$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."

Comments

what, no atari 2600?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh

Re:what, no atari 2600?

[optimism]

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.

for collecting, not for playing

[tuffy]

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.

Re:for collecting, not for playing

[SJHillman]

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.

Re:for collecting, not for playing

[SomePgmr]

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.

A day late

[Dinghy]

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

old people will buy anything for nostaligia

[alen]

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?

Re:old people will buy anything for nostaligia

[gman003]

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.

Looks great until you realize...

[XiaoMing]

Shipping kills the deal. Red, T/D.

Average price: around $173 per game?

[bipbop]

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.

Obligatory eBay link

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[Hatta]

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.

Location: France, Price: in EUR

[DrYak]

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).