Don't be that guy....

An article made its way around the video game community this week. It involved some reality show about buying foreclosed storage lockers. In this particular episode a guy found a ratty old stained Nintendo Entertainment System. He quickly turned it over, saying "please be a Nintendo 001 please be a Nintendo 001" and when he saw that it was, he jumped up and down and told the camera that he saw one on Ebay go for 13,000 dollars.

There are many things this guy did wrong.

First, he went on Ebay, looked for something insanely expensive and did a passing read about it. The listing was a Nintendo, 001 model, and 5 games. He tried to apply collector knowledge in one type of item to that of another. Nintendo 001 seems like it could be worth something. The only problem is that Nintendo 001's are ANY Nintendo of the United States type with the door. As in NOT top loading. As in EVERY NINTENDO SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES UNTIL 1993.

From Game Collecting with Rick

Hardly anyone calls those an NES 001. So the search doesn't show up often. They call it the Classic console. The NES 101 is a "Top Loader" so that is what they are called, "that top loading NES".

Next, he went out and got a case made for it, got it cleaned, and tried to make it look like a 13,000 dollar item when he tried to sell it to a collector. He invested money into something he had no real clue on how much it was worth. If something is not worth sentimental value to you, you probably should not blindly create custom carrying or display cases. What you might try to show off as nice could instead embarrass you when someone knowledgeable sees your presentation.

So if all that wasn't enough, he was so ignorant of the video game collecting market that he never bothered to look at the games that came with that 13,000 dollar system. Video game collecting is all in the games, not the systems, it is one of the first things a collector will learn. That system had a few of the video game buzzwords that should have caught his eye.

Unopened.

Sealed.

And most telling of all "Stadium Events".

If he had taken time to even google one of the "couple of games" in the package, he would find out that Stadium Events is the holy grail of Nintendo games at the moment. A sealed unopened copy of the United States version sold for over 40,000 dollars.

Not only was this guy on the television wrong, he was not even in the right neighborhood of knowing anything he was trying to sell for 1,000's.

Oh and his Nintendo did not even work. It was not worth 20 bucks.

Do NOT be this guy. If you are going into this hobby for monetary value, DO research. It would have taken him less than 5 minutes to know what was going on here in this situation. What is worse is there are sellers and buyers both that do about as much research. It ends up inflating prices of things that shouldn't be expensive, putting games out of reach of people that just want to play them or reclcaim a bit of their childhood.