Rare Games You wished You Had, Missed Opportunities

[Zeus]

I remember my buddy and next door neighbour had a copy of Air Raid (not kidding, the cart design and game concept are unforgettable). Had had I known then what I know now, well, you know where that goes...Anyway, I've just started collecting...I'd like to hear other such tragic stories, I'm sure there are plenty

[joeybastard]

When I was 14 I sold my huge collection of Colecovision and Atari 2600 stuff so I could buy a decent guitar. I had a lot of stuff that's now rare or at least not common. For the VCS I had almost all of the Spectravision carts, I had all of the Xonox double enders, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, most of the Tigervision games and a bunch more.

 

I love that guitar to this day but damn I should have thought ahead.

[Room 34]

I recall as a kid being given the opportunity to choose between ordering a silver-label Gravitar from the Atari Club or buying Vanguard at Kmart. I went for Vanguard... instant gratification!

 

IDIOT!

[Godzilla]

yea I remember something similar, I ordered Krull when I could have ordered Quadrun or Crazy Climber :-( Also a local blowout toy store in Brooklyn where I grew up had Glib for $19.99 for YEARS but I could never bring myself to spend $20 on a word game.

 

Perhaps the one I kick myself MOST for in terms of lost game play, was the one time I was at K.B. Toys as a kid with $20, and didn't buy Subterrania ($19.99), but instead bought 2 mythicon games ($9.99 each)(kid mentality, two games are better than one) took me well over a decade to finally get Subterrania.

[Zeus]

Well, I guess if anyone lives in Nova Scotia, you might find an Air Raid Cart.....

[+Nathan Strum]

Wow... where to start?

 

1) Had the order form for Crazy Climber all filled out. Never ordered it. I either didn't have the money, or I was afraid it was going to royally suck. I forget which. Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

 

2) Had the order form for the close-out sale of the leftover Starpath games all filled out. Never sent it in. Didn't have the money, so I ended up without Party Mix, Frogger, Dragonstomper, Rabbit Transit, Survival Island and Sword of Saros. And I think they were only a few bucks each. (I already had the rest of the games though.) I ended up getting the Stella CD for $5, so it worked out. (I still would've liked the originals though.)

 

3) Had bought and returned a number of other games. This was back when some stores (even Toys R Us) let you return opened games for credit. Among others, I returned a couple of Xonox titles and Star Wars Arcade. However, I still don't like them for the reasons I didn't like them at the time.

 

4) This one kills me. I worked at Toys R Us during Christmas of '83. After the holiday rush, we were working on inventory. I found two empty display boxes: Revenge of the Jedi Game 1, and Revenge of the Jedi Game 2. I already knew at that time "Revenge" stuff was valuable, so I stashed them. I got laid off before I could retrieve them, and didn't go back to ask if I could get them.

 

That one bothered me so much, on my last trip to Seattle, I went and checked the store. My story amused the assistant manager, and she would have let me see if they were still back there, but the entire store room where I hid them had been removed some years earlier.

 

I wonder if anyone found them, and knew what they were?

 

5) Seems to me I had the order form for Kool-Aid man, too. Not entirely sure about that one. I don't have the form now (but I still have the others).

 

Of course, there were plenty of opportunities to buy other games that were around back then, some of which I wish I'd gotten. But those are the ones that stand out. I did buy plenty of stuff anyway, especially after the crash when new games were going for as little as $1.99.

[MegaManFan]

I regret everything, starting with not owning my own Atari VCS during the 80's and going down the list from there. I missed out on commons AND rarities, especially stuff that I frequently saw bargain priced at Kay Bee and Toys R Us when I was there as a kid but sadly had no reason to buy because hey - I don't have this system so I can't play these games so why buy them and waste my meager allowance? D'oh!!!!

[sku_u]

I have too many to mention.

 

I'd rather think about the games I didn't pass up on.

[Brad2600]

I can't really think of anything so far but I did miss once of CPUWIZ's auctions with Kung Fu Master in it. Darn.

 

I'm glad to say that I got all 4 carts that I won from him in the mail today and they all work like the shiznit! Miner 2049'er is now the rarest game in my 2600 collection so far.

 

I'm keeping my eyes open from now on though. I don't want to miss anything that might be rare.

[CPUWIZ]

I got another Kung Fu Master if you want it.

