Downloaded from YTS.MX
(electronic game music)
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- For some reason, I came here during the week.
And It seemed like it was like a lot longer of a drive.
I thought that it was like an hour and 40 minutes forever,
but then I looked today and it was like 35 minutes.
- L.A. traffic man is always, you know how it is over here.
- [Edward] Yeah.
You've been hanging onto these for me for awhile.
Want to go through them?
- Yeah, of course, man.
I got your Sparkster right here,
your Battletech, Dune, and your Fire Shark
all complete in box, so, you know.
- You said 470?
- 470, man.
- My name is Edward Payson.
I'm a filmmaker in Burbank, California.
Something was missing in my life, right?
I was in California, I was making movies,
I was making commercials, I had lots of friends,
I was doing the things I thought that I wanted to do,
but something seemed like it was missing.
And I realized that it was retro video games.
So within one year,
I went from just wanting anything I could get my hands on,
retro video game related,
to really focusing on Sega Genesis.
And then by two years,
I was deciding that I wanted to collect
the entire Genesis collection.
And then from the entire Genesis collection,
I didn't just want the Genesis collection,
but I wanted prototypes.
I wanted sealed games.
And from there, you just keep getting bigger
and bigger and bigger.
Where it ends, I don't know.
But at this point, I just directed a horror movie
about a haunted Sega Genesis game.
And now I'm directing the documentary
that you're watching right now about retro game collecting.
So you can say that I'm all in at this point.
The question I asked myself is,
"What is this overwhelming feeling of nostalgia,
and do other people get this?
Is this a unique thing?"
- When people are going through difficult moments,
I think we tend to latch on to those comfort foods.
And by that, I mean those comfort video games.
(wrapper tearing)
- [Tyler's Dad] A box?
(gasps)
- [Young Tyler] Mega Man 2!
(screams in excitement)
- It's like a microwave.
You're reheating leftovers, right?
It's like, you know, nostalgia is the leftovers
that you remember it being so good,
it was such a great meal,
but it's never going to be as good as it was
when you first had the meal.
- [Young Tyler] I finally got Mega Man 2!
- But it was so good that you do want to keep having it
over and over again.
The leftovers are very good.
- Nostalgia such an interesting thing to me
because so many people place it in different categories,
and sometimes people will ask me what is nostalgia,
and the best way I normally explain it to people,
I start going, "Well, hold on,
let me ask you a few questions."
And I kind of start describing moments in their life
in their past.
And if they go, "Yeah, I remember that
and it was pretty cool."
I'm like, "Okay, I don't think that's nostalgia yet."
And I dig deeper.
"What about Saved By the Bell?
What about Ninja Turtles?
What about Skip It?
What about this old toy?"
And once in a while when we have those conversations,
you'll see someone like the light switches
and they're like, (gasps)
that.
And then you're not asking them questions
and all of a sudden they're going off, they're rambling,
they have so much to say, they're laughing, they're smiling.
I'm like, "Whop! That's nostalgia."
Nostalgia to me is those things
that were special in your past
where it's not just a memory.
Like, yeah, I remember I did this one time.
It's like, "Hey, I did this and oh my gosh,
let me tell you about it."
I feel like it's almost like your brain
has created your nostalgia for you.
It's not something that you can kind of pick and choose
what you're nostalgic for.
It's something that you're passionate about
because somewhere along the line in your past,
you were excited about something
and it means something to you now.
And it really is something
that you've kind of really can't recreate
or even try to create.
- Nostalgia for me definitely brings me back
to when I was younger,
when I didn't ache as much as I do, you know, (laughs)
pre-arthritis and stuff like that,
before I had responsibilities, before I had a full-time job.
Nostalgia brings me back to a time
when my dad literally went to go
to probably Montgomery Ward, or something back in the day,
to pick up the Atari 2600, and it blew my mind.
I remember literally asking my mom the question,
"So that has Pac-Man on it,
and I don't have to use quarters?"
I mean, I just, I couldn't wrap the concept.
I love the arcades at the time.
Every time we go to an arcade,
gas station, pizza place, grocery store,
there'd be arcade games everywhere,
or the arcade arcade at the mall.
But just the idea that I could have video games at home
that didn't look the same as the arcade,
but they were still just as fun to me
and I didn't have to use quarters on them.
That was great for me.
- I've been collecting games for a long time.
Ever since I got my first Commodore 64,
I've been a bit of a pack rat
because I love playing all games of all generations.
And so technically, I've been collecting
since the early '80s.
- My dad and I were hardcore collectors back in the day.
We used to collect everything under the sun for video games.
I mean, you name it, Nintendo, Sega, Atari.
It was crazy in my house.
We just had so many games,
and my dad especially was such a fanatic.
He was the one on top of every little detail,
every new system launch, everything.
And he recorded everything that involved games.
When they came into our house,
dad was there with the camera ready to record.
- [Tyler's Dad] Well, it's the next morning,
and Tyler's still playing Mega Man.
- 20, 22, 23.
- [Tyler's Dad] Wow, 23 games?
- Yeah.
- [Tyler's Dad] Wow, you must be proud.
- So I specifically remember, many times, many instances
where dad would come home with a video game in hand.
(overlapping speech)
- He loved surprising.
He loved the art.
I call it an art because there is an art
to surprising somebody with something.
And for him, it was surprising me with video games for sure.
- The reason I wanted to go back
and play these old games and collect them,
at the time, it wasn't really nostalgia yet.
I just kinda was like, "Man, I like those games."
They're just like, hey, I had a deeper connection with them.
I had a more intimate experiences playing with them.
I thought they were just more well-made games,
like core gameplay.
But as time went on,
I grabbed more NES games here and there.
I started developing nostalgia for the early days,
because as I got older,
you're going to get more distant from those memories.
And then you start to connect certain games
with certain people you played them with back in the day,
like your friend on the block.
- I'm James Rolf from Cinemassacre.
I like making movies.
People know me as The Angry Video Game Nerd.
I started collecting games ever since my eighth birthday,
but it wasn't really, you know, collecting per se,
I suppose.
You know, you'd get a game for your birthday
or for Christmas.
And a lot of times I'd rent games.
I was mostly renting games from the video store.
I can't recall exactly what was my first system,
but it was probably Atari 2600.
I was born into it.
It was my grandpa's or my aunt's or somebody's.
I don't remember who actually bought it originally,
but it was there when I was born.
So I played Atari at a very young age.
And then at some point during all that,
I remember playing the Odyssey 2 with my cousin.
The Nerd started out as just a simple joke.
I had no idea it was going to go this far
because the whole joke was, "Oh, remember
these old video games?"
Like, hey, you know, nobody's talking about the things
in these games that suck.
- [Young James] Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.
It makes no fucking sense.
It's like, what were they thinking?
That's what was funny about it.
That's what I thought it was just, you know,
who the hell would want to talk about these old games?
Who even remembered these games?
I totally underestimated that.
(electronic game music)
I just didn't know it would catch on as much as it did.
As soon as The Nerd kicked off,
then collecting came back into my life
because then I started seeking out these games
so that I can make videos on them.
This is the background that completes the picture,
so collecting has a whole new purpose for me.
And then people made it easier
because the fans would donate games a lot.
So this is a graded Jekyll and Hyde that's graded 90.
A fan gave this to me.
I mean, there it is.
It's in my collection.
It's just funny, you know, you always have this reminder
that people will go out of their way
to get you something like this,
because it must've made an impression on them.
- If you look at what's popular in the market
or what's expensive in the market,
it's usually when the target demographic
for whatever system turns about 30 years old.
And so that's like when you have,
in a lot of people's lives,
it's the first time that they have
really solid kind of disposable income,
maybe don't have children yet,
maybe don't have larger responsibilities like homes,
and so they're really then able
to start funneling their liquidity into a hobby.
And around that same time,
they get really nostalgic for their childhoods.
- What do we care about, right?
We care about pop culture, especially in America.
Like it's so American.
It's Americana,
like having physical products, you know,
it was capitalism.
I mean, '70s, '80s, '90s, think of how many toys came out,
how many actual physical products,
and us now trying to actually get that stuff back
is a representation of preserving culture,
preserving the culture that matters to us,
the culture that we grew up with.
In fact, there's a lot of young kids
who are educated about retro games,
and they're learning on YouTube
because the games they played
and the stuff they're growing up with today,
they want to know the origin.
- So physical media is something
that I think is kind of dying away a little bit,
because minimalism is really in right now.
And I think people want to just be able to have
more of a clean look, you know,
you see these streamers and people that are playing games
and they have like this whole entire area
that's just so put together
and there's barely anything on the table.
And, you know, everyone kind of thinks of a retro game
or a collector as a messy, almost,
but for somebody who's a collector,
I want to collect the physical media.
Like I want to have the case with the game inside of it
so I can just, you know, hug it and hold it.
And that's just kinda how I am.
- For me, it's the difference between listening to Spotify
or putting on an old vinyl record.
If you put on an old vinyl record,
you're going to listen to that one,
the whole thing with all the tracks,
because it takes time and effort to actually change it
and you made an effort putting it on.
When you browse through Spotify,
you can skip in the middle of a song
or, oh, not that one, and you just skip through.
It's more accessible that way
and sometimes you might prefer having it that way.
But there is a charm in actually engaging in the media.
For me, you know, putting on a cassette tape
on the Commodore 64 where you have to wait for 30 minutes
before the game even loads.
I'm not going to turn that off after two minutes
because it was a boring game.
I'm going to give it my all.
- I think collecting physical media is important
because when you are buying a digital product,
you are not actually buying the product.
You are buying a license to operate that product.
- When you'd only have digital content,
at some point that work is going to disappear.
It's inevitable.
I believe it is up to the manufacturers and developers
to at least give the modern day consumer
the right to have physical form of those games
so that we can protect that work.
There are a lot of people that put their hearts and soul
into those things,
the musicians, developers, electrical engineers.
I mean, the list goes on,
and lives that have gone into that game.
So if we don't keep a physical copy of that,
you know, it's all gone.
- Anybody can scroll through their digital library,
but I love walking by my shelves
and looking at the physical media.
