Neat blog about collecting and selling on Ebay. Guy talks about selling an NES system

The lady basically sold Stadium Games for $13,000 – I assume it was an opened game…on Ebay there is an unopended NTSC copy of Stadium Games (maybe the only one in the country) that went up about 12 hours ago and is already at about $12,000!!! Geeee.

Hey, can I borrow some money from anyone…I’m about $11,950 short!

$2,000-game
$1,500-manual
$9,500-box

We have significant examples of 18th-century jewellery we’ve collected that have cost us less than $10k. Rare pocket watches with fascinating workmanship by renowned watchmakers often sell for less than $10k. And someone is spending $10k for a box for a game cartridge, for a game that no one’s even heard of? While going so far as to suggest that the buyer should fly to the seller’s city to pick it up, and asking about the condition of the “little tabs inside the box”? What exactly is the appeal of the box beyond simply being rare?

*Generally*, I’d have to say yes. For one, the set-dynamic seems to drive demand a bit (as it’s all a function of supply and demand). But, people like myself who collect certain set-oriented things (esp. on eBay) tend to form little unofficial friendly-competitive communities. We all keep vigils for the next true rarity in our chosen category. And when it happens, there’s this whole complicated, weird dynamic that follows. It’s funny because you can sometimes see the page coutners going up & up on a rare item, yet there’ll be no bids. So, you know others are monitoring it, too. (If you’re the seller, you can see how many are watching it — also interesting.) And then sometimes a heavy-hitter puts in an initial early bid — kind of like a big dog marking his territory. It’s like saying, “Hey, I’m an alpha-collector and I’m interested, so if you want to bid, be prepared to shell out some serious cash.” Sometimes that’ll scare certain others away. There are actually a lot of quirky phenomena associated with these situations — all of which, in the end, boil down to those last few sniping seconds (during which almost anything can happen).

I’ve had have Super Mario Bros. 3 in the box, many times and the last one I sold on ebay was for $12 dollars. Tough to sell Mario Bros games now, because you can buy them in the Wii store for about $5 bucks. Duck Hunt is worth a $1 or $2 if anybody even wants it. Sports games are totally worthless. They aren’t even worth wasting your time posting on ebay, I throw hockey, baseball football etc games in the garbage. Ninja Turtles is worth $4 to $10 bucks.

The Nes system itself isn’t really worth much maybe $20 -30 bucks if you’re lucky. I sold a Nes system in the box on ebay along with 5 games and all I got was $53 dollars for it about 2 years ago. I it took about 2 hours to pack to damn thing, so it wasn’t really worth posting and selling on ebay.

Also, the threat of federal prison for committing interstate mail/wire fraud.