[Rob Mitchell]

I trashed all of the Telegames Book-style boxes .. for all the games we had .. including Cannon Man .. back in the late 70s. In 1983 I sold our console and our 20 games and controllers for $300.

 

In 1991 in the midst of a move to another state, I sold my Stunt Cycle and Video Pinball consoles to a kid down the street for $7.50 each. Ugh!

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[dwh]

I belonged to the Atari Age Club and only got Gravitar and Crazy Climber;should have gotten the rest,but as a kid $50 or $60 bucks was a lot...Also knew a family friend that worked at Atari and got me some stuff at their store;should have gotten more...Did not even know there were blow out sales of 2600 stuff near the end,was too busy being a stupid 20 something year old....writing of being stupid;threw away the box that had all my atariage magazines and all the atari boxes(mostly silver label),because I was moving one time.

[+legeek]

Selling Cubicolor and trading Lochjaw!

 

DOH!

[Mock]

I've missed out on so much crap it's not even funny...but I did get pac man...lol.

 

I was in the Atari Club for years...never even thought to order a thing.

 

I do have a Wizard of Wor "warrior" pin somewhere in my crap in the garage and a complete sub to the Atari club mags along with it...man if I could just find half the stuff I know I have (or did have)...stuff been boxed up for 15 years now. I really need to get organized!

 

Mock

[MattG/Snyper2099]

When I was a kid (1985 ish), I had Smurfs save the day, complete with the kid vid, all the cassettes and all that jazz along with Tapper, Pitfall 2, Gremlins, and a couple of other 5's or 6's as far as rarity goes. Well, you guessed it! When I was 10 (1991) I sold all of it at a flea market for $20 so I could buy the SNES.

Now, how stupid was that one?

 

Sidenote: I now have everything I did when I was a kid as far as the 2600 goes except for the kid vid module and the smurfs cassette tapes.

 

Also, another time I bought a bunch of rarer 2600 carts from a guy for $10 each. I ended up sending him $160 for 16 games or something like that. Anyway, one of the games (Gremlins) turned out to be DOA (dead on arrival). I told him the cart wouldn't work and he said I could choose anything I wanted out of his collection to replace the defective cart. (You can see where this one is going...) He offered me an Off Your Rocker with a "homemade" label as he described it. I remember saying "I don't want anything with a homemade label." Well, there goes big ass 2600 mistake number two!

 

Man, I know Off your rocker isn't THE most valuable cart but, I still don't own it to this day and it isn't a cheap one. Maybe this year in Philly though.

 

MattG.

[+Atarius Maximus]

I subscribed to AtariAge as a kid, and I remember seeing the ads to purchase Crazy Climber, Quadrun, etc from the Atari Club... I wish I would have, obviously. Rather than shelling out the big bucks for them, I bought the reproductions from Hozer last year, and designed reproduction labels for them so they look like the real thing. Not quite the same, but at least I can play them on a real 2600 now, and I saved hundreds of dollars!

 

AM

[Atariman]

I was just thinking about this the other day... how odd. Anyway, if I remember correctly, I was pondering on whether or not to purchase Aircars for the Jaguar one day in Kay Bee. It was a "whole 13 or 14 bucks" and I wasn't sure if I wanted to shell out the cash for it quite yet. Decided I would come back later and pick it up in a couple of weeks. Well, you can probably guess how that went...

 

One kinda interesting story that I have about Kay bee and their Jaguar stuff though (not with the topic) was when I was in D.C. There was a Kay Bee there and I noticed that there was a jaguar composite video cable hanging on a hook with a bunch of other clearance stuff. I think that the problem was that it didn't have a price tag. Anyway, the person working there said I could just have it. Apparently they had been instructed to just throw away the jaguar they hadn't sold, I believe. I was like, um.. ok.. cool. I picked up Clay Fighters for the Genesis and went up to the counter to pay. I looked behind the counter. Behold! There was a controller for the Jaguar! I asked how much it was. The same person came over and asked who wanted it. The cashier pointed at me. The worker just said, "oh, you can just give it to him." My eyes just about popped out of my head since this was another one of those items that at one point back home I was going to "come back for." (With the same results as aircars...)

[Tempest]

I don't really have any "should have got that" stories other than choosing Freeway over Miner 2049er Part II (which in the end may have been the better choice gameplay wise). I do remember seeing my local EB blowing out all their Atarisoft computer titles for like $5 each and I'm still kicking myself for not picking them up. Sure they're nto as valuable as 2600 games, but still they're worth more than $5.