And also, you know, we come from a time
where you get the game and you open it
and you flip through the manual.
And I mean, that's what I do before I would play the game.
Now games don't even come with manuals and it's so sad.
- It's like one of the biggest catastrophes
of the modern age, really, (laughs)
is no manuals, 'cause they are pretty helpful.
- Back then, I put tons of time, tons of energy,
tons of love into getting a box, opening it,
smelling it, feeling it, reading these guides, these books,
the video games.
Oh, look at the characters.
Look at this manual.
It's telling me every character's name.
Everything in my mind is vivid,
even looking back at console's old boxes.
When you see Super Nintendo boxes now, they're bright,
there's so many video games on the back.
They're showing you 20 video games in the back of the box.
Check this out.
This game is coming, this is coming, this is coming,
play it loud.
Everything's crazy.
- I wouldn't recommend to the common person
to fill up an entire room in their house
of video games or movies or anything, which is what I do.
I mean, we all have our own personal reasons for doing it.
It's more of a niche thing.
So I mean, nobody does this because this is the thing to do.
We just do it because we want to in some way or another,
and we may all have our different reasons.
(electronic game music)
(playful electronic music)
- I think a lot of collectors
prefer finding a game in the wild
as opposed to buying it online
because those particular collectors
are in it for the thrill of the hunt.
There's something maybe in them
where they are adventures, like Indiana Jones,
and they're out to find the lost Ark of the Covenant.
- It always feels the most satisfying
when you find it in person.
And especially if you get to interact
with the person who you bought it from.
And of course it's a lot more special.
Those moments are more rare for me nowadays.
- I love going game hunting.
I love going to garage sales, pawn shops, thrift stores,
retro gaming expos, looking underneath tables
and behind the counter,
and just looking for those really obscure and cool games
that no one has seen before,
or maybe I'm finding for a really good deal.
It's the thrill.
It's awesome.
- And that is basically how I was
when I was growing up with dad.
Every time we'd go out to a department store,
some old department store or a pawn shop,
we would be on the search.
It was like, you know, department stores and pawn shops
and these places, yard sales,
these were our tombs.
These were our catacombs.
And we were Indiana Jones searching for lost relics.
And that was what was so appealing about it to us.
And we'd find them too.
I mean, we would find really cool stuff back in those days,
I'm talking to the '90s and early, early 2000s.
- Swap meets and flea markets being so prominent in my life,
I think, is a lot accredited to my dad
in the way he raised us.
We grew up at a time in our life
when we were younger with a lot of money,
and then a lot of bad things happened in my dad's life,
and we took this big turn for growing up with no money,
to the point where, as embarrassing as it is to say,
I remember one Christmas going through trash cans
with my dad behind a Kmart to find toys for my brother.
And since then, my dad has bounced back
and life's been good.
But ever since then,
those old days of finding things and looking for things,
my dad kind of got into swap meets and flea markets,
and I would find myself complaining.
I don't want to walk around.
I don't want to pick up this junk.
But when I got into junior high and high school,
I started being like, I want to go to swap meets
and flea markets.
And it wasn't even necessarily video games back then.
I just think that's where I started to find my love
for collecting things and getting items that are used
and finding the deals.
- I think anyone who looks for rare things,
I mean, I remember my grandfather going to swap meets,
looking for old Winchester pieces.
When you find something that isn't being sold by someone
who knows what it is, you're hunting.
And the thrill of the hunt is that unexpected moment
when you see something that you shouldn't see,
that shouldn't be there, even though you're looking for it,
you can't believe that you're actually looking at it.
But I think there's also just a rush.
There's a rush to going out, having no expectation
that you're necessarily going to find anything.
And then when you do, it's a story to tell.
But I've never heard someone say,
"Man, I have this really great story.
I bet at the last minute.
I bet a hundred dollars more than the-
Just in case.
And I got it."
I mean, that's not a very compelling story.
So maybe it's the storytelling aspect,
that we want to have a good story.
We want to have high points in our life
and finding something in the wild
provides some of those high points.
- As far as my craziest pickup story,
I was at an event about five hours away from my house.
A person came walking up to me
and they asked me if I collected video games,
considering I have video games running down my leg.
(chuckles)
And I said, "Absolutely."
And they said, "We have a lot of that stuff for sale."
I said, "Well, you know, I'm here with somebody
and I don't really have a car.
I guess I'll take a chance, you know,
if you want to drive me to your place,
I'll be glad to take a look at it."
So I jumped in the car with that said person.
And I'm now about 45 minutes away from where I was,
which is about five hours away from where I live.
Without a car, I'm in the middle of the woods,
and I walk into a truly bizarre situation.
I walk in to cocaine addicted swingers
who were looking to have a good time.
And when I looked down on the ground,
I saw about $3,000 of games at one corner,
$3,000 of games at another corner.
And luckily I walked out of there unscathed
then I made a deal,
and I got probably 20 something thousand dollars
worth of games for two grand,
but it was the scariest damn thing I have ever walked into
in my entire life.
- One of my favorite finds ever at a swap meet in the wild
looking for video games was at a swap meet in Orange County.
I was with my buddy, Ricky, our cameraman, Chris,
and we were just cruising down the aisles,
not really in filming mode.
We weren't really in the spirits of filming.
We were just walking,
and Chris and Ricky walked past this one booth
with electronics, I would say, like had like car batteries,
some tools, some routers, Ethernet cable,
kind of cable equipment.
And they walked by it, and I kind of just glanced over
and I'm like, it was one of those days
where I'm just like, I don't know, I'm going to look.
There's going to be nothing here but I'm going to look.
And on the end of the table was a PC Core Engine,
basically a TurboGrafx just sitting there.
And I looked around and I'm like, there's no way
this place knows that this is what it is.
I grab it.
I hold it up.
It was early on, let me make that clear
and I'll tell you why in a sec,
I hold it up.
"How much is this?"
And they go, "What is it?"
And that's the fine line when you're doing this
because you don't want to lie.
You don't want to undercut people.
You don't want to be a sleazeball.
I admit it was early on, I was overly excited,
I just held it up and kind of nodded again
when they said, "What is that?"
I go, (mumbles) this.
And they go, "Ah, the router, $2."
And I was just like, "Okay."
God, forgive me, please.
Nope, don't want to go to hell, please.
And I just walked over, gave him the two bucks,
had Ricky and Chris roll the camera.
The person, I think, thought it was a car battery accessory.
So I am like super, super excited about this.
I never see these ever.
- How wonderful. - Ever out in the wild.
This thing right now is like $175
at the current time of filming this.
For two bucks, one of my favorite finds,
a funny find, a find that was really valuable.
And I have to admit, I did feel a little weird years later,
like I kinda got this, you know, the wrong way.
Then I actually ended up giving it
to one of our first subscribers in our old YouTube channel,
because I was like, that'd be kind of cool.
One of the first people to ever supported us,
let me put this demon product in their hand
and they could go to hell for it.
- [Brett] So the story of Kuon
is a long and treacherous one for me.
- So much pain.
- Yeah. - So much misery.
- There's a lot of history here.
I have always been a PS2 guy.
I've always been a horror guy.
Back in the day, Game Stop had a buy two, get one
free PS2 game, so I essentially got this game for free
and I played it, I loved it,
it sat in my collection for a while.
I went through some crazy purge thing
where I got rid of a bunch of games
that I was like, ah, probably not going to play this again,
whatever it may be.
Fell out of collecting for a hot minute
Recently, I mean, past handful of years, maybe,
- Yeah.
- the game skyrocketed in price.
A few years back, it was maybe $200 to $300.
Went up to $400.
I was like, "Great.
Now I'm never going to get my hands on this game."
Then at a birthday party of mine,
I had a bunch of people over my house
and we're all just kind of hanging out,
and I walk into the kitchen
and there is an artless case on the counter and I opened it
and there's this copy of Kuon on my kitchen counter.
Nobody there fessed up to bringing it over.
We have no idea how it got there.
So I'm not convinced that this isn't cursed to some degree.
I think the game's up to $700 to $1,000 on eBay
is what I'm seeing it for.
- [Tim] For a single PS2 game? - [Brett] A single PS2 game.
- [Tim] It's incredible.
And it is, yeah.
I mean, I've played that copy a few times
and I've had nightmares regularly after.
So I do believe it's cursed.
- It's a great game.
- [Robert] These two games.
They are not necessarily niche rare or anything like that.
They're just retail releases.
Like every guy who has big collection
usually has Chip 'n Dale 2 and Kid Klown.
When I got back into collecting for a second time,
I had a kind of a stroke of beginner's luck.
And I went to the flea market pretty early on,
like month or two into getting back into game collecting.
And I was walking on the flea market
and I was about to go home,
and then some guy who would just sell them like junkie tools
and stuff like that,
and like something, a guy that I never would have imagined
to be having video games on his table
just started laying these games out one by one on the table,
but like face down so you couldn't read any of the labels.
And I walked up as he was doing this.
He had like a bunch from the table
and I was like, "Hey man, what's going on with this?
How much, how much?"
And he's like, "Oh, I dunno, man."
He had a $3 price tag on each,
and he was like, "Yeah, three bucks each, man."
I was like, "Okay, cool."
And I pick up the first one and I was like, "Oh, Kid Klown."
I took up the second one.
I was like, "Oh, Donkey Kong Jr. Math."
And I picked up another one.
I was like, "Oh."
And like my adrenaline shot through the roof.
And then I was like, "Hey man, 40 bucks for all?"
And he was like, "Yeah, sure."
I break them all into a garbage bag that he was holding.
Two garbage bags.
And I just like ran out of the flea market.
I ran. (mumbling)
I was like, oh my God, oh my God.
Now back to the car
and just started sifting through the ones
that I couldn't actually see
because they're all facing down.
And I was like, "Oh, shit."
Like, you know, "Chip 'n Dale 2."
Oh, there's other ones in there,
like Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, like Wampa, (inaudible)
I guess all these good, uncommon to rare games.
This is a copy of Action 52,
tying into my previous story about some beginner's luck
of my round two of collecting.
I think one of the second or third garage sales I went to
at like 5:00 PM on a Friday or something,
I saw the clear cartridge of Action 52
and I knew immediately what it was
because of my previous knowledge
from 10 years ago or something.
