Don't throw away your old console games !

LordBritish

LordBritish

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http://news.sky.com/story/1543820/atari-games-dug-up-in-landfill-sell-for-100k

Hundreds of Atari game cartridges dug up in a New Mexico landfill last year have generated more than $100,000 (£65,000) in sales over the last several months.

The cache of 881 games were sold on eBay, with buyers coming from 45 US states and more than a dozen countries worldwide.

The result of the sale - $108,000 (£70,000) in total - was announced by Joe Lewandowski, who dug up the Atari games in April last year.

The games had been buried for more than 30 years in a landfill in the New Mexico city of Alamogordo.

Among them was ET The Extraterrestrial, a game based on Steven Spielberg's movie which is regarded as the worst video game ever created.
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I'll have to find my old Atari 2600 games.
OMG, I could be sitting on a fortune !!
 
LordBritish said:
http://news.sky.com/story/1543820/atari-games-dug-up-in-landfill-sell-for-100k



I'll have to find my old Atari 2600 games.
OMG, I could be sitting on a fortune !!
Click to expand...

You know the story behind this right?

The value of all these carts weren't just the cart. They wouldn't have been worth the same if it was just somoenes collection. (In fact, you can get E.T. for $5 BIN right now, $15 for the game w/ box). They gathered the amount of money they did because of the legend behind them.

I'm not saying old games can't be worth money. It just takes the right games. On ebay right now, there are tons of 2600 listings. Even if we completely remove the console from the equation and assume the entire cost is the lot of games. most of them are somewhere around $2-$4 per cart. Hardly a fortune. Even many of the rarer games are going for $10-$20. If you were sitting on a copy Nintendo World Championships, you've got a small fortune. Most of your old games probably aren't worth more than a couple bucks at your local vintage game store, though. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
 
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Viper87227 said:
You know the story behind this right?

The value of all these carts weren't just the cart. They wouldn't have been worth the same if it was just somoenes collection. (In fact, you can get E.T. for $5 BIN right now, $15 for the game w/ box). They gathered the amount of money they did because of the legend behind them.

I'm not saying old games can't be worth money. It just takes the right games. On ebay right now, there are tons of 2600 listings. Even if we completely remove the console from the equation and assume the entire cost is the lot of games. most of them are somewhere around $2-$4 per cart. Hardly a fortune. Even many of the rarer games are going for $10-$20. If you were sitting on a copy Nintendo World Championships, you've got a small fortune. Most of your old games probably aren't worth more than a couple bucks at your local vintage game store, though. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
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Atari in particular really is just never going to be worth much, a big part of this is because they overproduced them. A landfill full of Atari 2600 carts color me surrrprised. Its more the rarity thats important *cradles minty US copy of House of the Dead SS*
 
I have a CD case full of Dreamcast GD-Roms.....

Real game discs, not rips etc.

I'll never part with it.

Shenmue 2, Headhunter, all the good Euro imports.
 
LordBritish said:
http://news.sky.com/story/1543820/atari-games-dug-up-in-landfill-sell-for-100k



I'll have to find my old Atari 2600 games.
OMG, I could be sitting on a fortune !!
Click to expand...

And this is why Facebook and Craigslist is full of "Atari 2600 with 3 games for $250!" or "NES with Mario for $150!"...

You're not going to make a ton of money doing it. Prices are going up because people keep pushing this crap. It's to the point where it's in a bubble and it's going to pop.... Artificially inflated. It sucks being a collector/gamer as I had to stop buying unless I find a great deal. :/

I'd like to own a copy of a buried version of ET. I'd pay $15 for it. No more. I own several copies of it now, but they were store bought.....
 
horrorshow said:
I have a CD case full of Dreamcast GD-Roms.....

Real game discs, not rips etc.

I'll never part with it.

Shenmue 2, Headhunter, all the good Euro imports.
Click to expand...

DC games are pretty hard to find. Went to a mom and pop used game shop recently and they had just a handful of the usual DC fare. Nothing interesting.

I will hold onto my DC stuff for a long time....Wish I started collecting them when the going was good.
 
horrorshow said:
I have a CD case full of Dreamcast GD-Roms.....

Real game discs, not rips etc.

I'll never part with it.

Shenmue 2, Headhunter, all the good Euro imports.
Click to expand...

God I hope you kept the inserts atleast. I only had a rom of headhunter, but I got a good way through before a gamebug broke it.

HardUp4HardWare said:
DC games are pretty hard to find. Went to a mom and pop used game shop recently and they had just a handful of the usual DC fare. Nothing interesting.

I will hold onto my DC stuff for a long time....Wish I started collecting them when the going was good.
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most aren't I bought a catalog of them on cag or whatever it is for pretty cheap, it's a subset that are tough. Like getting your hands on a complete box of seaman or tech romancer. I'm not sure what the rarer ones are anymore I stopped keeping track after I completed my DC collection. I know PowerStone 1&2 and MVC2 are on the expensive list though.
 
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horrorshow said:
I have a CD case full of Dreamcast GD-Roms.....

Real game discs, not rips etc.
Click to expand...

Yeah, i've got a few GD-Roms as well. Would love to get a full rip of them sometime so I can run them on an emulator but i'm not even sure if that's really possible anymore. The copies of the games I own I "find" online are all shrunken CD-R sized ones.
 
I will say one thing. The old NES/SNES games had much neater box, manual, maps, etc than anything released today it seems.
 
Everyone talks so badly about E.T. on the 2600. I'm not ashamed to say that I actually enjoyed it very much. There are plenty of worse games I can think of that were on the 2600... like Pacman for example (though I played it and enjoyed it at the time too).

E.T. was neat little adventure game and I still have my original cart. In fact, I have a big box of all of my old carts. My favorite and most beloved 2600 title? Pitfall II

-logga
 
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