 

I also remember my EB blowing out Jaguar and Lynx titles at rock bottom prices. Shoulda woulda coulda....

 

 

Tempest

[Cassidy Nolen]

Atariman,

 

That is so funny that you say that. I am in DC, and that is how KB dealt with that stuff. I got a Gamecom and a bunch of wierd stuff like Jag carts (loose), a Gameboy sealed multi-tap, some gamecom software for like 15 bucks about a year and a half ago.

 

I usually buy any/everything I see game related. It got me in debt pretty well. Funny enough, it was working on arcade games that got me out of the debt that video games got me into. Strange how the world works....

 

 

As a kid, I only had the games that Best Company carried. We would go about once a month, and I would get a game. There was also a toy store called Juvenile Sales, and we bought some there. I am not sure, but I would imagine they really did not have the selection to have the "super rares" we all covet today. My library back then were all the commons, which are still today my fav's.

 

Only "big missed deal" were new in the box Jaguars about 4 years ago: 19 bucks each, or 39 with like 10 new games each. There was a little computer store about 15 miles south of here that was clearing them all out. I was home sick from work one day, went down there, and only bought myself one. Shold have hoarded a few away. Its not a favorite of mine, but still would have made for good trade bait down the line.

 

Cassidy

[joeybastard]

Cassidy Nolen's Jag story reminds me of missed deal I had on the Jag and the Turbografx 16. A Toys R US near me was unloading stuff at clearance. They had a Jag/Jag CD deal for $69. The Jag games were all $7.99 each but I don't know if there were any rare ones. The TG16 deal was a real heartbreaker though. TG16 unit for $19.99, CD add on for $19.99, and all of the games (and it seemed like they had hundreds of them) were $2.99.

 

Unfortuanetely that was at a time in my life when I had no money for anything but food and rent. I didn't get anything and that stuff was gone in 2 weeks. Damn

[Big Player]

Not sure how rare it is, but I passed up a NIB Solaris at the Dollar store in 1992.

 

I had never heard of it, so I thought it couldn't be a good game. Sad to say that's how little money I had in my last year of college that I couldn't spend a $1 on an Atari game.

[JCroniger]

I remember flipping through an Atari Age (pretty good deal for a buck) and debating on wheter or not to get a Crazy Climber.

 

The other thing I regret is that I got a Colecovision in '82 and didn't buy another Atari 2600 cart. I missed out on a lot of rare games : (

[+bfstats]

In March of 1991 I discovered a store in Ohio called Pleasant Valley Video, which specialized in selling hard-to-find video game carts. As a test I ordered 3 Chase The Chuckwagons COD and received them promptly. They all worked fine but they weren't original. Mystique carts had been opened and homemade chips with the Chuckwagon program were inserted. Then the carts were "sealed" using brown sealing tape, and handwritten labels were applied. The carts were cheesy as hell, but they worked! I was finally able to play a game I never thought I'd lay my eyes on (this was before the days of emulators).

 

Convinced that this establishment was at least semi-legit, I sent a $300 check for a large order of many other titles from their catalog that I hadn't known existed. NEVER saw games or money. After much un-answered correspondence I wrote to the Ohio Better Business Bureau for information about Pleasant Valley Video. All they could tell me was there were many complaints on file about the company. Clearly I should have written to the BBB before sending money. THAT is my second-biggest regret. The biggest is missing out on so many cheap games that are either expensive or exceedingly rare now.

 

I was so bummed by this experience that I gave up on Atari. That Chase The Chuckwagon cart was my 379th game at the time, and several of those are 9's and 10's now. It wasn't until CGE 1999 that I rediscovered this hobby and the community that has formed around it. I have acquired 73 more titles since then. No regrets now, but I sure could use that $300 at this year's Philly Classic.

[Dolt]

About seven years ago, I found a loaner cart with the black label on it, but nothing indicating what game it was. I got the owner of the store to pop it in, and it was "Dodge 'Em." I didn't buy it for $5 because I already had a real one....

 

And then there was the time I threw out all my boxes (maybe 30) because I didn't have much room in my apartment at the time. Even as I did it, I thought 'someday I may regret this.' Damn right I regret it.

[SS]

I carried around the Crazy Climber issue of Atari Age forever but never got around to actually ordering the damned thing. I guess that $26.95 seemed a bit high for my 14 year old finances. (It kinda was, actually.)