And I was like, holy shit, that's Action 52.
Got the cartridge for a dollar.
I can show you the cartridge.
I'm sure everybody's seen this game,
but for the sake of being thorough.
So I got this cartridge for a dollar in a lot of 10 games.
I later acquired the box and manual
just from trading to some guy in Chicago
some other stuff that I had just to complete it,
but I don't know.
That's my story of beginner's luck.
That's like a true wild find
for an actually rare game like Action 52.
I don't know how valuable it is per se these days,
but as a loose cart, like it's actually legitimately rare.
- All right, these are some of my more expensive items.
This is the famous Stadium Events game, complete in box.
It's not in beautiful shape.
It's in a label less Wata holder.
I guess that's the benefit of working at Wata
is having some protective cases.
And I also have the spare cartridge,
which this is the cartridge that,
I found this when I really started collecting early on,
it was a lot of about 150 games
and they were two bucks a piece.
And the guy said,
"Man, there's something really rare in here,"
but I didn't know what it was
and I didn't find out until I got home.
And I'd read something about, there was a PAL version
and I was like, there's no way.
And I went down and looked at the computer,
and lo and behold, this was the one.
So I was young.
I was known on the forums then
as the kid who found Stadium Events.
- [Young Deniz] I died and went to heaven.
- [Deniz's MOM] What happened?
- [Young Deniz] I will never forget this day in my life.
- [Deniz's MOM] (Turkish) Let me see you, huh?
Tell me.
- [Young Deniz] I can't.
There's too much- - [Deniz's Mom] What?
- [Young Deniz] To tell.
- [Deniz's Mom] What is that crap?
- The whole bag
- [Deniz's Mom] It's full? - It's filled.
- [Deniz's Dad] And there's some real neat stuff here
that is really rare, right?
- I could probably sell all of this for like $7,000.
- [Deniz's Mom] What? - 8,000.
- [Deniz's Mom] Get out.
- No exaggeration whatsoever.
- [Deniz's Mom] Wow. - [Young Deniz] None at all.
- The cartridge in here is actually nicer.
And I would sell that over this one any day
because of how much this one means to me.
- I had started to get back into retro games,
sort of circa 2005 to 2008,
and I couldn't really go places and just buy games.
Everything I was buying was off of eBay
or something like that.
So there wasn't any real,
like brick-and-mortar stuff around me.
When I came to Japan,
there are just so many dedicated game shops,
thrift stores, everything like that.
Especially in Tokyo, really densely populated area,
lots and lots of video games.
So it became way easier for me
to actually just go and take a drive down the street,
go to Hard Off or something,
and then come home with, you know, bags full of games.
When it comes to looking for retro games in Japan,
especially a place like Tokyo,
it's kind of like looking for sand at the beach.
They're just like everywhere.
But if you go to a thrift shop, like Hard Off,
you can go into their junk bins
and just find, you know, PlayStation games, Famicom games,
Super Famicom, all this stuff like a hundred yen a piece,
which I think with the exchange rate right now
is like 94 cents.
I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a game store,
a brick-and-mortar game store in the US
where you can go and just find 94 cent games
that aren't, you know, Madden, whatever year that was,
or something like that.
People, like locals, just dropping off
all their old games they don't want anymore.
And then they just throw it in the bin
and put a hundred yen sticker on it.
You can walk in with, you know, 50 bucks
and walk out with huge stacks of games.
(dramatic suspenseful music)
Maybe it's something specifically cultural about Japan.
It's a very common comment
on some of the videos I do with game hunting
is people remark how it's so awesome that, you know,
all those games are still boxed
and how the boxes are still in good condition
and how the manuals and everything
is still in good condition.
Obviously somebody really cared about this
and, you know, they really took good care of it.
It ties into a history of Shintoism in Japan,
where you can have an attachment to something.
It's my understanding that in Shinto,
even something like a doll can develop a soul
if you attach enough emotion and attachment to it,
or maybe there's a certain soul that's connected
to a piece of art because of the emotion
that you attach to it.
It compels people to take better care of things,
that you could put in an artistic context.
You could argue that, okay, this box is a piece of art.
This manual is a piece of art.
The cartridge itself, all of this,
the game inside is all art.
So I don't know, maybe there is something cultural here
that creates that kind of attachment,
that people want to take better care of things.
- Looking at other cultures,
video games was art and culture, and respected and revered.
I think we're finally seeing that in the United States.
For the longest time, we had the boomer generation,
nothing against them,
but they typically didn't grow up with video games.
And this generation had a significant control
on several businesses and opinions
throughout the United States.
And I think as time has gone on,
you've seen different generations
now occupy and own businesses and perspectives
with the aging Gen X,
and even the millennial generation behind them,
video games is a very different thing.
- I think, with any medium that you have,
it takes a while for people to truly accept it
as an art form.
When you look at photography, it was a novelty.
When you look at film, it was at first,
it was just like putting random group of pictures together.
And with video games,
I think it's a similar phenomenon
where initially it was looked at
as just a bit of entertainment for kids.
But as time has gone by, you know,
I always find it funny that art is its own thing,
its own category that's respected,
and music is a category that's respected,
and animation is a category that's respected.
But games have all of those things
and that it's taken so long
for people to truly accept it as art,
when in every category,
a game has a little bit of each of those things.
So I think that it's about time because they are art.
- This is probably the most interactive form of art
there is.
If you're staring at a painting,
you can stare at it all day and appreciate it.
If you're engaging with a comic book,
the most you can do is turn the pages.
If you're watching a movie,
the best you can do is sit there
and interpret what the director is trying to tell you.
With this form of art, you're actually literally involved.
It's the most immersive kind of art there is.
- The thing I've seen change over the last decade
in retro gaming is really two things.
It's many more people getting excited and jumping in
and building up their own game collections.
And then along with that is the prices of games have gone up
because of that.
It's basically just supply and demand.
So we have more and more people
growing up with video games
with a positive impact on their life.
And so I definitely see people loving video games
and what video games has brought to them.
And I'm seeing the culture kind of open up
and appreciate video games more and more
because they've had more experience with it.
- Any form of art, any form of art throughout history,
whether it was from the Greek era or Picasso,
when people realize it's special,
it is inevitable that it's going to end up
in private collector's homes, and it is inevitable
it's going to be behind three inches of glass at a museum.
- I have noticed, being in the collecting world
for such a long time,
that more people that I know
have gotten into grading games
and getting their video games graded
definitely more than there was back 10 years ago or so.
A lot of these collectors have kind of collected.
They've got their complete collection,
they've kind of hit a lot of milestones,
done a lot of the goals they've had,
let's say, in collecting.
And from personal experiences,
the people I talk to say,
"I kind of wanted to try something else.
I kind of wanted to go for a new style, a new subset."
And for a lot of these people, it was graded games.
- I do think the graded games market
has kind of had a negative residual effect
on your average everyday casual gamer,
because there are people out there
that just want a few cartridges,
or they just want to revisit their old games
that they played growing up.
And if one of them happens to be rare,
they don't even realize it,
then they're like, "Oh, now I have to pay
hundreds of dollars for this game
that I just own growing up."
And that's unfortunate
because those people just want to collect that thing
for themselves, and they have a passion for it.
Yet these people who have nothing to do with video games
are coming from other markets,
like coins and collectibles and whatnot.
They artificially inflated the prices all around
for their own greedy needs.
- I think graded games have affected the market greatly.
I think prices have gone up somewhat for the average gamer,
but I don't think significantly.
I think the only gamer that's significantly affected
is the sealed gamer
and the guys who want really good, clean copies of games.
I think, with regard to sealed game collecting,
with the prices have gone up, the values have gone-
And I think there's established marketplace
for people who want to preserve games like art.
There's two major companies right now,
which are VGA and Wata, who kind of control the market.
But I think Wata has a better control of the market
because of their relationship with Heritage Auctions.
To an average gamer, this plastic, it's just plastic.
It's irrelevant.
It doesn't mean anything.
But to a grader, it's paramount to everything.
The values are all determined in plastic quality,
which is insane.
What are we talking about,
grading plastic or grading games?
Sealed game variations.
There's Nintendo (inaudible)
like a very common sealed, which is the y-fold,
which is stripped right in the middle.
There's variations of packaging.
Not everyone did the same uniform packaging
with video games.
Throughout the years, things changed
and different production facilities existed.
Something like this, which is not an original seal.
If you can tell, for something like this,
the value is not there because it's not original seal.
Determining different packaging and variations of it,
if it's a real seal versus an authentic seal
or a repack or whatever the terminology people like to use,
it varies.
A lot of times, it's based on touch
to verify if it's original seal or not.
Visually, it's hard to tell, always.
But some giveaways are basically different white spots
on opening creases.
That kind of gives it away.
There's stuff like this, where we have its original seal.
It's not the typical original y-fold,
but there are variations.
- I'm glad there are people who are grading sealed games
because they're doing history a favor.
I mean, I'm not one of them,
but they are preserving something
that posterity will be able to see.
And I don't think really, if you ask gamers really,
is that something that we want to lose?
- I mean, the whole point of being a preservationist
is so that these things last longer than you do.
We're trying to preserve these so that when we're gone,
these things are still here.
- My name is Deniz Kahn.
I conceived and founded Wata Games,
and I'm a video game collector.
Wata is, in name, a certification and grading company,
but we aim to be a lot more and provide a lot more
to the video game collecting community
and collectibles as a whole.
Graded video games, certified video games
are a way to eliminate a lot of the risk
for people that are dealing with video game collecting
and buying and selling.
It's an authentication process.
It provides confidence to buyers
so they know exactly what they're getting
and the consistency of a grade,
which can actually impact the value tremendously.
Something that gets a 9.0 versus a 2.0 versus a 9.8
can have significantly different values in the market,
further with, you know, counterfeits
specifically in video games,
it's a way to protect people against spending money
on something that's fake essentially.
The vision behind Wata
was really to elevate video game collecting as a whole,
to legitimize it, and bring credibility and confidence
that just didn't exist previously.
