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Colecovision Auction Watch

Rev

By Rev
in ColecoVision / Adam

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  • 2 weeks later...
slab0meat Stargunner

slab0meat

Posted
Posted

The last prototype cart of Champion Ice Hockey for ColecoVision is now up for auction on eBay!

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Champion-Ice-Hockey-game-cartridge-for-ColecoVision-5-of-5-/251975209831

 

Good luck to all bidders! :D

 

Just curious.. and I don't know if you'll want to say.. but have these brought in what you'd hoped for?

 

I'm glad I got one. :)

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TPR River Patroller

TPR

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Why are people asking insane prices for these "VGA Rated" games when I just paid $35 each for a totally brand-new, completely sealed not a crease in the box at all Pitfall & River Raid? Unless there is something about this whole "VGA Graded" thing I'm not understanding, like "gold" means it comes with actual gold, it looks to me like a scam?

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-Graded-Gold-MT-95-Pitfall-Colecovision-Coleco-Video-Game-Computer-System-New-/300956040238?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item461260bc2e

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-Graded-Gold-MT-95-River-Raid-Colecovision-Coleco-Video-Game-System-New-/300956482510?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4612677bce

Screen Shot 2015-06-04 at 22.03.43.png

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Atari_Bill River Patroller

Atari_Bill

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Posted

Why are people asking insane prices for these "VGA Rated" games when I just paid $35 each for a totally brand-new, completely sealed not a crease in the box at all Pitfall & River Raid? Unless there is something about this whole "VGA Graded" thing I'm not understanding, like "gold" means it comes with actual gold, it looks to me like a scam?

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-Graded-Gold-MT-95-Pitfall-Colecovision-Coleco-Video-Game-Computer-System-New-/300956040238?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item461260bc2e

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-Graded-Gold-MT-95-River-Raid-Colecovision-Coleco-Video-Game-System-New-/300956482510?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4612677bce

 

The guy selling these is well known for insane pricing on anything he can get his greedy little hands on. For any typical item he will list it at 5-6x other folks prices. If it's graded that jumps to 15-20x what anyone else would try to sell it for. I don't agree with grading personally, but this chump takes the corrupt practice to an all new level.

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TPR River Patroller

TPR

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^ Yeah, I don't quite get it. I looked at their website and from what I gather I can send in my sealed games, pay them some money to go "Yup, it's sealed" and then they give me a sticker that somehow makes it worth more? I've been paying between $30 - $50 for totally mint sealed games lately. I don't get how this makes that jump up in price hundreds of dollars. Really feels like a scam.

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AtariBrian River Patroller

AtariBrian

Posted
Posted

Happiest is insane . He even tries to corner the market on ebay for Atari games . He buys them up to make them rare . He probably bought 15 Sub Commander carts before I think he gave up since they just kept popping up for auction . If you look at his auctions , alot of his carts say anywhere from 4 to 8 available or higher .

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NIAD Quadrunner

NIAD

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Posted

^ Yeah, I don't quite get it. I looked at their website and from what I gather I can send in my sealed games, pay them some money to go "Yup, it's sealed" and then they give me a sticker that somehow makes it worth more? I've been paying between $30 - $50 for totally mint sealed games lately. I don't get how this makes that jump up in price hundreds of dollars. Really feels like a scam.

This whole grading thing is a joke and I see the same thing going on with baseball cards... a complete set of cards from Ricky Henderson's rookie year card might get you $50 even with a mint/flawless Rickey Henderson card, but get that card graded all by itself and then the price of this one card jumps to around $200.

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Pixelboy Quadrunner

Pixelboy

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^ Yeah, I don't quite get it. I looked at their website and from what I gather I can send in my sealed games, pay them some money to go "Yup, it's sealed" and then they give me a sticker that somehow makes it worth more? I've been paying between $30 - $50 for totally mint sealed games lately. I don't get how this makes that jump up in price hundreds of dollars. Really feels like a scam.

Most people (especially today's retrogamers) see grading from a short-term point of view, and in that way, it can only be seen as pointless. Grading is not a short-term measure, it's quite the opposite. Then you seal a CIB game in one of those plastic or glass boxes, what you're doing is arranging for the long-term preservation of that game. It stops being a playable game and becomes an historical artifact.

 

Look at it this way: When a paleontologist finds a remarkably well-preserved fossil, like say a group of dinosaur eggs, it is said that this find is particularly valuable. Why? Because those eggs managed to remain well-preserved for millions of years before being unearthed by us humans. The era in which these eggs came into existence is long gone and will never return, so such a find is quite rare and valuable.

 

Now ask yourself this: How did these eggs manage to stay preserved for so long? Similar eggs hatched normally millions of years ago, and those that never hatched (for whatever reason) were probably crushed and eaten by various predators. To avoid this fate, a group of unhatched dinosaur eggs would probably have gotten burried in a mud slide or some other similar event, keeping them out of the normal food chain of that era, and over time, they became fossils. Fast-forward to today, and you have humans digging up these eggs and saying "Wow! You sure don't see something like this every day!".

 

Grading video games is not done for the benefit of people like you and me, it's for people who aren't born yet. And the thing is, most people living today don't care about people who are yet to be born, especially those who will be born hundreds of years from now. We're like the dinosaurs: They saw their eggs as a simple means of survival of their species in the great cycle of life, and it never crossed their primitive minds that millions of years later, their eggs would be seen as treasure from a long-gone era.

