goatdan

I'll just say this again... I get it completely. If I was you I would want faster communication too. I apologize for it. We dropped the ball. :-(

Yup, those guys are crazy. Oh yeah, I'm one of them. :-\ What others have said is basically correct. We've both been swamped getting the Midwest Gaming Classic together, but that's only half the story because if it was just that, we would have a note up on the web site and all that. It's also the last few days have been insane in our personal lives too. Sick kids, sick me, a tree that fell over, a car that had to be taken into the shop, some work deadlines that I didn't realize were deadlines, and about twenty other things no one else really cares about. And that's just me, Gary has had a similar last couple days. If anyone is paying close attention, the mgc Facebook page had no updates whatsoever for the past two days either. When that happens in this season, you can tell something is up. The good news is, if you still want your order, Gary and I are getting together in about twenty minutes to hopefully dig through email, reply to everything from the last few days, send get on top of it. Gary is planning on a half day at work tomorrow to catch up on packages I believe, and he did tell me he intends to have them out tomorrow when I spoke with him this morning to try to figure out what we can do. So, greatly apologize. I won't pretend we are the fastest guys in the world for replies - as someone else mentioned, this is a hobby shop, it isn't a big money maker, just more something we do because we love sharing the joy of retro gaming. We try, but we also, perhaps stupidly, try to manage too many things at once sometimes and end up playing catch up top much. Expect an email back from Gary or I within the next two hours!

It's not included with the two day pass. If you already purchased tickets, you should be able to use this link to do so now: http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com/products-page/special-offers/tom-taylors-open-house-machines/ NOTE - There were less than five tickets available last night!

Dan from the show here, just saw the topic... Sorry about the rooms, the entire hotel is sold out. We have four additional hotels that offer free shuttle service to the show in the area for similar prices to the cheap Sheraton rooms, so if you didn't get one, that is an option. We don't hold back any rooms, it's just the show keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger! If you want to participate in any of this stuff, get your tickets soon as they will sell out too: - Tom Taylor's Open House - Play more than 300 arcade games (mostly EM pinball machines) with 100% of the proceeds going to a local charity. Only 100 tickets are available, this is a Friday activity. - Clock Chaos / Up To Par / Call of Duty Ghosts tournaments - All three Friday night tournaments are very popular, and all three are nearly sold out now! - V.I.G. Upgrade - Get into the halls a little early, get a special reception dinner, exclusive shirt, exclusive event badge, early seating for presentations (and there will be some great ones!) and more! The other reminder - if you're coming, please consider prebuying your tickets. The first 1000 two-day passes bought before the show will get a lapel pin and window cling for free (we're revealing those designs in the next two days!), and we use 100% of the money that we get to make the show better this coming year. We're using a HUGE temporary structure this year for the vendor hall to increase space, and due to pre-orders we've already managed to add nearly 4,000 square feet to it, and we might add more! The show is really shaping up to be incredible, and we can't wait to see you there!

But you didn't. Sorry I was "wordy". I'm sorry video games are more important to you than someone's health. I'm sorry that Axe was trying to handle this and that wasn't good enough for you. Again, I'll handle your issue. Awaiting your contact.

You know what, if this is what you're after, I'll refund your money for him and keep my own Skunkboard. Problem solved. I'm telling you, and perhaps you don't believe it, that they have been making every effort to correct this. Quite frankly, with all of Axe's health issues right now, I'd have told you to shove it if I was him. I understand your frustration about losing one of these, but holy heck man - go read the thread about his health problems because I'm guessing that you haven't or you wouldn't be acting like this. These are VIDEO freaking GAMES. Axe is a totally awesome guy, and he is totally laid up right now and has been for some time. In the thread, Axe's wife talks publicly about how they can barely make ends meet, and you're out here slamming the dude for not sending you a bunch of money or getting you an unobtainable product immediately. That's great. That makes me feel really good about the human race. Probably the same clowns that compared me to Hitler after I suggested that I host Jagfest 2K2 for a second time. Seriously, if "many" are out there saying that they wouldn't have been so nice, I challenge you to be living day to day with money - I did it recently myself - and then have someone freak out about not getting a video game product quickly enough when you are doing everything that you can to actually get it for them. Again, I can sort of see your complaints if this was a copy of Super Mario Bros for the NES, but I don't exactly see Skunkboards for sale everywhere. And again, if I wasn't certain that I would be making the next mortgage payment, I would just tell you I'd get one when I can and drop it. If it's only words, I guess I can plan on not sending you the Skunkboard, and like I said I'll personally refund your money instead. The GOAT Store definitely doesn't have much in the way of money right now, but I'd really like to keep my own Skunkboard that I was going to sell to Axe because of how hard he was trying to make this right when he should be doing nothing of the sort and instead dealing with his own personal issues. If that isn't enough for you, I don't know what to tell you, as I don't know how you can expect him to materialize out of thin air a product that he does not have to loan to you until another one pops up. I'm more concerned about his health, and it makes me absolutely sick that this is of such a big concern to you right now. Tell me if the refund for the thing works out, otherwise PM me and maybe I can work out something with you directly. I would much rather you stop bothering him when he has a million other things he should be focusing on, so you can bother me instead if it makes you feel better. Walter - I'm okay with it being public so far, as I think it's only fair for me to be saying that Axe has been doing everything he can do (and again, under the circumstances going way above and beyond what is I think is expected) publicly too. If anyone wants to see what a seller Axe is like, I think it's more than worth pointing out he is trying to correct an issue that is extremely difficult to do, and he is doing it when he is so ill that he shouldn't be bothering with this sort of stuff at all.