So through our product, through the technology,
everything that's instilled there,
our CEO, Ryan Sabga, who provided that,
really also helped create a product
that not just elevated video game collecting,
but really push the boundaries
of how you can instill confidence in certification
across collectibles in all fields.
I think with the rise of graded games
and what Wata has sort of how it's transformed the market,
we've seen a lot of different effects, I think, as a whole,
because with the market just elevating so much
and growing and knocking down those barriers
to allow more people to come in,
we've just seen so many different types of collectors
coming into this.
So previously where you had this really small
community of video game collectors,
it's, you know, 10 times as big now, right?
So I think a lot of people feel like community is gone,
but I look at it a little bit differently
where it's more like, you know, this small thing
that I understood and that a lot of us, you know,
we were kind of weird, these video game collectors.
Like we were a small community.
Well now we get to share what we love
with that many more people.
I think it's awesome.
Yes, I don't collect the same way
as a lot of people who are coming in and collecting,
but who am I to tell someone
how they're supposed to collect.
Collecting is a very personal thing, right?
So if someone wants to spend $50,000 on a game,
that's their prerogative.
If someone wants to collect only cartridges,
that's totally cool.
- My name is Eric Naierman,
and I'm an avid video game collector.
And this is the VVG Club collection.
I estimate that this collection
is worth somewhere around five to $6 million today.
I'm a aesthetic general dentist in Hollywood, Florida.
I've always been a collector my entire life.
I'm known in the hobby as the dentist of video games,
because I spent a million dollars
on a group of very rare first print video games
last September.
They have that real, organic rarity,
especially the sealed ones.
When you collected sports cards back in the day,
you had organic rarity,
whereas no one knew to save a Mickey Mantle card.
No one knew to save a Babe Ruth card.
And the people that did
had something that was truly special
and almost became like an art piece.
What I love about sealed video games
is that the seal, the original factory seal
gives it that organic rarity
that you know that most of these games that were distributed
were open and you only have a select few that stayed closed.
So that becomes a special art piece right there,
and something truly special to collect.
What I love about Wata as well
is that their displayability on their cases
really turns that historic collectible into an art piece.
So these are the two gems of my collection
and the games that I spent the most money on.
This one is a first print Mario Brothers
with a sticker seal,
which means it's from the test market run
of Nintendo in 1986.
And there's only one of these in the world, and this is it.
And I spent $95,000 on this.
This one is a first print Castlevania.
The first time Castlevania was released to the public,
because it has the hang tab,
which signifies the first print.
And it's in amazing condition with almost a perfect seal.
This one, I spent $85,000 on.
Both of these were steals.
Since I bought these games,
I've gotten a few unofficial offers
of over $200,000 for each of them,
but I'll tell you right now,
if someone offered me $500,000 for each, I would not sell.
The reason I prefer Wata grading
over VGA grading for my games
is that I love that they split up the box
and the seal grade.
That's very important to me
because you know exactly what you're getting.
So as a collector,
you could say, okay, seal grade is really important to me
so I want games that have a perfect seal, which is an A++,
or some people really love the box grade,
so they want a 9.6 or a 9.8.
While VGA really groups them together as an average,
and to me that's very vague
and you could have a lot of games
with the same grade by VGA,
and they could be totally different quality and look,
and to me, that was just a vague scale of grading,
and Wata just speaks to me as a collector
and it's just so much more clear to me.
So these are two of the most special games in my collection.
They're both the same game.
One's a first print, matte seal,
and one's a second print, gloss seal.
This represents the first print
and second print of this game in 1985,
and there's only one in the matte print,
and there's only one in the gloss print
that have remained sealed.
And these are both of them right here.
So this is the only sticker sealed golf copies
in the entire world and I have both of them
and it's amazing to have them together in one collection.
So insider collectors will know
about the recent mold pedigree that we call,
where someone on eBay had found
some really nice first print games,
but they were left outside and became a little bit molded.
So you see here that there's some remnants on the mold
on top of his face over here
and there's a little bit in the back.
My theory about it is a lot of people didn't want to buy it
because obviously it's not in great condition.
But my theory is that some of the games were just so rare
that it was just too hard to let go.
And I didn't care what condition it was in.
I was going to buy them anyway just based on the rarity.
This was the first Super Mario Brothers that I ever saw.
And someone told me that just to have the circle seal
is super rare.
So I was interested in it right away.
And I had already seen some oval seals
sell for around $3,000 to $4,000 at the time.
And this was not only a circle seal,
but it was called a No-Rev
where it doesn't have a Rev-A marking,
and this is even more rare than most prints
that you get of this game, and this is the most iconic game.
So at the time, I got presented to buy this for $13,000
and it was hard to do at the time,
but I was confident that it would go up in price
and I did buy it for 13,000,
and many of these circle seal games
are now selling for $100,000 to $200,000 at the time.
I hear a lot that people tell me
that games are meant to be played and not to be encased,
but to me, that's just ridiculous
and it's a mantra of jealousy.
The reason I feel this way
is because you could play any game you want now digitally.
By me collecting sealed games,
it has no hindrance on anyone playing any game.
When I think about it, I think about, you know,
someone who really likes Diet Coke, for example.
We all know you could get Diet Coke at any store
if you enjoy it.
And let's say someone collects the first sealed Diet Coke
that was ever released by Coca-Cola as a collectible.
How does that affect your ability to get Diet Coke?
And to me, that's just a mantra of jealousy,
where why would anyone care
if I'm boxing up a piece of history
to enjoy and appreciate the nostalgia that it brought me.
Wouldn't make it easily play the game
at any time that they want.
- I do know there is a world out there
of people who love graded games
and love having a status or a price number
or a rating on their video game,
and that's cool and I like that,
and I tell people because I know there are some people
who talk down on that and they go, hey, that stupid.
For those of you who think it's dumb
and don't want to do it that way, then don't do it that way.
Regardless, I think that gaming is such a cool community,
especially retro gaming.
It's such a different world.
It's such a niche world.
And I think that we can all learn something from each other,
looking at different ways that people collect.
- The hard truth is whether it comes to the most expensive,
rare games or graded games that are in pristine condition,
the truth is every gamer wants them.
Every gamer wishes they could get those.
People that are serious collectors
really do wish they could get them,
but there is no way that the average person
is going to be getting those games.
And so I think that there is some jealousy.
I know I have it when I see some of those things.
I wish I could get those.
I wish I could fork over $600,000
for a pristine Super Mario Brothers, but I can't.
So I think, you know,
I have to cope with my own jealousy
and pull it back and just realize
that that's not going to be in the cards for me probably.
- I honestly don't have any idea if it's going to stick,
like the graded games thing,
or if it's just going to fizzle out
as a really expensive fad for the time being.
I think is going to be an expensive fad.
I really don't think that stuff's going to stick
in the long run.
I might be entirely wrong and that's fine,
but I'm sure there will always be a divide
and there'll be two communities now as a result.
- I do understand that Wata Games
has been getting a lot of negative press
from some people in the community.
And I do know that one of the founders of Wata Games,
Deniz Kahn in particular,
has literally been getting death threats.
I don't understand.
As far as my relationship with Deniz,
I like to reiterate,
I hold no stock in what Deniz is doing.
I don't own a single graded game.
But I do know Deniz as the collector.
That's how I met him.
I met him about five, six years ago.
And quite frankly, that man is passionate about this hobby.
I don't think you can lay the market on his shoulders
because quite frankly, if Deniz didn't start Wata Games
and the other three companies that were grading games
didn't continue what they were doing,
the market would have demand for it anyway.
It's just inevitable.
I believe that there's this misconception going around
that Deniz is just sitting back, collecting money from Wata,
and he was never a real collector.
I beg to differ, my friend.
He really has one of the greatest collections
I've ever seen, and that was in place
well before Wata was even conceptualized.
(electronic game music)
- This is original art for a game that I actually had
and that meant a lot to me as a kid,
which was Mickey Mania,
which I've got over here the box so you can see.
So this is not a print.
This is not, you know, reproduction or anything.
This is the piece of art done by Greg Ray
that they used for the cover.
So, as I said earlier,
I think original art is just the best it gets
with collecting.
And I've never spent on anything in my collection
than I did for this piece.
And I don't know if I'll ever own another piece of art
for a game that I had as a kid.
So it's incredibly important to me.
These are some of my favorite standees right here.
They're really hard to come by.
You got the Blankas for the Street Fighters.
Then you could actually swap these parts out.
And then Goro is from Mortal Kombat.
Personally, I'm a Mortal Kombat guy.
That's the game I grew up with.
But this one in particular,
I got this one early into my collecting display,
like Goro was one of my first significant displays I bought.
And the reason this one is special
is because of this note right here,
and I'm going to read it.
It's got a signature on it.
And it says it was sold to someone named Richard,
who someone bought it from
and then I bought it from that person.
"Hey Richard, thanks for being a fan
and for supporting Mortal Kombat over the years.
Like I said in my listing,
this Goro standee was given to me
by none other than the game creator, John Tobias,
back in the day when we did the games.
You have something very rare in your possession now.
Fight to keep it yours forever."
He didn't do real good job of that.
"No one else on this planet has what you have now
that came from an original Mortal Kombat actor
and was once in the office of the MK creator.
Thanks again."
And then it's the guy, I forget his name,
who played Kano, Baraka, Kabal, and Quan Chi in both,
he did the character stuff and then in the movies.
So knowing that this was in John Tobias' office,
(stammers) that's so special to me.
I could never get rid of something like that.
And I'm in love with it.
This is my Game Boy collection, CIB Game Boy collection.
I still have one game left
and I started collecting, started Game Boy in 2009,
so like, (laughs) over a decade has taken me
to get this far.
Game Boy is-
And this is with variants.
So if you see duplicates, they're all variants.
There's a ton of really cool variants on Game Boy,
like, you'll see Bonk's Adventure
was published by Hudson Soft,
but then there's also an Electro Brain re-release.
And, you know, where is it, like Alleyway or Baseball,
there's four different prints.
There's actually more than that.
So it never-
It was so fun to actually track them down
and figure out what variants exist
and checking them off one by one.
And Game Boy, no one had a reason to keep the boxes.
