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Rare Recalled NES Game Stadium Events On Ebay For $99,000
An anonymous reader writes Via Eurogamer comes news of possibly the rarest of all NES games selling on the auction site Ebay for a staggering 99,000 Dollars at this time, with 4 days left to go. The game in question the 1987 NES game Stadium Events was released then pulled only 2 days later. Stadium Events was released by Bandai as a test title for its Family Fun Fitness Control Mat — an early version of the technology now found in Dance Dance Revolution floor pads. But Nintendo acquired the technology for itself, just as the game was being released. The company ordered an immediate return of all copies so the game could be rebranded with Nintendo's version of the controller mat, now named as the NES Power Pad .
The pre-approved bidder suggestion seems sketchy. EBay should just allow escrow bidders - the interest on the float alone would make the feature worth doing, and nobody who can drop 30 large on a video game can't stand to set it aside for a few days.
Rich people have been spending incomprehensible sums of money on luxury goods for a long, long time. The only difference is that now some of the geeks are among the rich, and have tastes that extend into obscure and rare video games, rather than the classics like jewelry, yachts, planes, or supercars.
Or perhaps you meant "us" as in the western world? I can assure you that the elites in any given impoverished country are busy wasting wealth, too (though they tend to prefer the classics, as well). I've walked through some of Saddam's old palaces, and the amount of money he probably wasted on that stuff while the rest of the country rotted is just staggering.
Yeah, but unlike Saddam I'd like to think we're not a bunch of assholes who would put an old video game ahead of the well-being of kids.
That is just wishful thinking.
Ahmed Wali Karzai for instance, the brother of Hamid Karzai, was the largest warlord and drug trafficker in Afghanistan during his brother's presidency. It's not because someone is on our side, that they're suddenly saints. In fact, Saddam was described in glowing terms by some of our politicians, to defend him against claims of genocide made by the Europeans, long before his relationship even went sideways with the US.
Also, I can assure you that many world leaders have people in the US, that can procure things for them in the US for the right fee. So even if an Ebay auction is purposefully limited to the US, it doesn't mean you're bidding against just US residents. In any case, that's probably a moot point anyway. The probability that the bidding is driven by fraudulent accounts, like someone else said already, is probably even higher still.