Video Game Collection Sells For $1.2 Million

[key2win]

Massive old-school video game collection fetches $1.2 million on eBay | Games Blog - Yahoo! Games

Geez! LOL!

And you thought your Atari 2600 collection was cool.

A French game collector just netted a cool one million Euros (or about $1.23 million) on eBay for what appears to be the most epic game collection ever.

Seriously, it's a doozie. The collection includes full sets for 22 game consoles, or roughly 7,000 games. We're talking every single game for every Sega console, every game released for Nintendo systems spanning the Famicom to the Gamecube, and even every single game ever released for the lesser-known NEC systems.
The startling haul belongs to a 32 year-old named Andre, who told The LA Times that it took 15 years to complete the absolutely insane task of collecting every Nintendo, Sega, and NEC game.

"I perfected some full sets by getting every title of them factory sealed, just for the challenge of it," he said. "Some titles are extremely hard to come by brand new when they're 25 years old. Now that the mission is complete, maybe it's time to move on."

Good idea, probably, though it must have been hard parting with prized rarities like the Go-Net, a preposterously hard-to-find cartridge for the Sega Mega Drive worth a few grand on its own. Also included in the auction is a full set of the notorious Nintendo Virtual Boy as well as a full, complete set of Pioneer's little-known LaserActive machine. And most impressive of all is that every single game reportedly comes complete in its proper game box -- with instructions -- or is a brand new, factory-sealed copy.

The big question, of course, is whether or not the winning bidder -- who lives in Canada -- will actually fork over the cash (shipping alone comes out to over $1,000). If not, Andre tells the Times his contingency plan is to re-list it on eBay or perhaps hit up some Japanese auction sites, though there's apparently more where this gaming goodness came from.

"What I put on eBay is just a part of my collection," he said. "I still do have thousands of other games that I didn't put there."

[ocanseco55]

I never knew games would sell for that much..

[key2win]

The Story Behind That Million Dollar Game Collection - IGN

Andre lives in France. He’s 32-years-old and works in law. Since the age of five he has been an avid gamer, with a strong preference for Japanese games, RPGs, and old-fashioned shoot-’em-ups.

For most of his life he has been collecting games. Last week, he decided to sell a significant proportion of his collection, a $1.22 million package consisting of full-sets for 22 consoles and game-devices -- a total of 7,000 games.

The collection includes a complete set of every game released in Japan on Nintendo systems from NES through to GameCube, as well as every game for every Sega system and a full, factory-sealed collection of all NEC games.

Full sets are included for such curiosities as Sega 32X, Game Gear, Virtua Boy, and PC Engine. As Andre puts it in the ad, "You’ll probably only see this once in a lifetime.”

In an email interview, Andre told IGN that although the collection is marked on eBay as sold - to an individual in Canada - he has yet to be convinced that the buyer “is serious” and may be putting the collection up for sale again.

Andre says, “The collecting began in 1994 or so. I collected with my twin brother up to around 2001, then continued the journey alone. I don’t collect things obsessively. I’m not what you’d call a hoarder, more like a completionist. I like to achieve challenges, and getting all games for a specific system was one.”

He explains, “First I’d buy the games I love, then all games from the specific companies who produced those games like Falcom, Square, Capcom and Konami, and then I went for the full-set of the game genres. Once finished, what was the next goal? Getting all the games for the specific system. When the challenge was too easy, for some systems I’d try to get them factory sealed.”

He says it’s impossible to say how much he has spent on games over the past two decades, but estimates “hundreds of thousands of dollars”. He supplements his income trading games via eBay and clearly understands the value of collections and rarities. Right now he has over 40 items for sale, ranging in price from $10 to $500.

Andre adds that, broken down, the collection probably isn't worth the asking price. The value is in its completeness and the difficulty involved in amassing such a treasure. “It was extremely difficult to find some games, because some never appear,” he says. “It can take four or five years to finally see one copy of the game you seek in factory sealed condition, and you’re lucky to not miss it. Sometimes there are only two or three copies in the world.”

So why sell the collection, and why now? “Because I felt I had achieved a goal,” he explains. “I got all the games for all the systems I loved. I did it only on the systems I loved. I won’t do it on Wii for example just because it’s a Nintendo system.” But he’ll still be keeping other games, duplicates of favored items. “This is not the entire collection I’m selling, just the Sega, Nintendo and NEC blocks of it.”

On his life as a gamer, he says, “I’ve been playing since I was five, but I play less these days than I did when I was aged between 10 and 25. I love Japanese RPGs, shoot-‘em-ups, fighting games and action platform games. The Ys series affected my life, as well as Japanese RPGs such as Far East of Eden 2, Emerald Dragon, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star series’.”

For security and privacy reasons, Andre prefers to keep his identity out of the media. Already, with the initial sale looking shaky, he is dealing with some of the problems involved in selling such a high-profile and expensive collection on eBay. Selling a game collection for a million Euros ($1.22 million) comes with practical concerns, like how to receive payment.

He says, “I’d probably ship them by Fedex in individual box shipments, being paid in separate amounts with each shipment, perhaps ten percent at a time. It’d take a few weeks to make the delivery, but I think it’s the safest way, so every package can be fully insured.”

So, we are yet to find out who the mystery buyer is, or indeed if anyone is really willing to drop a million bucks on such a collection. Is Andre really confident that someone will pay such a fee? He replies with Gallic sang-froid. “Not until I am paid.”