So it's so hard to find them in the box,
that's why it took so long.
Some of these titles, they don't even sell for that much,
but they show up on eBay once a year, if even,
so it was really, really fun to do that
and it was easily my favorite system to collect for.
I almost don't want to get that last game because if I do,
it's over. (laughs)
Yeah, I mean, the games are meant to be played.
It's the age old argument.
Comics are meant to be read.
You know, how far back can we go?
Again, I'm not one to tell someone how to collect,
but thank God for technology.
You see how many games I have.
I haven't put any of these games in a system
because I have an EverDrive.
I have, like, technology has enabled us
to have the exact same experience,
like with a comic it's actually, even it's different.
Reading a reprint or reading a digital comic
is not the same experience as holding the comic in your hand
from like, you know, if you have like an Amazing Fantasy 15,
right, the first appearance of Spider-Man,
it's a different experience.
It smells different.
With a video game,
the EverDrives work on original hardware, right?
It's not even emulation.
So your experience is more related
to the TV that you're using than the actual game itself.
So I think that because of technology,
because of the resources we have,
that argument becomes totally moot.
And what it does actually is it enables us to look
at the actual physical games in a different light
and enables us to appreciate it
for more than just the gameplay.
It enables us to look at it
and say, this has beautiful artwork.
Who was the artist who did this, right?
Packaging,
I mean, I collect displays.
That's all about-
These were just marketable materials that got thrown out.
And the last thing I have to say
is if games were meant to be played,
then they wouldn't be collected.
Because if they were meant to be collected,
they wouldn't be a collectible.
Beanie Babies were meant to be collected.
That's why they crashed.
It's the stuff that you were meant to use, to toss out,
the boxes, the original packaging,
that that becomes collectible over time.
And thank God we did that
because now there's a whole market around it
and there's all this excitement and a community
built around preserving these old pieces of history.
It's culture.
It's pop culture, and it's important to all of our lives.
(bright stringed music)
- My name is Donny Fillerup.
I'm a collector from the Netherlands,
and I'm the owner of Consolevariations.com
Consolevariations is a hyper database
with all the hardware you can think of,
all the controllers, all the consoles,
all the accessories and even prototype.
So this is my Nintendo GameCube collection.
It's a hundred percent complete collection,
including the controllers and accessories.
We start from the left, top,
which are the Super Smash Brothers controllers.
(upbeat electronic music)
Followed up by the Emerald Green and the WaveBirds.
The WaveBirds are wireless controllers.
The most rare one is the Gundam one.
There are only 2000 made.
It's also the most expensive one.
This is from Club Nintendo.
And then we have the wired versions of Club Nintendo.
The Mario version was also released in Europe,
but the rest are all Japanese exclusive.
Here we have Dev kits and prototypes.
These are two prototype controllers.
This is the first version,
and this is the second version.
This is an Orange GameCube that was only released in Japan.
We have the Starlight GameCube, which is gold,
and it was only available in Toys "R" Us.
Then we have the Resident Evil 4.
We have a very rare Heineken GameCube.
There was a contest in the Vibe magazine.
Only 50 are made.
And then we have the Panasonic Q,
which was basically the rival of PS2
because it supported DVD.
It also have a brand new Game Boy player.
Below is a Hanshin Tigers.
Back in 2003, Nintendo sponsored Hanshin Tigers,
so this was like a celebration console.
This was Tales of Symphonia,
it was an online game.
This is the Gundam One.
It came with the figure and the Game Boy player.
This is a very rare Final Fantasy
Crystal Chronicles version.
There are only 150 made,
and it was a giveaway in a magazine.
And this is the ATI console.
It was only given away to GPU employees.
And here are all the accessories.
I have them all, including the very rare SD card reader
that was only meant for Animal Crossing.
N-Zone is a magazine company that was licensed by Nintendo,
hosted in Germany.
N-Zone magazine is basically the Nintendo power of Europe.
When their 200th magazine was released,
they had a few contests.
So this is a contest page.
You have to fill in the form, send it to N-Zone,
and you had a chance to win one of these prices.
One of them is a Nintendo DS with Mario 64 on it.
The Nintendo DS was canceled
because there were just too less entries.
Apparently one of the insiders who worked there
just took it with him.
He stole it (chuckles)
and he probably sold it to me a few years later.
This is only one made.
It was bundled with Super Mario 64,
and it was issued 200th issue of the N-Zone magazine.
In 2009, THQ figured out that the queen of England
loved to play Wii bowling for the Nintendo Wii.
THQ was also developing a video game
called Big Family Games,
and to promote that system,
they made a 24-karat golden Wii
to give it to the queen of England and their family
to play on.
So this was disposed of all the press
and there were stories and everything
that they still have it,
but the truth is they never received it.
They canceled it without the press knowing.
When THQ got bankrupt,
there was a high level collector
who purchased every development console and prototypes
in the entire office basically.
And that system was included.
So on the forum called Assembler Games, I met him,
we talked, we discussed, and eventually we came to a deal
where I purchased that console from him.
So this is my holy grail cabinet.
All my rarest items are in here.
So we start with the golden Wii.
This internal Wii is actually exactly the same
as any other Wii, only it's 24-karat gold.
It's the first version, which still has the GameCube ports.
I'm wearing gloves (chuckles)
because it's too expensive to hold with my bare heads.
The Wii was actually displayed vertically on a pillow
when it was presented to the press.
Funny enough, it was actually glued on
because there's still some residue on the back.
So you could still see some red stuff on it from the pillow.
This is an unreleased color of the Nintendo 64.
It was actually set up on auction in 2011.
It was sold for $1,200 and never to be seen again.
Apparently, this buyer never paid
and the seller still had it.
I contacted the seller nine years later,
and this is the system.
This is an X-Box one of Rare Replay.
There are only five made in the world.
You can win one for your Comic-Con.
There was one given away for your Twitter,
and one for your Facebook.
And there was also one able to win at Gamescom.
At Gamescom, you have to participate in a special tournament
when they made a custom level of Battletoads
and the highest scorer was able to win this console.
This one came from Facebook.
When I let Rare, that's I own this console,
they invited me over.
And then when I did, everyone went down
and signed this console.
The reason why I collect consoles
is that they are challenging to collect than games,
in my opinion,
and everything has a story behind them.
Every limited edition, every giveaway,
there's always a story behind it that makes it special.
And that's the reason why I collect consoles.
And when you have a complete collection,
you have an entire story to tell others
about the whole history about that system.
(ominous music)
- So I remember growing up in a rural area
in Northern California,
and, you know, going to a rental store to get a video game
was typically a weekly or every other week experience.
You know, we would get a take and bake pizza,
we would get a movie in, and if we were good,
we would get a video game to rent
for our Nintendo Entertainment System typically
back in the day.
And so I remember going into one of two
main video rental stores in my hometown at the time,
and looking at the box art.
And you know, at the time,
I wasn't looking at video game magazines.
There wasn't the internet.
And so you had to go either by word of mouth
of other kids you went to school with,
or you would look at that box art,
you turn it on the backside and you'd make a judgment call.
Sometimes I would make that decision with my brother.
Sometimes we'd flip a coin.
Sometimes, you know, we'd just take a gamble.
Most of the time, we were pretty good at picking good games.
And you definitely found out pretty fast, you know,
if a game was terrible.
You would tell people about it
and you know, you'd find out what are the good games,
what are the bad games from, you know, kids at school.
- I remember going to the video store broke
just to see what game, just to see the selection,
just to see what they had.
It was like, oh, I saw that in Nintendo Power.
There's a Nintendo game that just came out.
I've never even heard of that one.
And you just have to grab the game
and look at the back of the box and look at the pictures.
That's all you had.
You didn't have the internet.
You couldn't look up gameplay footage.
You couldn't look up somebody streaming it on Twitch.
You certainly couldn't look up any reviews
or anything like that.
You actually either had to see it in a magazine
or literally just take-
You know, like, here's what the cover art looks like.
Cool.
Flip it around.
You see two or three screenshots,
a little synopsis about the game.
That's all you had to judge on.
- There was a time, not too long ago,
where if I saw a game that I wanted
but it had an old rental sticker on it,
I'd be like, "Oh, I'm not going to get that one."
But now, the whole concept of going out
and renting something is so antiquated
that that just adds to it.
So it's, you know, especially if it is a place
that we grew up going to.
- I love finding games with rental stickers on them
because that's a piece of history.
That's a part of its journey or where it came from.
Sometimes I'll find games here in the Northwest
that have rental sticker stores in Virginia
or something like that.
And I love it when people write on their cartridges.
I know a lot of people don't, but I love it.
Like, you know, turning on the back of the card,
and it's like, you know, Thompson,
and it has like their phone number or something.
I'm having to call the phone number
to see if the family still lives there
and say, "Hey, I've found your copy of Silent Scope.
Where can I send it back to you," you know.
- For me, that personally adds
to the likeability of the product.
You know, if I find somebody's high score
written in the back of an instruction booklet,
I can be like, oh my gosh, this kid, some of this guy,
he played this game when he was a little kid
and he got this high score, and I bet he loved this game,
I bet he cherished it.
- The sticker make it sicker.
- [Aaron] I absolutely love it when I find stickers
that are retro.
The original stickers,
it makes it so much cooler in my opinion.
You know what, it's just like a staple part
of physical media that isn't as popularized or polarized
as I think it should be.
(electronic game music)
- Video stores actually led to a lot of innovation.
Way back in 1994, Blockbuster actually teamed with New Leaf,
a company that basically wanted to make it easier
to get the games and get the movies
and get the music that you wanted on demand.
Blockbuster Game Factory green,
and Blockbuster Game Factory blue,
and basically what these were were flash carts
that were at kiosks in 10 Columbia, South Carolina stores,
where you could go in, you could type what game you wanted
and it would write the game to the cart.
You'd take it home, you'd play it, you'd bring it back,
it would erase it and be ready for the next person.
- We have any video game you like.
- What if I don't know what I want?
- You can preview them all right here.
- Then what do I do?
- Pick one and we'll produce it on the spot.
- And eventually they wanted to bring that into movies
and music as well.
- [Man On Video Commercial] Hi, excuse me.
