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$1.2 Million Ultimate Games Collection

An anonymous reader writes "If you're a collector of video games, counting the complete back catalog of titles for one system as part of your collection is a commendable achievement, but what about having full gaming sets for 22 different systems? I doubt anyone has ever done that through game purchases alone, but one eBay seller is offering such a set. The price? A cool $1.2 million. That's a crazy amount of cash to spend on games, but when you find out what's included in this auction, and the condition the games are in, it might actually sound like a good deal. Here's the list of systems the auction is offering full game sets for along with the number of games for each one:

Nintendo Famicon – 1,050 games
Nintendo Famicon Disk – 200 games
Nintendo Virtual Boy – 19 games
Nintendo Super Famicon – 1,500 games
Nintendo 64 – 200 games
Nintendo DD64 – 10 games
Nintendo Gamecube – 320 games
Sega Master System (Europe) – 300 games
Sega Mark 3 & Master System (Japan) – 80 games
Sega Game Gear – 200 games
Sega Megadrive – 450 games
Sega 32 X – 19 games
Sega Mega CD – 115 games
Sega Saturn – 1,150 games
Sega Dreamcast – 550 games
PC Engine Hucard – 300 games
PC Engine Supergrafx – 6 games
PC Engine CD – 120 games
PC Engine Super CD – 300 games
PC Engine Arcade CD – 12 games
PC-FX – total games not stated
Pioneer Laseractive – total games not listed."

41 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. what, no atari 2600? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sheesh

    1. Re:what, no atari 2600? by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Tell me about it. The platform I loved the most was the C64. Of course, the Amiga has some rockin' games, too.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:what, no atari 2600? by ezakimak · · Score: 3, Informative

      no Atari 5200?
      no Atari Jaguar?
      no Colecovision?

    3. Re:what, no atari 2600? by logical_failure · · Score: 3

      No Intellivision, either.

      --
      Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
    4. Re:what, no atari 2600? by optimism · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How was this not modded up?

      The Atari 2600 games, and the cabinet arcade games of 1978-1983, were the foundation. There is no such thing as an "ultimate games collection" without them.

    5. Re:what, no atari 2600? by tuffy · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's obvious why just by looking at the pictures. The games are almost entirely Japanese, so US systems like Atari aren't represented.

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

    6. Re:what, no atari 2600? by Mr+Z · · Score: 2

      I came here to say that...

    7. Re:what, no atari 2600? by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      It's obvious why just by looking at the pictures. The games are almost entirely Japanese, so US systems like Atari aren't represented.

      even then, where the fuck is neogeo? or is that collection up for 12 million as a separate bid?

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. for collecting, not for playing by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's over 6,000 different games, many of which have never been opened. No one has enough free time to play them all, so the collecting itself becomes its own reward.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

    1. Re:for collecting, not for playing by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      6,901 + unstated number of Pioneer Laseractive and PC-FX.

      Let's assume 7,000 in total. If you spent just 30 minutes on each game and played 8 hours a day, every day, it would take approximately 62.5 weeks to play them all.

    2. Re:for collecting, not for playing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Just like torrenting porn you never watch.

    3. Re:for collecting, not for playing by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you want to play classic video games, you're better off buying flash adapters and modchips.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    4. Re:for collecting, not for playing by SomePgmr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Obviously I'll never have that kind of cash, but just a quick look shows some of those single items are like $750 ea, and I'm sure some are more. If 10% of the items are worth something like that, that's already $525,000 on the face of it. That puts the rest around $107 ea.

      For someone that would have to spend years hunting down all that stuff in original factory wrap, and that has that kind of expendable money, maybe it's actually worth it.

      Hard to say... I'll never be that person.

    5. Re:for collecting, not for playing by tmosley · · Score: 2

      I wouldn't bet on that. Future emulators will likely be able to emulate not only the system, but the online servers as well.

    6. Re:for collecting, not for playing by EdIII · · Score: 2

      Depends on how you watch it.

      Yeah, if you break out a glass of wine and actually watch the whole thing to give a review on the riveting plot twists and depth of the characters... it might take you some time.

      It's like being a tourist or being a Navy Seal that is rapidly inserted into the field of battle to kill them all and let God sort them out later.

      I think most men are probably the latter with porn (we got shit to do man) and have seen pretty much all the good parts that would be put in the movie trailer.

    7. Re:for collecting, not for playing by Surt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That'd be a nice trick. Who is going to rewrite the thousands of hours worth of server code that doesn't ship with the client and is never released to the public?

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    8. Re:for collecting, not for playing by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Informative

      ..you'd be surprised about some projects on the net.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_MMORPGs_with_a_server_emulator

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. A day late by Dinghy · · Score: 5, Informative

    The auction ended Jul 08, 201213:59:58 PDT, so even if you dreamed of getting this collection, it's too late.

