaid.