AdamW

Well, seems like one of those games that won't necessarily have a huge premium sealed vs CIB. They're expensive games cib mainly for people who actually want to play them (and, I guess, aren't into modding). Not sure they're gonna be high-roller sealed collector targets really. Nice grab though!

Yeah, I'd say include the games that were excluded. Let people make their own judgments about what specific sub-sectors are behaving in different ways for whatever reasons. It's hard to justify for e.g. including a Majesco print of Castlevania IV but leaving out the Majesco Mega Man X. Thanks again for the data, though! It's super interesting.

Of course, the cynical take on that is that if a grading company will stick it in a case, someone will buy it, whether they were right or not...

Not really, there are more experienced folks than me on the forum, I think - maybe ask @Shmup? I buy off YAJ and Mercari via buyee/zenmarket, I only buy things specifically listed as "unopened" from sellers with good feedback (I specifically look out for negative feedback saying an "unopened" item was opened), and with at least decent pictures. There are some sellers I specifically avoid, I don't trust starplatinum0119, I'm a bit dubious about carseat539, I'm kinda on the fence about tskdv09048 - they have some tempting stuff and a lot of good feedback, but some worrying feedback too. Other people might have their own lists of good/bad sellers, heh. With any unsealed game you're still always running a risk that it might have been opened, that is just a chance you kinda have to take, honestly. If I got one like that I'd probably just take the L rather than go through the hassle of trying to return it through a proxy, unless it was real expensive. I did get an "unopened" Pokemon Red back in January that's clearly been opened, but fortunately at that time it was only like $80 so not a big deal The hinges on all of these ones look pretty good to me, happily. I may send them in to VGA at some point, I never graded anything yet but for the specific case of getting some kind of 'authentication' that they're unopened it seems maybe worthwhile. If you're buying cart-only / CIB I'd just look out for high feedback and good prices, honestly. I haven't had any problems with those kinda purchases myself. It's definitely worth learning how to search sold listings on YAJ to get an idea of reasonable prices.

Uh, I mean, this just seems unnecessarily combative. I think we just have different perspectives. The games I'm mainly interested in are generally not worth more than a handful of bucks cart-only, so I didn't immediately think of your scam angle. Obviously you're mainly interested in different games, so it seemed more obvious to you. In the end we didn't really disagree about anything except how to characterize the number of games where this would be a concern, which I think again is a question of perspective more than anything. As I said, if you're buying one of those, yeah, it'd be something to think about. But since we don't really know for sure whether anyone is trying that, or how good VGA or WATA are at knowing whether a box has been opened, it's all speculation in the end.

I don't quite really see the angle there, to be honest. There aren't that many JP games for which the cart/manual are worth more than a few bucks. So if you have an actual unopened copy, why take the risk of opening it to take out the very cheap innards versus just grading it as-is? What does it get you? I guess maybe if I was looking at a game that's so rare the cart/manual are actually worth like a hundred bucks or more I might worry about it, but only then... Something I see as slightly more likely is that a very careful JP gamer/collector might have opened their copy carefully and kept it in pristine shape. The kinda person you get those super clean CIBs with just a slit in the shrinkwrap from. But there aren't gonna be too many of those around, really. Most "unopened" copies you can buy are genuinely just old store dead stock or something.

Oh, VGA has already been doing it for ages. Three sold at certifiedlink today - a Super Mario USA went for over $1k. I don't really know what you mean by "messed up"? I mean, the number grade will just reflect the box condition. If it's in bad shape it'll get a bad grade. The biggest potential issue is that some copies which were actually carefully opened get graded as unopened. But hey, that's not really *so* different from the risk of reseals getting graded as legit. Either you trust the graders to be able to tell, or you don't, in the end... If you send VGA a box they think has been opened but they think the contents are unused, they will offer to grade it as Qualified, I believe. WATA would offer to grade such a copy as CIB I guess.

VGA and WATA claim to be able to reliably tell if the box has ever been opened by carefully examining the hinges where the box opens. Usually when you open a cardboard box, it'll cause wear patterns to appear on those hinges. If VGA grades a cardboard box game that was sold unsealed without a Q, it means they think it is unopened. I'm not 100% sold that this is foolproof, honestly...I think if you open a box very carefully with a thin flat tool you can avoid or at least seriously minimize those wear patterns. But it's unlikely to be the case that someone would've done that with a 30 year old video game. Japanese sellers/collectors do draw the same distinction, if you pay attention. If they list as "unused" they're not necessarily claiming the box is unopened, just that the contents are unused. If they list as "unopened" that's really a claim that the box has not been opened.