  4. old people will buy anything for nostaligia by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    baseball cards, my brother has a bunch of old ones including Mark McGuire rookie. I think he also has barry bonds and some other good rookie cards. dumb middle agers will pay lots of money for paper cards with photos of baseball players

    1980's GI Joe and other action figures. look at ebay prices. dumb middle agers will pay top dollar for toys their parents never bought them

    comic books, the list goes on

    so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?

    1. Re:old people will buy anything for nostaligia by gman003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?

      Well, if I were to have all those games, I'd open a museum. Buy as many consoles + TVs as possible (old CRTs, if possible, for max realism), pop in as many games as possible. Put up a little placard next to each, describing the history and historical importance of the game. Keep the most popular ones on constantly, but rotate out all the rest. Supplement it with other material - old game magazines, videos, etc. Do some proper archival work as well - have all the games backed up militantly, so the games will never truly be "lost" (maybe do the playing on the duplicated copies, if cost-effective).

      Charge $5 to $25 to come in and play the games all day. Run some special events, maybe have the Minibosses or the Protomen do a promotional concert every so often.

    2. Re:old people will buy anything for nostaligia by slyrat · · Score: 2

      so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?

      Well, if I were to have all those games, I'd open a museum. Buy as many consoles + TVs as possible (old CRTs, if possible, for max realism), pop in as many games as possible. Put up a little placard next to each, describing the history and historical importance of the game. Keep the most popular ones on constantly, but rotate out all the rest. Supplement it with other material - old game magazines, videos, etc. Do some proper archival work as well - have all the games backed up militantly, so the games will never truly be "lost" (maybe do the playing on the duplicated copies, if cost-effective).

      Charge $5 to $25 to come in and play the games all day. Run some special events, maybe have the Minibosses or the Protomen do a promotional concert every so often.

      I actually saw something similar to this in an arcade in Nashville, TN. It was an arcade with a bunch of pinball on the left, older arcade games on the right. In the middle was a large screen tv and a smaller screen tv. They had older systems and a very large shelf of games. You could pay to play by the hour and get to use any of the games in the library.

  5. Looks great until you realize... by XiaoMing · · Score: 4, Funny

    Shipping kills the deal. Red, T/D.

    1. Re:Looks great until you realize... by hawguy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Shipping kills the deal. Red, T/D.

      Yeah, no kidding, I almost placed a bid until I saw that the shipping was around $1200 -- I hate when eBay sellers price a product cheap and then jack up the shipping charges.

  6. Re:Hmmm... by SJHillman · · Score: 2

    Most of them are older games, so even 7,000 games would probably fit on a modest sized thumb drive.

  7. Average price: around $173 per game? by bipbop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is about 6900 games, and $1.2M / 6900 is about $173. Sure, there are probably some valuable games in there. But that price seems very, very excessive for what it is.

    1. Re:Average price: around $173 per game? by slashmydots · · Score: 2

      I think it's low. Dot Hack 1-4 and GU 1-3 for the PS2 all sealed would be worth $500-1000 easy. A ton of Japanese games are worth a fortune in other countries and some whole console + game sets are exclusively japanese in that list. I think there are enough multi-hundred dollar to a thousand dollar games in there to put the average at high-ish but not insane per game.

    2. Re:Average price: around $173 per game? by Enderandrew · · Score: 2

      At the same time, assembling such a collection is quite a bit of work. Assuming you're a multimillionaire, what is your time worth? And how much time would it take to assemble this collection otherwise?

      --
      http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
    3. Re:Average price: around $173 per game? by Nadaka · · Score: 2

      And the purpose of collecting is the hunt.

      This guy probably got every thing he spent his life looking for, and realized that he had nothing left to find.

      To just buy a complete collection whole?

      Kinda pointless.

  8. Obligatory eBay link by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since they forgot to put it in the summary

    Anyway, the auction already ended with a sale. Also, shipping on it was 1000 euros. Pretty ridiculous, but I suppose it would take quite a few boxes.

  9. Re:Hmmm... by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

    Complete sets for all of these consoles are available through torrents. I have downloaded most of these, and they come in under a terabyte. IIRC, the Dreamcast and PC Engine CD are the largest torrents, each a couple hundred gigs. The cartridge based systems obviously take much less space.

    FWIW, a complete PSX torrent comes out at about 500GB. And that's USA only, with ECM stripped and 7zipped.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  10. Re:AMIGAAAAAAA by INeededALogin · · Score: 2

    Where are the Amiga games?

    Commodore was a Canadian company. This was an auction of his Japanese related property. RTFA(Read the f'n Auction:-P

  11. Re:Hmmm... by Applekid · · Score: 2

    No need to ignore software emulation limitations anymore. There are many devices today that can run games loaded off commodity flash drives, on actual hardware. See: Everdrive, Powerpack, Acekard, and others.

    --
    More Twoson than Cupertino
  12. Re:Hmmm... by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You're assuming those CDs and mini-DVDs are full... They are not. Even WII games usually come in under 200MB unless its a premier title like Zelda. I think where your real space hogs would be is in those pioneer discs. Those have real video, that's played at key points when you make the choices. Even the crappy games (probably all of them) fill the entire disc.

