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- Hacker News
- Posted yesterday: "Unreleased Versions of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Discovered in Warehouse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099113
- Talk about a barn find. According to ChatGPT, this box might be worth $1 million or more.
Good thing the owner talked to the author before putting them up for $15 each...
by shmeeed - Why are some copies of the game "graded" higher than the others if they are all the same copy of the same game?by merpkz
- I don’t really have any doubt that these are ‘real’ - but the article author has, to me, a strange amount of confidence in video game ‘grading’, especially since he himself is an expert:
From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.
by jrmg - I hate grading companies, they are a part of the retro industrial complex which made old consoles (ones that were manufactured in the millions, mind you!) and games so expensive. Old stuff should be sold at old stuff prices. Look at the New 3DS, it's approaching the launch price!
- Something that I wonder about when I see the 'final' results like these NES cartridges sealed in a graded plastic box as a collectible.
Surely the market value of these will only hold up as long as they're within the normal lifespan of the people for whom the original NES is a nostalgia item?
For example: If you were born in 1978 and were 7 to 8 years old when your parents bought the original NES and brought it home with a small selection of games, that's probably a core memory for you. And probably exactly the same demographic now who will pay big money for these things.
But as this generation of people ages, do people who have no childhood memory of a NES (or SNES, or Genesis, etc) because they were born in 1999 consider these things to have any value? Will their value drop significantly when there's no longer a population of age-range-appropriate nostalgic collectors to buy them?
If these are being treated as some kind of "how many dollars per unit" valuable commodity to be traded/hoarded, is it the best possible solution to convert a collection of something like this into currency before the collectors age out of the market?
by walrus01 - Do we know if the actual binary on the cartridge is the same ?
- I was expecting to read about a new variant of the game ROM itself. But, this just sounds like a new, slight variant of the packaging.
It almost feels more like stamp or coin collecting, than video game collecting as I understand it.
by badc0ffee