A cool quarter of a million

[Callipygous]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...1379598219&rd=1

[Albert]

Jaw drops to floor.

[Inky]

Jaw drops to floor.

 

Still though, it's not like the auction I found where some guy was auctioning off a URL with the name of a Buhhdist diety for $10,000,000

[Cap5750]

I'm sure it's a nice collection, but there's no way I'd spend $250,000 on it...even if I DID have that much to spend...especially on video games.

 

And how can he consider Zork I to be valued at $80? Last time I checked, you get get the entire trilogy for free from Activision off their website. Granted, no box or manual, but you still get the games.

 

Cap

[oesii]

This one is very goofy with the high opening bid and lack of game titles and pictures. I like those $3k auctions with all the pictures, they are fun to look at anyways :wink:

 

There's also something fishy in a marketing not ripoff sort of way in the auction because he was just interviewed by PCWorld about vintage games: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,...d,104772,00.asp

 

seems strange to get your auction highlighted in a big magazine before it goes live, probably has a friend that works there and is trying to justify such a big collection auction.

[Callipygous]

Cap,

I think only a business would buy this. Its not for gamers, but a business that sells to collectors who want NOS. The seller evidently has been auctioning it for some months and the prices are from his actual auctions. Looks like they already did an enormous amount of work scanning and cataloging all the pieces. The problem is that is so huge that the capital involved would require a loan. It would then be a full time job selling the stuff. Can't imagine where it all came from.

 

Actually, at 250,000 titles its only $1 a piece. They would surely average much higher than that at auction. Hmm, think I hear Albert calling his banker: "Yes, I have this web store and have the opportunity to buy .."

[sdstuff64]

Wow.Some pics would have been nice,but I don't even have enough $$$ for this fall's new games!!!

[Callipygous]

oesii,

Thank you very much for that link! I would have to say that Mr. Tomlinson is a rare kind of collector - rich No, I really mean that he collects everything for all machines for all time periods. Generally one likes to collect for the machine you like and maybe expand to others and possibly a whole "era", but not everything. Obviously things got a little out of hand!

The thing I never understand about some big collectors is that they often decide to sell the whole thing at once. We have seen this on eBay quite a few times this year. They have stuff for multiple platforms and never seperate out , i.e., Atari 2600, Coleco etc into different auctions.

[oesii]

All good points Calli, about these recent 'All at Once' auctions. I guess once your collection gets over a few thousand items you would basically have to quit your job and go into ebay selling full-time to not sell it in one large lot. You'd probably make a lot more money selling piecemeal but it would take a long time and you might not want to become a warehouse manager/distributor as your career

[somePUNK]

opion: this will never go no one will buy it.

[+cvga]

Don't be sure that it won't sell. It appears that he's getting rid of it because he wants to sell the warehouse that is being used to store the games. At $1 per game, it's not a bad deal. The key will be finding someone with the resources (funds, time, and space) and desire to purchase this lot.

[AtariDude]

I don't think you can really resell these games. Games in cartridge form will sell but computer games will have a problem with holding their magnetic charges after all this time. You could just iwn up buying essentially a box with a diskette inside that has no useful information on it due to its age.

 

I be really surprised if he manages to sell it.

[+cvga]

That's a good point but I think most of the people who purchase these older games are buying them as much for the packaging as the data on the diskettes. Someone pointed out that you can download Zork for free but that won't stop people from wanting to also have the original box and documentation. A bigger concern to me would be the number of duplicate titles you would be purchasing. There is a demand for this stuff today but the demand is still limited.

[AtariDude]

Infocom used to include little things in part of the package as part of the copy protection. Ultima used to have cloth maps and a few other items over the period of the products.

 

However, most other products were simply documentation and a diskette and little else. Unless someone had a specific interest in a specific product, most of those items will not sell. I wish the person well but I just don't see anyone buying it. The price is just too high (unless you are Bill Gates that is).

[Stella'sGhost]

This guy is never going to sell this stuff, much less for $250,000??? I'm sure there are some items that are worth 30-100 or maybe more, but the majority of it is probably worth little, only of interest to a collector. Not worth $250000, not even in his dreams....

[Numan]

They ran an article about this guy in the Scranton newspaper, but did not provide any link to the item itself. There was a photo of the guy in his warehouse.

 

Unsurprisingly, nobody bid on it.

[CincYnoTi]

view his auctions over the last month. he has been selling hundreds of c64, st, apple games, some for $5, some for $25. he has about 500 feedback in the last six months. so he has proven that they can be sold, but probably not fast enough to make it as lucrative as making $250,000 in one lump sum.

 

think about it, if you took a $250000 loan out over 30 years, you would end up paying about $1500 monthly payments. so, if you average $10 per game (which might not be sustainable), you would have to sell 150 games per month to break even. anyone know how much time it takes to make 150 listings per month and package that many boxes????

 

it could have been as much about marketing as anything else. he wants to generate hits to his website which is obviously set up as a business.