  13. Re:Hmmm... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 2

    Complete sets for all of these consoles are available through torrents

    How do you load a Torrent onto an old Nintendo or Sega game box?

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  14. Re:Hmmm... by Hatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They sell flash devices now that read the ROM file and present it to the console as if it were a real cartridge. For the NES, the only one around AFAIK is the PowerPak. For the Genesis, your best bet is the Everdrive. For the PCE, there is a card from NeoFlash but I don't recommend it, mine broke. The creator of the Everdrive is rumored to have a PCE card in the works, so I'd wait for that.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  15. Re:Hmmm... by Quila · · Score: 2

    For the Nintendo 64 at least, that's a maximum of 12.8 GB. However, few games actually hit that 64 MB max, and many were down in the single-digit range. So I'd guess no more than 8 GB.

  16. Re:Average price by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    Think spending half a million (today's money) on a tulip [wikipedia.org] is outrageous? Not if somebody will pay $600,000 a year later...

    But if nobody will pay more than $15 a year later, then "outrageous" wouldn't even begin to cover it.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  17. Re:NOT fullsets, for at least one system. by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 2

    He claims JAPAN-ONLY fullsets. If the game wasn't released in Japan, he didn't include.

    --
    "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
  18. Location: France, Price: in EUR by DrYak · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Atari 2600 games, and the cabinet arcade games of 1978-1983, were the foundation.

    but it's hard to say it's complete. The odyssey was pretty cool too.

    Location of the eBay entry: France.

    (Read the following with a strong french accent:)
    Sorry, what are zeese "Atari" and "Odyssey" you're speaking about? I've never heard about zem.
    (/accent)

    Joking aside, the european video gaming console scene has went through a slightly different history than the USA.
    For one, the japanese console manufacturer have had a stronger bigger presence (at the time when they arrived, Europe hasn't been through a big video game crash, unlike the USA, and thus wasn't suspictious of video games).
    Also, home computers (either european like Amstrad and Sinclair, or north american like Commodore) played a much bigger role in the general gaming scene too.

    That explains why this guy's collection is mostly japanese brands (Sega, Nintendo, NEC... though not SNK as NeoGeo was considered as a luxury overpriced import for people wanting the real arcade hardware at home, not for video console enthousiasts) and no US-american hardware at all (nothing from Atari, Magnavox, etc. - they weren't widely available in regular commercial channels. The ST was the first machine from Atari that I remember seeing here around in europe).

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:Location: France, Price: in EUR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Bullshit. I lived in England for most of the 80s and Japanese consoles were not popular there at that time. Nobody had a Nintendo or a Sega, they had Ataris and Commodores.

  19. 3 type of situations. by DrYak · · Score: 2

    Situation A:
    - its a single player game. the online component only serves as an advanced form of DRM, under the false excuse of some community-related social stuff (online score boards and the like).
    The game is probably cracked nowadays already. And the server components in that situation are pretty much minimal, so full emulation isn't that much complicated.

    Situation B:
    - its an online multiplayer game. as in a MMORPG, most probably.
    - the game is any where in the range of "a few people did hear about it" to "its a massive planet-scale crack addiction (a.k.a. World of Warcraft, Everquest, and the like)"
    Well, as pointed by other /.ers, there are already server emulation solution *NOW*. Either based on stolen code. Or reverse engineered/re-implemented independant project. Sometimes several of them at the same time. Even if the game ISNOT a world-wide drug-like addiction. Even games which are only locally popular (Ragnarok online is really popular only in asia. A little bit in europe too. But didn't manage to withstand the WoW barrage in the US. And it features *a few different* servers based on stolen code, and *several other* servers based on re-implementation of the same procol).

    Situation C:
    - its also an online multiplayer game. probably still an MMORPG
    - the game is absolutely un-popular. only a few people have ever heard about it or even played it.
    Server code is designed to run headless on the server. Thus it is mostly pure game logic. Almost no physics. No eye candy at all (beside probably a nice dashboard to have a look on all the running instances).
    In consequence, it doesn't rely on some 3rd party expensive 3D engine (for exemple Unreal is a popular engine with some MMOs). It doesn't count on a few 3rd party middleware (for physics, for video, for sound engines, etc.)
    Thus, it's almost entirely developped in-house. Thus the original developpers of the server bit have the copyright on almost anything on the server.
    Also it's highly customised. Beside a few networking code, there's not much to leverage/recycle for another game. There's little long-term IP value in the server-code.

    In the end: it's not completely unheard of that, before completely dying, the company release the server code, sometimes even with source code. And it's not impossible that some future company like "Good Old Games" tracks down the copyright holders and asks for the server code.

    So even if you want to play some obscure on-line game, chance are that in 2030, you'll be able to find some server emulation code (and in addition to that: a few bots to simulate other players, so you can enjoy the real "multiplayer" experience).

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]