Source: I once put a website for sale on eBay. Bids went up to $10M. The press covered it like crazy. Turned out the bids were fake.
For example:
http://www.salon.com/2000/09/11/ebay_deadpool/
There were articles about it in Forbes and Cnet also.
This video will explain shows actual game play. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJY7HKJsnAI
I had imagined that someday I would just be able to emulate the games on future computers, and there was no rational reason to waste space with the dusty relics I was not playing. What was less obvious at the time was that I really had little intention of actually re-playing most of these now collectibles which I had already played to a pulp. The future of perfect hardware and software emulation was as irrelevant as was impossible.
What I gave up for some quick cash was basically a life long historical record with the physical artifacts to match. It will be a bitter sweet day in the future when I visit the Video Game Museum to see my lost history. At least I still have my Marvel cards.
Is it not conceivable that video games might be collected in the same way in 60 or 70 years time?
Young people starting to collect now might rationalising their purchases as a bet that the value of such things will skyrocket by the end of their lifetime. I don't think that's such a crazy bet.
EDIT: I said track and field originally.
Why would someone bid multiple times when they already have the highest bid?
In this system, the highest bid always wins -- bid amount being equal, the earlier bid prevails.
Best strategy is to bid your maximum amount in the dying seconds, if that's still enough - if someone was happily sat below their max, and didn't increase because they were "winning", you can grab it off them for less than if you had both fought for top spot throughout the auction.
Of course, if everyone bids their maximum amount when they notice the auction, sniping like this becomes irrelevant. But people don't, because they're people. I like that they're acting like people when I'm selling things. I dislike it when I'm buying things (because they push the price up by fighting for the top spot days before the end.)
The only conclusion I can come to is that rabid video game collectors are a special kind of stupid.
Unethical? Huh? Ethics is concerned with morality; with right and wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong about paying large sums of money for beat-up bits of electronics. It's just plain ol' stupid.
I'm not arguing against collecting games. I'm saying that paying (almost) six figures for a cart that historically sells for about five times less, a cart that can't even be readily identified, is dumb.
The cart can be identified by the switches on the front, also since only 90 cart were produced (and gave away, you couldn't even buy one) makes it collecting value fairly high.
One can disagree about the irrationality of a collector with money, but I wouldn't call stupid something that I don't understand, it's rude and potentially incorrect.
I'm not arguing from a position of ignorance. I've been collecting NES games for close to 20 years. I think I know what's what. But don't take my word for it; see for yourself what the NES collecting community makes of this auction:
http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=3&threadi...
90 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_World_Championships#Ca...
If this one is worth 90k then his must be double that
I think people who spend huge amounts on diamonds are stupid, but everyone has their reasons.