Actually, this is completely false. Not just has both Axe and his wife talked with me multiple times about figuring something out, in case you haven't heard (even though it has been posted in this thread multiple times) Axe has been very sick, which minimally would slow his communication about something. At the same time, as I'm sure you can imagine, sickness causes mounting bills, especially when you can't keep the regular stuff together. I have been working on locating Axe a Skunkboard which will probably end up being one of the ones that I kept personally to figure out selling it to him so he could give it to you. I have taken a while to do this, as we are moving the GOAT Store, and had to locate where even my own Skunkboards were, since basically no other ones exist. Clearly, you have no knowledge of this situation, in which case I ask you where else you can just find a Skunkboard sitting around. To be completely honest with you, I think that Axe has already gone FAR above and beyond what he needed to do. You're waiting on me getting a bit of time to figure out what is a fair price that I can ask for (or trade with) Axe's wife right now to figure this out, which I will do soon. So please, do NOT act like you can just walk to Target and pick up a Skunkboard and send it over and no one has been doing that - I get requests at least weekly for Skunkboards, so if they were so easy to procure, I'm sure you would have been already taken care of. I'm honestly disappointed to know that I'm going to be sending my own personal one to someone so ungrateful.

Algus... we're collectors first. We're very picky. It goes with the whole not having pictures thing, we need to make sure everything is described as best as possible and no one can pick on it. Glad you agree The cable is in my car about to go to the Post Office. Gary was the one packing that actually and he feels really goofy. He set the cable directly next to the box, and just didn't get it in it. You'll have it soon

Spacewar I'd guess a little higher, because that was how it came "new" from them. I might be interested in that one, actually.

It did! I need to hit the hay right now, but with any luck I'll either make it tomorrow or Tuesday and get it out to you ASAP! Some fun stuff there

Got it, and we're packing it now, it'll go out tomorrow! We put the first 7 new shelves into spot last night, and we take delivery on the next 16 within the next two days. Overall, we'll be more than tripling inventory space.

Thanks guys, we spent some spare time today redesiging what our new space is going to look like and installing the first 6 brand new shelves for it (we are more than tripling the inventory space, we're rather excited about it...) Tomorrow, we'll be making and shipping orders! We think that we found the issue with the checkout stuff. No idea what was wrong, but it had to do with some of our inventory pages that stopped regenerating properly. Regardless, it's back up and running, and we're moving and shipping orders again. Thanks for all the support!

Fixed, we think! (We hope!)

Weird. If you can, again, PM me with any issues. Oddly, when we shut down three or four weeks ago, nothing was having an issue. We changed nothing, but re-opened, and now we're having issues. Gary was working on updates tonight and tried applying them, so any details we can get we'd love to have. I spent the night going back through our Super Famicom inventory. Hoping to hit the rest of SNES loose carts tomorrow night

Sorry for the double post, Smart phone... ??? user.

When did the PayPal thing happen? We had an issue with the checkout we should have fixed yesterday night, so if you were ordering then, it might not have worked. If not, please pm me any details, as our system (and error logging) is showing everything fine right now.

Good to hear! Packed it up tonight, it goes out tomorrow. Also managed to get together with Gary and we put in the first 25% or so of the SNES loose inventory. We're up to the Js. With any luck, we'll get back together on Thursday and get through the middle of the alphabet if not beyond...