Do you have the new album-
- We sure do.
CD or cassette?
- How do you know you have it?
I haven't even told you the title yet.
- We have everything.
- Well, you might be sold out.
- We're never sold out.
- Unfortunately, they did a test on this
in Columbia, South Carolina,
from August 10th through August 15th of 1994,
and some things they did not anticipate,
a lot of companies just wanted nothing to do with it
because it was such a new technology.
They thought that they were going to be losing money
because they couldn't actually keep track
of what was being rented.
Sega Genesis said yes, but then individual companies,
most of them said no.
So there are only a few games available.
The other thing that was the problem
was a bunch of the games took way too long to write.
So you had to wait in real time
as these games were written to these cartridges.
So New Leaf and Sega Genesis spent so much money
in advertising, trying to get as many companies
as they could.
They even hired Dennis Miller as a spokesperson.
And they were only able to put these in stores
for five measly days.
However, it made this one, the green,
and this one, the blue, very, very rare.
And it's actually one of the most rare things
in the Genesis set.
The green will run you between like $250 to $450
while we're filming this documentary.
The blue, you almost never see available
and could go upwards of a thousand dollars.
- This is actually not that rare.
This is a copy of a Baby Boomer on the NES.
It's unlicensed Color Dreams game.
And it's kind of printed black and white manual
because it came from a rental store.
I actually got this from my own childhood rental store
that I used to rent games from growing up,
in addition to a few other Nintendo games.
The name of the store is actually a really weird name.
It was called Take Home Our Movies.
It was awkward, and that was the name of the store.
It was in a strip mall.
It just said Take Home Our Movies.
I'm like, and that was it.
And I was like, okay, it makes sense to me.
I was driving through my hometown with my girlfriend
and we were driving past that strip mall,
and I was nostalgically being like, "Man,
there was my video store I used to go to."
'Cause I do that every time when we drive by it,
because I'm just like a sentimental bastard.
And then I had this idea.
I was like, well, what if I pull into the parking lot
and go into the liquor store
that was a few storefronts over.
And that's been there since the '80s
and still is there today,
and why don't I just talk to whoever's in there
and see if they remember the video store and who ran it.
So I went in there and I bought a drink
and I just struck up a conversation
with the owner of the liquor store
who happened to be there that day.
And I just casually was like, "Hey,
remember that video store over there?"
And he'd just like, "Oh yeah."
And so and so.
And, "I know the family and this and that,"
he knew all their names.
And I said that I wanted to reach out to them
to try to acquire some old games.
And he, you know, he was like into the idea.
That was cool and I remembered it
because no one ever talked about that place anymore
because it just kind of disappeared in time.
And so I took that information and I went home
and did some internet sleuthing,
and I tracked down the son of the owners of the video store.
And it was like, "Hey man, this sounds really weird.
And I'm sorry if it's like off putting,
but do you have any of the old video games
or whatever that your mom and dad's store used to carry?"
Like, "I have a lot of nostalgia
for renting games from their store
and I'm a big video game collector
and I'm just wondering if there's anything left over."
And he was like, "Actually there is a bunch of leftover
at my mom and dad's house up in Wisconsin.
And you know, I'll mediate it for you.
I'll go check on it and I'll get them all for you.
And then we can meet up at some point and you can buy them."
And I was like, "No way."
Like I was like so thrilled that I could finally have
a piece of that actual era.
Few weeks went by,
I was like, we're messaging back and forth
at a glacial pace.
I gave him my address.
He put two and two together
and he's like, "Oh, I'll be a block away from you
on Thursday.
We'll just meet."
So like weird twist of fate,
those games magically traveled down to Chicago
and I just walked out of my apartment door.
And he was like, "Here you go, man."
He was like, "Five bucks each."
And I was like, "Cool."
And then he also had some posters
and random VHS tapes and stuff that I also bought
just 'cause I was like, "Hey,
give me everything you've got."
- When collecting now, there's a lot of games
that are unlicensed, and there's a reason for that.
I mean, Nintendo had very strict standards
on what they wanted and what they would accept.
But there were a lot of people who saw this as a cash cow.
They wanted to get some money.
And so how could they do that?
So they figured out ways
to circumvent Nintendo's chip and everything,
and they also wanted to try to reach markets
that Nintendo wasn't really reaching.
They wanted to reach the adult market.
They wanted to reach the Christian market.
Those games, it's just they weren't printed
in the same kind of quantities.
It was so niche.
They weren't gonna be found at Toys "R" Us.
They weren't gonna be found, you know, in regular stores.
So they were so niche
that now there just aren't that many of them.
- This is the most common example of a Wisdom Tree game.
This is the Bible Adventures.
These are, as you could tell,
this is almost self-explanatory.
These are Christian-based video games.
- I distinctly remember when I was a kid,
we would go into this one Bible bookstore,
a Christian store.
And they had this one little counter, under the glass,
with Nintendo games, but they were all Bible Nintendo games.
I remember seeing Bible Adventures there for sure.
And I remember just, you know, because it was Nintendo,
I wanted to get it, but my parents always said no.
So seeing a game like Bible Adventures under that glass
at a Christian bookstore,
there weren't many ways you could get that game.
I mean, you could get it at that store.
You could maybe mail off
from a Christian catalog or something.
- From what I understand, I never saw them.
There were commercials supposedly with, you know,
where you can call and order these direct.
(electronic game music)
- [Woman On Video] So are you guys getting hungry?
- [Boys On Video] Yeah.
- [Woman On Video] Okay, good.
(electronic game music continues)
Do you ever worry that they're playing too much Nintendo?
- Oh, not anymore.
See, Matt has Bible Adventures.
They're actually learning Bible stories
while they're playing Nintendo.
- Quick, get that Bible quote before you run out of power.
- [Voiceover On Video] Bible Adventures features three games
in one cartridge:
Noah's Ark, Save Baby Moses, and David and Goliath,
a must for every family with Nintendo.
Call 1-800-77-BIBLE.
That's 1-800-77-bible.
- There really weren't many ways to get it.
So how is the average kid going to find it?
And that's why it's rare to this day.
- Later in the life of these games,
as a good friend of mine pointed out,
a lot of these ended up in a lot of use video game stores,
you know, (chuckles)
because this would be the first thing
that a kid would trade in
once they realize there were a lot better stuff out there.
The Nintendo versions of these games,
the NES version of these games, are uncommon,
but they're not extremely rare.
The ones that really got to be rare
are, you know, from the Super Nintendo era.
Those games seem to be the more valuable ones.
("Hallelujah")
- This is a cool little set.
It's very esoteric.
And I love odd ball, stuff like this.
This is the full, and some behind there,
the full HES set, which was Home Entertainment Suppliers.
They were basically the distributor
for unlicensed NES games in Australia.
They actually have like, I pulled one aside here,
because they either had these funky shaped cartridges
or they came with something called a dongle
to basically bypass the lockout chip on the NES.
So they come in these really funky VHS-style clamshells.
So another interesting one is Chiller,
which is also an unlicensed game for the NES.
- Sometimes you'd be at the video store,
you'd see this weird game, it looked a little different,
different color, different shape,
you'd bring it home and you'd play it.
And you were, "What the heck is this?
This is not Mario Brothers.
What is going on?"
And then you start wondering like,
maybe you don't want your mom to come in
and see what you're actually playing.
- I know with my friends growing up
and going to rent movies, kind of, the big thing to do
would be to go rent Faces of Death
and then tell your friends about it.
And I'm talking about when I was like 12 years old,
and the video game equivalent of Faces of Death
has to be Chiller.
- [Deniz] Chiller was actually an arcade machine.
It was very controversial when it was released.
It's a point and click game
and you have to just click a bunch of times
and it rips a girl's arm off and stuff.
Really messed up.
The arcade machine got banned because it was so gruesome.
They dumbed down,
like the NES version is a little bit more appropriate,
(laughs) even though it's still really messed up.
- [John H.] So Chiller was, to me,
like the anti-Nintendo game 'cause it was so violent.
It definitely was going for that shock value.
That was kind of a theme with several video games.
You know, even going back to the Atari 2600,
you had the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was not allowed
to be sold in several stores.
There's only a few places that offered it.
And the same thing with unlicensed games,
Nintendo just pretty much put the kibosh on that
and just said, "If you carry these games in your store,
then you cannot carry licensed games."
And so that really limited the places
where certain unlicensed games were sold.
- With their marketing,
they tried to make this game, which was all about torture,
you know, seem like it was the worst damn thing.
It was almost as if Satan made it himself.
So there was a real cult following,
trying to find this game and play it.
You know, there was no internet back then.
So, you know, if you wanted to find something,
you really had to go out there and look for it.
And I think Chiller is a good example of that.
- So actually by chance, I have the AGCI,
which is the unlicensed version on the NES
that you usually see as a pretty little fun game there.
- [John H.] Typically, and this is where I found
my copy of Chiller, was actually a rental store,
and the rental store had a copy,
and when they went out of business, they sold it.
And that's how I got my copy.
So rental stores became kind of a place,
especially Ma and Pa Rental Stores,
for these unlicensed games back in the yesteryear.
'Cause, you know, big corporations
aren't going to go hunt down an individual rental store
in a small rural community.
And so that typically was where you found
some of these games.
- For the moment everyone's been waiting for,
my pornographic Panesian games.
I only have two of them.
There are three of them in the set
and it kind of bothers me I don't have the third one,
but I'm working on that and maybe I'll someday get it.
These two games, Peek-A-Boo Poker and Hot Slots,
but in my own sense, I like to call mine Hot Lots
because I have label tare that tore off the S,
so I got the rare variant right here.
But these two games, they're pornographic Nintendo games.
They were unlicensed.
They weren't licensed by Nintendo officially.
Some company made three pornographic Nintendo games
and made them available to Mom and Pop Video Stores
to rent out,
and I think that's the only way
you could actually experience them back in the day.
So nowadays, they're extremely rare.
Like the level of rarity is through the roof
because you can actually couldn't buy them in the store.
So the only way they leaked out into the market
is from clearance bins
of when video stores are shutting down or whatnot.
- [Man On Video] Spudic's Movie Empire.