Big order of unopened stuff came in from Japan...FDS games are (sticker) sealed. Now I just wait for JP prices to catch up with US and I can call the private island brokerage!

Well, I've seen similar patterns there with Pokemon too. It doesn't seem that unusual if you think about it... Before release day, for a game they think will be popular, they'll print a lot of copies. For instance with Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen I'm pretty sure they printed a million copies of each in the first batch (this is based on serial numbers from the player's guide offers). Ideally, if you're Nintendo, you probably want to print enough to satisfy at least the first couple of months of demand, so you don't have to run back and rush print / ship more - but you don't want to print too many and have them lying around taking up inventory space. So, if you got it right, it kinda makes sense for later print runs to be much shorter. Most games sell most of their copies shortly after release. After that, you're usually dealing with a kinda 'long tail' scenario where you'll be selling a few thousand more copies, not a few hundred thousand more in a short period of time. To go back to the FireRed/LeafGreen example - based on my theory, the second and third print runs of each corrected errors on the box, happened before or right around release day, and consisted of 300,000 copies each. Then after that, the runs of the fourth print - the print with no wireless adapter in the box, but not yet player's choice - were smaller again; I see runs of 100,000, 40,000, 7,000 and even 3,000 copies. Similarly with the fifth print (the main Player's Choice print) - I see a ton of small runs of that print. I don't necessarily have records of all the 'splits' I use to calculate this, but there seem to be runs as small as 9,000 copies, 5,000 copies, 2,000 copies(!), 3,000 copies... Later prints of the Gen I games are similar. There are a ton of recorded date codes for the black-ESRB prints of Red, Blue and Yellow, even though they're the least common prints overall. This also fits the pattern of later prints being done in much smaller numbers, but quite frequently. I guess Nintendo just monitored reseller demand for the titles and fit in a little run of the games they needed more copies of whenever the schedule allowed for it, or something.

I kinda disagree on that. For instance, there are three date codes for white-ESRB Pokemon Yellow boxes, but those boxes are identical in all other regards. Nothing at all differs between them but the date code. So I don't see that the date code can indicate anything other than the date the box was printed. I don't see any problem with the notion they could've printed hundreds of thousands or even millions of boxes on a single day. They're using commercial printing equipment, not an HP Inkjet! Remember, major newspapers used to routinely print millions of copies every morning...

Unopened FF 1 does not come up much even on japanese sites. I'd expect it to go over $500 for a plausible copy from a seller with cred (sale prices of "unopened" copies vary a lot depending on how much of a good reputation the seller has, and how plausibly unopened the box looks...)

All of this: "We have to remember that all VGA games graded under 95 and over 70 are in "near-mint" range (from EX+/NM to NM/M). In practice, this means that over 80% of VGA games on the market are in the near-mint range *officially*—as you never really see a 95 or 100 VGA at market (and if you do, it's irrelevant to anyone but a millionaire) and candidly VGA games 70 and below often aren't at market either (and of those that are, maybe 90% are 70 or 60, which are both still EX or EX+). Meanwhile, do the math: any WATA game under a 9.0 is *not* in the near-mint range definitionally—per WATA partner Heritage Auctions' official assessment—and even some of the 9.0 and 9.2 WATA boxes are *not* in the near-mint range because they have B+ seals" That whole blob seemed to be about the words "near mint"...

@SethAI'm not sure a lot of people place as much weight on the words "near mint" as you do. I personally just look at the numbers. It doesn't mean anything much to me what range VGA or WATA choose to describe as "near mint", I'm much more interested in "what an 80 looks like", "what an 85+ looks like", "what a 9.2 looks like" etc. Now when two 9.6s don't look anything like each other and have significantly different amounts of dead flies trapped in the case, that starts to be a problem...:D

Nobody is sending anything to P1 they seem sketch as hell, claiming an address in the U.S. but only one guy on eBay in Brazil has significant stock of P1 graded games (which seem to be graded extremely generously, and haphazardly). I haven't seen a single person in any of the usual places say they're sending games to P1.

Finally got around to adding the contents for Ruby and Sapphire. Just need to get a minute to do Gold and Silver now and it'll be done...

Still, if a game is rare enough that an 8.5 of it is worth a ton of money, if a 9.8 of it surfaced, you can bet it'd be worth an even larger ton of money...

"with an exception for games that are genuinely rare in any kind of decent condition" It was indeed a gross simplification, for someone who's new to the market. I didn't want to snow them under in detail.