It wasn't "devoid" of images, but what you said in your spoiler was basically right. The average network connection was a 28.8k modem, and sites were considered to be well optimized if they loaded in "less than 45 seconds." In that sort of world, lots of photos were not something that many were thinking of - perhaps outside of the porn industry, which always (seriously) drives new technology forward. Digital cameras were *expensive* for not really good ones. By the time that photos started to become standard, we literally had probably 20,000 items and no easy way to categorize them. We will generally send out big announcements when we list a ton of stuff at once. We are working on a system to notify people when specific items that they are looking for are put up too, but we're not sure exactly when that will get done. I have a huge, NICE SNES / NES order I need to put in, and we took out literally all of our loose NES / SNES stuff because inventory got screwed up at the MGC. No idea exactly when I will get that stuff in, but hopefully soon. Includes some Mega Man games boxed. The YoBo I like better than the Retron 3 that we had in stock for a while, although I heard that the Retron 3 received a second revision that was considerably better, but my gut feeling on that is that unless you don't have a NES, SNES and Genesis, there is no reason to get one. The Retron 5 will change that I'm certain, as it has features those old systems don't, but if I'm going to be honest other than footprint the current multi-systems all have issues that I don't think make them better than the original hardware. If I didn't have them however, I'd totally get one. That's the reason we carry them - If I wanted to get all three systems and check out, say, 10 games for each, this is the perfect starter system. If you don't love it, it didn't cost much. And if you do and decide to start collecting, you'll get the original hardware anyway. We generally sell the NES clones at the MGC, and they DO make sense for the "general public" part of that crowd. The portable Famicom thing I'm forgetting it's name of is okay, but the carts sticking up so much makes it really not portable. More Nintendo's fault for the cart size, but still not perfect. On the flip side, I'm one of the few people who I think will unabashedly say that I *love* the SupaBoy. I got a Revision 1 of the SupaBoy and found none of the issues that everyone else had with it. It isn't *perfect* by any means, but for a portable LCD system that looks darn fine, it's way cheaper than I'd expect it to be. I have one that I use relatively often, and I was just playing Contra III on it recently. It will *not* replace your SNES console, but it is a perfect way to take some SNES games on the road with you. Battery life is surprisingly good. I personally think they are great, and don't understand the scores of people who seem to not like them. Mine isn't going anywhere

Looking into the PayPal thing. It's odd, it worked fine when we closed the site, but now it has some issues. Gary looked into it last night, and will be doing it again tonight.

Sorry if it came off like I felt you were attacking. I wasn't. It is true thought that a lot of people look at our site and go, "Awesome large corporate thing for retro games!" but it's really just two of us doing our best in our basements in between running a gaming convention, being dads, and all the other fun stuff in life A lot has changed for us since we opened up the site, but we want to keep it going and growing as much as we can. We started it because 13 years ago, there was nothing online like it for finding retro games. While there are more options, we still enjoy being one When the site was started, online pictures were basically unheard of. That was 13+ years ago now. There are a few problems with online pictures, which can be summed up basically as... ...when we started, online photos weren't really something that was done. By the time they were, we had tens of thousands of items, and there was no simple way to take them for everything. Remember, we're not an eBay seller. There are games we have more than 20 variations of in stock at any given point in time. If we took for instance 20 pictures of Combat and sold them each individually, we'd literally go nuts. We take representative pictures, and I think that almost all buyers will attest we're extremely particular with condition.

Daytona, I've got a real job on top of the GOAT Store one. As for GOAT Store not making a lot of sense, that's your opinion. It's worked for us for 13+ years. For the complaint about pictures, we have been busting our buttons over the past year to add pictures for the literally tens of thousands of items that we have in stock. We have currently taken pictures of about 75% of our software, which is where we started at. On top of us both having real jobs, we also run the Midwest Gaming Classic, are both dads, and have a ton of other stuff going on, so I apologize that we don't immediately reply to every forum with pictures - it's just simply not possible. As for your question, we do have a Console 1 in stock in good condition. It depends on what you're looking for on "mint", I suppose, but here you go: http://www.goatstore.com/Products/Sega/Saturn/361049/Console_1_with_hookups/ For faster replies, please feel free to contact me through there. I try my best to keep up with all my regular forum postings too, but again, both Gary and I have a LOT going on. We love the GOAT Store and we love what it does for people (we have yet to really make any money off it... after 13 years, so we *better* love it) but we don't have a ton of time right now to keep perfectly up to date. We're working on a giant inventory management upgrade in the next month to six weeks that should greatly enhance our ability to stay on top of everything