Nintendo games for $2.50.
We have Sega Genesis games for $2.50.
We got some Super Nintendo games, $2.50.
You can't find these at Walmart.
Spudic's Movie Empire.
- These last couple of years,
I've been buying a bunch of erotic games
because I have basically everything else.
That's interesting for me.
I found Bubble Bath Babes for the Famicom.
I didn't know what it was until I got it,
but just the cover alone made me want to get it.
And from the backside, it looks like a puzzle game
and I love puzzle games, so I got it.
And it's actually a really, really good puzzle game.
I've never seen a puzzle game that has these mechanics.
Exactly like this one.
It's very enjoyable, especially in two player mode as well.
I've played it a lot with friends,
not because of the nudity,
because it's actually a good game as well.
So this is apparently a very rare game today.
I bought it many years ago
and it's quite minty with everything intact.
It's for the Famicom and I gave a hundred dollars for it
many years ago.
- I don't actually know where they were actually in,
like where they were located in the video stores.
I think you had to ask about them.
I think it's a lot of lore at this point.
Nobody really knows the actual story behind it.
I think some of the old timers might know,
but I feel like, well, those guys
don't even really post on forums anymore or anything.
So I think they just probably had them readily available
'cause I definitely read online
that some people remember seeing them at the video store,
like somewhere on the bottom shelf, I think,
like in the video game section.
So I don't think they had it in a porno section
or maybe it was up to the discretion
of whoever ran the store.
Maybe they wanted to put them in the porno section
or maybe they put them in the video game section.
I don't know.
No, I never looked at these games with blacklight,
and I'm afraid to.
Probably these are box protectors.
So if in case anything new happens, there'll be protected.
- [Heidi] Soft porn Adventure by Online Systems.
And this is the prequel to,
or the game that is the whole Leisure Suit Larry Series
is based on, the first Leisure Suit Larry game.
And the woman here, Roberta Williams,
is the woman who wrote the whole game
and she's done like knight quests and a bunch of other games
after that as well.
And it's a brilliant game.
It's so funny.
It's not as-
It's soft, it's soft porn, and it is a floppy disc,
like a real floppy disc.
And I've played this game with so many friends
and everybody has been laughing and having so much fun.
And I bought it.
And a few months later, a friend of mine
who knows that I bought it told me that it was just sold,
a copy on eBay, in not as good condition as mine
and everything like that, and it was 15,000 kroners,
which is approximately, I don't know, $2,000 or something.
- You know, a lot of these unlicensed games
were controversial.
They had adult content.
So you might find some of these unlicensed games
in like an adult section at a video rental store.
You might find them behind the counter.
Even some games were sold with a lock and key,
and you know, going back to the Atari 2600 days.
And so, you know, because they were so recluse
and the distribution of them was so limited,
that as time went along,
not many copies of these games survived.
And so most of these copies of these games
are now in collector's hands.
There's not many out in the wild.
You know, you can't go to many thrift stores
and just find them.
And so finding these controversial games now
is rare and would typically fetch quite a lot.
(gentle serene music)
- As much as game collecting is awesome,
there's downfalls if you get too into it,
kind of really with anything in the world.
Too much of something can be a bad thing, per se,
not specifically speaking about game collecting.
I know personally in my life before,
there's been times where I've maybe spent
a little more money than I would've liked to,
or tried to keep up with other YouTubers,
and that's something that I think also needs to be looked at
is a lot of times, pick up videos or collectors
were kind of known by some people on the outside,
like you guys are just trying to show off.
You're just trying to one up each other.
And as much as I like to back myself away from that,
I have to realize that there is some times
where I have to step back and go,
"The only really reason that I picked that up
is because I wanted to show people.
I don't really have a connection to it.
I don't really feel any nostalgia for it.
And heck I don't even really like the game."
So personally for me,
I feel like I've had to pull back the reins
quite a few times.
If I'm collecting for just some sort of status,
of saying I own this, or I have this,
for me, that's personally unhealthy.
Also with my family as well,
there's been multiple times
where I'm, "Hey, I'm going to go to the swap meet
instead of going out with the family,"
like I know I said I would.
So I stepped back from that and I also tell our people now,
like going forward, be careful
how much you dive deep into this.
You know, make sure you put
the important things in your life
a step above of your hobbies.
- I get this question a lot,
what is the difference between collecting and hoarding?
Honestly, I don't know if there is.
(laughs)
I want there to be.
As a collector, I really do.
- So I think as long as you keep things organized
and you can walk on the floor, it's not hoarding.
It's collecting.
- Yeah, I've been called a hoarder a lot.
I don't think it's the same as the real hoarding.
I mean, it depends what it is, you know,
whatever it is you're filling your house up.
If it's something that makes you happy, I'm all for it.
Yeah, I mean, that's all I say.
Like if it's something you like,
if you want to have it, then it's good.
- The funny thing about collecting
is I know people who have basically the library of Congress
when it comes to books in their living room,
like next to their TV console and stuff like that,
and people will go up to them and say,
"Oh, that's a nice collection of books,"
but they see my pile of video games,
and it's like, "Oh, you're just a hoarder."
It's like where's the divide
that says my collection of video games isn't hoarding,
but somebody who has a bunch of books,
how's it any different?
- I've seen collecting destroy people
where it's gone too far.
Some of the unhealthy choices that comes
with video game collecting: debt,
I've seen a lot of gamers out there collect too much
where it's impacted their relationships with their partners,
where they've gone into debt,
where they couldn't pay their bills.
Space, where it takes up too much space
and then that becomes a problem.
It impacts their day-to-day living,
which then, you know, impacts your mental health.
- The most important aspect of being a person
is the relationships we have with people.
And unfortunately, collecting,
there's a dark side where it can interrupt relationships,
whether friendships.
I've known of people who fought
over games that they couldn't get,
or sweeping in and taking something
that someone else wanted, and then it causes a rift,
or I've known of marriages that have fallen apart
because people are spending too much
or hiding the purchases, hiding how much they're spending
from their husband or wife.
- So I have family overseas that, you know, again,
it's a very cultural thing like I said earlier.
It's very American to collect stuff
in the way that we collect it,
and they just don't get it, right?
It's very different, but again,
it's because it's not part of their culture.
So I totally understand where people are coming from
where they don't get it.
But for us, it's just a representation
of what we grew up with and capturing that.
- Having a game collection,
I don't want to say necessarily
that it's like a taboo in Japan.
It kind of goes along with that sort of Otaku culture,
I guess, which is like obsessive fandom.
So some people are really obsessed with manga, for example,
so they'll have huge collections of manga or figures
or something like that.
It's not necessarily frowned upon,
but I think most people do tend
to keep things like that personal,
unless you're sharing it with a group of friends
and you're all into the same thing.
It's not necessarily something that you're like, you know,
making this big public thing about you.
So I think, for example,
like there are less Japanese gaming YouTubers
that the focus of their channel is they're game collecting.
Like if you go and watch a lot of Japanese YouTube gaming,
it focuses a lot more on gameplay,
showing expertise in gameplay and things like that.
Whereas it's way more commonplace
for North American channels,
collecting is a big part of that.
So doing pickups videos and doing room tours
and then showing off your collection and things like that,
that is far less common on Japanese Gaming YouTube.
Not so much that there's a stigma attached to it,
but I think generally people are just more personal
about that kind of thing here.
- Are there positive things about collecting?
Absolutely.
You know, with my mental health background,
collecting can give you an outlet.
I've seen a lot of people use collecting
as a healthy outlet for stress.
You know, they might have a day job that's really stressful.
I know my previous journey with jobs,
I've had stressful jobs before,
and I used collecting as a healthy outlet
to kind of relieve that stress.
Playing games or collecting games
or even just having conversations about collecting
with others has been really healthy.
You definitely have to remember balance in your life
and knowing what's best for you,
knowing what's best for your family,
and ultimately in the end of the day,
are you having fun doing it,
are you still enjoying the hobby,
are you still have finding that passion about collecting
or talking about something?
You know, that's really the determining factor
of continuing with it.
- My husband and I actually met in 2014,
right after I got my first N64.
I bought an N64.
And then about two weeks later, I met him,
and I noticed on his Instagram he had pictures
of game collection and it was like half of this.
I'm just going to say that, okay.
We've collected a lot since we've been married together.
But we really, when I first saw that,
I was like, okay, this guy like collects retro games too.
This is really cool.
He likes to play games.
He's a video gamer.
But then diving into it more,
I really found out that he was a collector
and there was a whole world that I didn't even know about
of retro gaming that I never knew would be a thing
because of the fact that, you know,
he was already involved in it
and already in the retro community
and already getting those games.
So he really introduced me to the retro world
after we got married, you know.
We walked down the aisle to a Legend of Zelda song,
and our whole entire reception and everything we had,
video game music.
Like we just love it.
It's been a bit huge part of our relationship.
We had an N64 at our wedding.
So it's always been a really cool thing for us
to kind of do and play.
These are my husband's (laughs)
from when he was a child.
They're not from right now.
They are Super Mario.
I think Super Mario 3 little undies, and I love them.
We found them when we were cleaning,
the last time we were cleaning up the game room,
and I was like, "Okay, we're putting these on the wall."
So these hang on our wall.
So we're really not too sure where these came from.
They were his, but they just all of a sudden
appeared in a box.
So we think that he just put them
in his box of collectibles when he was 10 or 11 years old.
'Cause these, you know, obviously would probably fit
a seven to 10 year old on figuring.
And so we figured that he just put them in the box
with all his little collectibles
'cause he did have a lot of collectible figurines
and all of these video games.
And so they've just lasted until then.
And they're actually in really good shape
and everyone's always like, oh, that's gross.
But you know, you wash underwear
and you wear it all the time, so why not?
And obviously, they're starting to wear out a little bit,
but other than that, they're pretty, pretty cute
and something that's really rare in a collection
that a lot of people don't have.
They don't have underwear on their wall (laughs)
for video game collecting.
If my husband one day walked away
from the retro video game world,
I would be so excited
because I would get all these video games.
I'd be like, "Listen, I don't know
how we're going to do this anymore."
It would depend on how much he walked away from.