 

Games from the Atari/Intellivision/ColecoVision era came into existence merely 30+ years ago. From a historical perspective, that's frickin' yesterday! We're still bathing into cartridge-based video games (and we're even making new homebrew ones, just for fun) so putting a high value on them seems silly, because they're tons of them on eBay today. But it won't always be this way. Those boxes, manuals and electronics will eventually decay and become truly useless junk, most of which will find its way into landfills or recycling plants. Those will be lost forever, and there will eventually come a time when all that will be left of our beloved "classic" video games will be those "graded" artifacts locked in hard plastic that many of us are spitting on today.

 

The people who accept paying high prices for graded video games today are the ones who perceive the "future value" of these games as historical artifacts, and they often (unfortunately) tend to overestimate their value by today's standards, because they see these "artifacts" with the eyes of the unborn people of the future. Most of us who live in today's world see video games according to their given commercial pricetags, but here's the thing: "Today" means nothing. "Today" is just a fleeting moment with its own logic, a logic that will become more and more deprecated and irrelevant as time goes by.

 

I tend not to judge people engaged in such grading activities, because I actually want the people of the future to see what video games were like in "my" era, long after I'm dead and burried. The beautiful thing here is that those people won't need to break open those plastic boxes to play those games, they will be able to try them via emulation, as long as the ROM files (and the technical information required to make new emulators that can run these ROMs) are preserved.

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bojay1997 Stargunner

bojay1997

Posted
Posted (edited)

Most people (especially today's retrogamers) see grading from a short-term point of view, and in that way, it can only be seen as pointless. Grading is not a short-term measure, it's quite the opposite. Then you seal a CIB game in one of those plastic or glass boxes, what you're doing is arranging for the long-term preservation of that game. It stops being a playable game and becomes an historical artifact.

 

Look at it this way: When a paleontologist finds a remarkably well-preserved fossil, like say a group of dinosaur eggs, it is said that this find is particularly valuable. Why? Because those eggs managed to remain well-preserved for millions of years before being unearthed by us humans. The era in which these eggs came into existence is long gone and will never return, so such a find is quite rare and valuable.

 

Now ask yourself this: How did these eggs manage to stay preserved for so long? Similar eggs hatched normally millions of years ago, and those that never hatched (for whatever reason) were probably crushed and eaten by various predators. To avoid this fate, a group of unhatched dinosaur eggs would probably have gotten burried in a mud slide or some other similar event, keeping them out of the normal food chain of that era, and over time, they became fossils. Fast-forward to today, and you have humans digging up these eggs and saying "Wow! You sure don't see something like this every day!".

 

Grading video games is not done for the benefit of people like you and me, it's for people who aren't born yet. And the thing is, most people living today don't care about people who are yet to be born, especially those who will be born hundreds of years from now. We're like the dinosaurs: They saw their eggs as a simple means of survival of their species in the great cycle of life, and it never crossed their primitive minds that millions of years later, their eggs would be seen as treasure from a long-gone era.

 

Games from the Atari/Intellivision/ColecoVision era came into existence merely 30+ years ago. From a historical perspective, that's frickin' yesterday! We're still bathing into cartridge-based video games (and we're even making new homebrew ones, just for fun) so putting a high value on them seems silly, because they're tons of them on eBay today. But it won't always be this way. Those boxes, manuals and electronics will eventually decay and become truly useless junk, most of which will find its way into landfills or recycling plants. Those will be lost forever, and there will eventually come a time when all that will be left of our beloved "classic" video games will be those "graded" artifacts locked in hard plastic that many of us are spitting on today.

 

The people who accept paying high prices for graded video games today are the ones who perceive the "future value" of these games as historical artifacts, and they often (unfortunately) tend to overestimate their value by today's standards, because they see these "artifacts" with the eyes of the unborn people of the future. Most of us who live in today's world see video games according to their given commercial pricetags, but here's the thing: "Today" means nothing. "Today" is just a fleeting moment with its own logic, a logic that will become more and more deprecated and irrelevant as time goes by.

 

I tend not to judge people engaged in such grading activities, because I actually want the people of the future to see what video games were like in "my" era, long after I'm dead and burried. The beautiful thing here is that those people won't need to break open those plastic boxes to play those games, they will be able to try them via emulation, as long as the ROM files (and the technical information required to make new emulators that can run these ROMs) are preserved.

Disagree strongly for many reasons that putting sealed games into an acrylic case somehow is a good means of protecting them. Shrinkwrap decays over time and reverts to its original form which is a petroleum by-product. Similarly, the acids in paper, cardboard, adhesives on labels, plastic and metal parts etc... break down over time.

 

The general consensus from institutions that are actively preserving the physical copies of games is that shrinkwrap should be removed and games should be stored with the individual components separated and preserved according to their respective needs. In addition, the components need to be stored in dark environments with stable temperature and humidity. The cases being used to "Slab" games by VGA are not UV proof (although they have some UV protection) and are not airtight as that could result in a buildup of condensation inside the case. Similarly, the very fact that someone sticks materials that tend to degrade each other (paper, plastic, dyes, adhesives, metals, batteries in some cases) in a clear plastic case does nothing to prevent that degradation.

 

The only thing the morons spending money to get sealed games graded will have in the future is a lump of decayed cardboard, shrinkwrap and adhesive goo in a clear case. On the other hand, properly preserved manuals, boxes, and cartridges could theoretically last for hundreds of years if stored properly, although it's very likely the underlying game won't be functional.

Edited by bojay1997
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