Hey everyone, after a trying month or two for Gary and I, we have reopened the GOAT Store after being forced to close it thanks to personal issues that we both had spring up on us. Hey, one month out of 13 years isn't too bad, right? Especially when we really don't get paid from this enterprise... Anyway, as a thank you for those of you that have been long time customers for waiting, we have a 10% off coupon code up on the main page. Thanks for sticking with us! We're upgrading our inventory system later this month, and we fully expect that it will make it so that we'll be able to continue to expand and grow in the future! Again, thanks for the support through the years.

First off, hi everyone. Sorry for not seeing this way earlier, almost immediately after MGC this year Gary and I both had a bunch of personal stuff come up that actually forced us to shut down the GOAT Store for a month. We just reopened today, and we're making a bunch of changes to hopefully make things easier for us. Anyway... The ones on eBay are not ours. I despise eBay, and very rarely sell stuff there. I am tempted to list some really odd stuff I got there because I have no idea what to price it - like a factory reconditioned Atari 2600 and Colecovision that come in "Reconditioned" boxes - and I'll also use them once in a while for really rare stuff, but not production stuff that we make. Next... I'll apologize for this. Here's what happened, in a nutshell... our host server throttles how many emails we can send to 100 / hour. They do not tell us when this is reached, and we had no idea it was an issue until during the run up to the MGC this year when we were sending emails and people were claiming not to get them. A lot of digging later and we found out we have to use something wholly different (and wholly annoying) for our email clients. We have since switched over the MGC to this new client so we can use it better, but due to the MGC and then all of this life crap that has come up, we haven't yet gone about switching over GOAT Store properly. It will probably be done soon. It resulted in people getting screwed on the email list, and for that we apologize. We had no idea it was happening, and it was a really hard problem to nail down as everything appeared to be functioning properly. Anyway, if you're still looking for one Ax, email me. I kept a couple personally, and I could probably give one of them up for the error Email me at my last name at goatstore.com, and do me a favor and tell me where you were emailing. Gary and I keep constant tabs on our own emails and our ticketing system, and I checked and saw nothing from you in at least mine or the ticket system. I'd love to know where else people are emailing so we can fix it

As a vendor, I can tell you this is basically *exactly* correct. Even five years ago, we'd take and sell hundreds of 2600 carts at the show. People would leave with 25 carts in a shot. It was amazing. Around 2010, the market just died for stuff of that era. Unless it was either really rare or was a "title" game (aka Pitfall, Mario Bros, etc), it basically doesn't sell. We took our entire cartridge inventory for the 2600 this year (not boxed stuff, sorry!) and we sold about 10 games. On the flip side, we sold about 200 NES carts, and a similar number of SNES ones. I personally do think that the NES era and up will retain value / interest a *little* better because you have the historical beginnings of many really popular games (Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Street Fighter, etc) that continue to have interest today, and the games are a little more complex. Unfortunately, the fact that a lot of the 2600 titles are so basic gives people the option of playing either a free flash game with the same concept, or paying $XX to pick it up themselves. Right now, the flash games are winning except for those of us that find the original cartridges to be too good to pass up. I also think that the 2600 suffers in large part because the library is so hard to define. The third party stuff is so prevalant, and there is so much different stuff. Then, you have all the variations that people were collecting. The NES and up have a very set type of cartridge, and the third party oddities are truly oddities. Makes it much easier to define what you are collecting and go start looking for it. Regardless, I do think it will continue to evolve, but I don't think there will be much of a decline in NES market for a while. As for N64, it is seriously heating up right now. In February counting online sales only, the N64 outsold the 2600, 5200, Odyssey 2, and Intellivision for the *entire year* of 2012, just as a for instance...

In a nutshell, thanks to this fact and the fact that they were bragging about busting into the after parties because they should have been for everyone (because, see, everyone is as big as they are, right? OMG!), security will be notified that if anyone wearing their shirts are around in the future that they should be escorted out of the building. I don't care if you come and don't have a good time, especially if you were expecting this to be a corporate show like PAX. I don't even care if you write a stupid slam article on your site to try to get attention and hits like they clearly were doing. I do care if I feel like I have to increase security because your dumb arses broke into our party at night. They had the balls to write asking for their money back too. Because as "press", they should have been let in free. Right.