But you know, if he walked away from it and said,
"I don't want to see a retro video game
for the rest of my life,"
we would probably have a bigger issue than, you know,
than just our collection
because there's no way I'd think I could be with somebody
who could not be into video games or support somebody
who likes something, you know.
It's a big thing to be supportive of each other
and have those connections with something,
whether it's just one thing or 10 things.
And that is one of the things that we have is retro gaming.
And we love it together and that in itself
makes us stronger.
- My wife had cancer.
And so it was like this crossroads
of really needing something to distract myself
from that part of my life
and wanting to get into something new.
So I basically started liquidating my toys and comics
and started funneling it in mass
into a video game collection.
My wife passed away of stage four breast cancer,
and I was her primary caretaker for that entire journey,
and that was about four years.
But when she was diagnosed terminal,
which means like no chance of ultimate survival,
she wouldn't be able to be cured at that point,
then her life insurance policy unexpectedly paid out.
So we did lots of responsible adult things
with most of that money,
but then afterwards she had some leftover
and she came to me and she said, "Hey, you know,
you stuck through me with this
and you take care of me and I love you.
I'd love to do something for you.
What do you want?"
This was the copy of Stadium Events that my wife bought me
when we discovered that she was sick.
It's one of my favorite pieces,
and not because of the monetary value necessarily
as much as the intrinsic sentimental value.
It means a lot to me.
So I started collecting about five years ago,
five or six years ago.
And it did transform over time,
and I think any hobby does that.
And I do think it's very important to set goals,
especially when you starting out
because you don't get a collection like this immediately,
right?
So you start, you know,
start with very achievable goals
and then you kind of get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And so I started out collecting games
and I just had decided that when I started,
I had maybe a shoe box collection of, you know,
10 or 15 Super Nintendo games.
And I had decided that, okay, well I want to get
every Super Nintendo game ever made or every North American
or every English Super Nintendo game ever made.
So I ended up getting the whole Super Nintendo set
in two and a half months, (chuckles)
which is bonkers.
And then I was, kind of, set to set
and I've done 11 or 12 sets now, full sets.
Part of collecting that I really love is the chase.
Not just the, oh yeah, I have this artifact
from my childhood or whatever.
Some of these things, definitely not from my childhood,
but the chase is really important to me.
And so I had gotten to the point
where I started to get bored with games, right,
because retail games are expensive, but not difficult.
Really your only gate is monetary, right?
Like with the advent of eBay and different Facebook groups
and all that kind of stuff,
you can essentially buy as fast as you can afford to
for most things.
I really started to feel a need to try to hunt things
that were more and more difficult.
So one of the things that I collect
is internal Nintendo awards.
So awards that were given to employees for various reasons.
This one is absolutely my favorite.
This is a 20 year Nintendo Service Award.
So an employee would have to be with Nintendo
for 20 years before receiving them.
Now they don't even give them these.
They give them these block, like crystal block numbers.
So even if you were there for 20 years now,
you don't get one of these statues.
This guy is solid bronze and marble.
And so he is very, very heavy,
and he's actually made by the same company
that makes the Oscars.
So he's very, very high quality
and extremely challenging to find
because, generally, if someone is with Nintendo
for 20 years, they have very fond memories of that.
So finding someone who is willing to even part with one,
or even willing to talk to you about it is very challenging.
So I'm super happy to have this,
but yeah, he's my favorite.
I like to say that if something is for sale,
I'm not interested.
Like that's the level of rarity
that I generally look for at this point.
So the things that I'm hunting for,
a lot of times I don't know that I'm even looking for them,
you know, because I am doing things
where I am discovering that things exist
as I'm finding them.
That happens a lot with,
especially with the original art pieces,
like people ask me what my holy grail is
and I just say, well, it's the next thing,
it's the next piece.
And I don't even know what that is yet.
This jacket actually started my obsession
with Nintendo Game Play Counselors.
- You're going to come across this big sea serpent.
(electronic game music)
- You'll get to a place
where there's this big skullhead guy.
It looks kind of like something from Star Wars.
- [Stephan] If you look at the very first page
of the first issue of Nintendo Power,
there is an ad for the Nintendo Power Line,
the tip line that you would call
to talk to a Game Play Counselor.
And there were three actors, I'm assuming,
wearing these gray jackets.
And so I was curious as to whether or not
those jackets actually existed.
And I was eventually able to find them.
It turns out that these gray Samus jackets
were only given to the first 40 or so
Nintendo Game Play Counselors.
And then afterwards, they were, you know, subsequent hires
were then able to sort of pick their own jacket,
pick their own design.
So this whole case is full of original clay MCATs
from Nintendo Power Magazine in the early run
of Nintendo Power, like say the first 12 issues or so.
A lot of them weren't drawn covers.
They were sculpted covers.
So they would have someone sculpt these maquettes
and then photograph them for the covers.
So you can see in here, they all sort of correspond-
They have the corresponding cover paired with them.
So there's the shoes from the Track & Field II cover.
Here's the Mario Paint Mario, the Mario 3 Mario,
Wily and Mega Man from the Mega man 2 cover
and the kind of mechanical robot from Super C.
And these are all partially polymer clay,
but then also kitbashes.
If you look at the underside of Wily,
you'll see a lot of Gundam parts and stuff like that,
that they just sort of cobbled together.
The shoes for Track& Field II
are just in a pair of Converse that they glued things to.
And one thing that I love about these
is that they were modeled very intentionally.
They were sculpted with just the angle
that the photographer was going to shoot them at in mind.
So if you turn around this Mario Paint Mario,
he is this like horror show (inaudible) monstrosity
made of Popsicle sticks.
And I just think it's funny to me
that they were so cognizant
of like just what the photographer was going to shoot,
that they saved time and money
by not sculpting the front of him.
So this is definitely one of my favorite
and also one of my rarest signs in the collection.
This is a fiber-optic Nintendo Power Glove sign.
This is from CES 1990, we think.
It was made for a single trade show.
They've made two of them in this size.
We did also find the third one
in like a smaller desktop size.
But if you want these big three by three signs,
there's only two of them.
And these were found in a storage locker in Arizona,
and they were actually on Craigslist forever
and no one knew what they were
and nobody thought that they were legitimate.
They thought someone had made them,
like a custom thing.
It wasn't until someone actually drove out there
and pick them up and then did some research
to find out that they were from the Mattel booth
at CES in 1990.
So as far as we know from photos and accounts
from actually the people who made these signs,
there are two of them.
This is one example.
And the other one actually is owned by Deniz Kahn.
- The guy who actually had these,
I think he worked at Mattel.
He had both, and he was only selling one.
And he said, I got to him and I said,
"Well, you know, whatever, it'll take, I'll figure it out."
And we were trying to work it out.
But then he said, "I'm only interested in trading
for other fiber signs."
And I said, "Well, I don't have any fiber signs to trade."
So Stephan did.
And so he got the one and I was so pissed off
and I said, I harassed the guy,
I said that, "If you ever sell the other one, let me know."
Well, he let Stephan know and Stephan got the other one
and then he was gracious enough to let me know
when that happened.
So now we both have the two that are out there,
which is a pretty special.
It's a really neat sign
and it's a cool piece of history
promoting something that was just so bad.
- So I've talked a little bit about how difficult it is
to find any art from Nintendo Power at all,
but there are sort of sublevels of difficulty there
as well.
One of the most notoriously difficult things to find
is reader submitted art,
and generally they would do that
by sending in art on the front of envelopes,
and because they were children
and Nintendo wants to protect privacy and all that,
generally these were either destroyed
or kept at Nintendo essentially forever.
I was fortunate enough to not only find envelope art,
but an entire set of envelope art.
So this is every piece of envelope art
that was published in this issue of Nintendo Power.
And I mean, just the likelihood of finding a piece
of envelope art is crazy,
and then finding a whole set of it was just otherworldly.
Rarity is, first of all, it's a really subjective thing
to talk about,
especially when you're talking about value of things,
because at the very rare end
where you're talking about one of a kind
or just a couple of something in existence,
it's very difficult to talk about value
because sometimes when you're asking me about an item,
well, the first time that it was ever sold
was when I bought it.
So I can't really put a price tag on something,
or sometimes I won't exactly know how to evaluate something
until someone comes to me and asks to buy it.
So I have, certainly, I have standing offers on a few things
that previously I wouldn't have known how to evaluate them
because I was the first one to buy them.
But something like my Super Metroid strategy guide cover,
I have the original painting for that.
I have a standing offer for $75,000 on that piece.
Very much, things are only worth
what someone will pay for it.
So oftentimes, again,
especially when you're talking about things
that sell so infrequently that I can't evaluate them.
That's the only way that I would ever know
how much something is worth is when someone asks
to buy it from me,
which almost is always the answer is almost always no.
(upbeat electronic music)
- The infamous Cardi B game that never existed (chuckles)
probably for a good reason.
I was going to hack this as dance aerobics,
and I was going to put her in dance aerobics,
which is a power pad game, just for fun, just to be silly.
But I was like, I gave up about halfway through
or part way through anyway.
It's again, it's a long process to hack these video games.
I figured if Cardi B was going to be in a Nintendo game,
it'd be an LJN game.
(laughs)
It's pretty silly all the same.
(upbeat electronic music continues)
- So Outback Joey was part of-
it's tactically doesn't work on a Sega Genesis.
You actually need the Heartbeat System controllers.
You can plug it into a Sega Genesis,
but you have to have these specific,
exclusive to this Heartbeat System
to make it actually work and play.
And so it's really bizarre, very, very rare game.
And the other thing is the manual.
So I do have the manual to it,
which is incredibly difficult to get as well.
(upbeat electronic music continues)
- So this is your famous McDonald's DSi.
Nintendo made these for McDonald's employees
to teach them how to make their burger.
All of them are used, probably smell like burgers,
and there are probably around a thousand made.
(upbeat electronic music continues)
- Slightly before The Nerd started,
I began selling off a lot of my games, you know.
A lot of it was, I just needed the money.
So I sold Contra for like $7
just so I could buy a sandwich, you know,
so I'll never remember what that sandwich was,
but I'll always remember Contra.