Having said all that - an 8.5 is almost always going to be worth a lot less than a 9.8. That's a very big difference. 8.5 is not that great of a grade for games in reasonable supply, which includes the most 'buzzy' games at present like your Marios and Pokemons and Final Fantasys; I'd guess a lot of people wouldn't be totally happy with anything under a 9.2. An 8.5 is usually going to have at least one fairly visible imperfection. (As @SethA points out, for games which are genuinely rare, you'd have to adjust your condition expectations downwards). Keeping the overall uncertainty in mind, and with an exception for games that are genuinely rare in any kind of decent condition, on the whole I'd expect an 8.5 to typically be worth substantially less than 40% of a 9.8. Maybe more like 10-30%. [edited to cover seth's point about less common games]

It's much harder with games, for a few reasons which all boil down to the same reason: lots of uncertainty. Notably: 1. Seven figure prices for games are entirely new within the last few months. Six figure prices are new for all but, like, two games. Even five figure prices are new for the vast majority of games that are currently selling in that range. There's no established pricing history here. Nobody's an expert on these numbers. Rich people are picking prices out of hats. 2. We don't have population reports for games. Even if we did, they would come with substantial uncertainty attached, because grading is nowhere near as pervasive for games as it is for comics or cards. You can't assume that more or less all high quality copies of a game will have been graded by now. So even if you had pop reports from both major graders for a game, you couldn't be really sure how many more high quality copies might still be out there. But we don't even have that, so it's hard to price an 8.5 against a 9.8 or whatever for any game, because we don't really have any solid idea how many of each are out there. 3. Our knowledge of a lot of important information about games isn't really complete, and a lot of buyers don't even seem to be operating on the best information that's available. Games frequently have complex production histories that the market clearly cares about - check the price of "Red text" Pokemon Blue vs. a "black ESRB" copy, or "Left Bros." SMB3, or sticker sealed or hangtab SMB vs. an oval seal copy, or "realistic violence" FFVII vs. "misprint" vs. the other prints - but we definitely do not know a lot of it for a lot of games. It's been pretty well researched for the games I mentioned and some others, but at the same time, people are throwing large sums of money at games for which the print history hasn't really been established very well. You really can't operate in the game market as if it were a market that, uh...makes sense and is full of informed participants who agree on the fundamentals, because it kinda isn't. It is a more immature market than that. A lot of stuff is up in the air.

hah, I hadn't noticed that about the barcode on the back of the manual. Thanks!

hmm, Metroid and Zelda 2 - which obviously came out a little later - seem to only have 'white logo' prints. Which kinda implies the 'yellow logo' print may be the earlier one, I guess.

Hey folks! Yeah, just me being nerdy about prints again. I noticed something interesting about the original Legend of Zelda (then subtitled "The Hyrule Fantasy") for the Famicom Disk System today: there seem to be two prints of it. On one, the "FAMICOM DISK SYSTEM" logo at front top left of the cover/manual is yellow; on the the other, it's white. There also appear to be two variants of the disk label, one with the katakana system logo ("ファミリーコンピュータ ディスクシステム") in yellow, one with it in white (confusing things a bit, there seems to have been a sheet of stickers included with the game, including replacement disk labels; the replacement labels on the sticker sheet seem to have the logo in yellow even on copies of the game where the original disk label has it in white). "Yellow" print: "White" print: I've been trying to figure out an ordering for these two prints based on the disk serial numbers, using @0xDEAFC0DE's theory from However, it's a bit unclear so far. I went through 15 pages of sold listings on YAJ, but the codes are frequently not visible or only partially visible in the pictures. These are the lists I wound up with: * white logo: L265K?? J026104(?) J??6?? K016J16(?) * yellow logo: K75J11 H236G07 K??6?? L016K10 A147L15 a ? in the code means I couldn't read that character, a (?) at the end means the code was pretty fuzzy and I'm not 100% sure of it. We have two codes from 1985, it looks like, one per print. There's substantial overlap in the middle of 1986 - white logo copies apparently from October, November and December 1986, and yellow logo copies apparently from August, November and December. And there's a yellow logo copy with a disk from January 1987, though that copy wasn't very 'complete' which makes me suspicious it may be a Frankenstein. More data would help establish which are likely outliers, but that's all the data I got. So, does anyone have any knowledge/ideas on this? Thanks!

I ran across another 'anomalous' Zelda: https://www.catawiki.com/en/l/34555665-nintendo-famicom-disk-system-2-zelda-games-both-complete-with-unused-stickers-2-in-original-box the code is K75J11. So if our theory is true they added the 0 later on November 7th, any time on November 8th, or sometime on November 9th.

bit of a nothingburger update overall, but I find it pretty interesting that it includes a quote from HA.