Seth

GPX, I suspect you're right. I collect Intellivision, Atari, and (primarily) NES, and I decided a while ago to be a "three-figure" collector—I wanted to prove to myself, if only to myself, that it's still possible to get amazing NES games in very good grades without ever paying even $1,000. So far I can tell you... it's going well. This really *doesn't* have to be the four- or five- or six- or seven-figure hobby it's become, it just takes some careful research and not obsessing over 9.8/A++ grades. That said, I do own games that could have been in Friday's Heritage signature auction pretty easily, that I purchased in the last year and were under $1,000. It's doable, and for me it feels like an act of resistance, I guess. I know the folks here are in most instances very serious gamers. Sometimes, like OptOut, I guess I find myself just wanting to fume about the others—the speculators, investors, flippers, and even the 10% collectors—out loud.

I edited my comment with a postscript as you were posting your follow-up, as I realized that despite quoting me verbatim and then using the word "you" throughout, you might have been speaking of others. But the point stands that when we confront these investors pretending to be collectors we need to be certain they understand much more about (say) the NES than Contra and SMB3.

When a self-described hardcore retro gamer brags about their familiarity with Contra and Super Mario Bros. 3 it sounds a little to me like Mark Zuckerberg trying to convince the world he's a person with real feelings because he likes smoking brisket and ribs. Talk to me about Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Or Over Horizon. Or Zombie Nation. Totally Rad and Arkista's Ring. Crisis Force, Recca, and Moon Crystal. The Legend of Prince Valiant, Ring King, Boulder Dash, Nightshade, Shadow of the Ninja, Mighty Final Fight. The Lone Ranger and Cowboy Kid. Tell me about the first time you beat Mappy-Land or Dragon Spirit, tell me if your favorite NES pet is the dog from Conquest of the Crystal Palace or David Crane's Blob. Tell me you beat Fester's Quest without a Game Genie or Battle of Olympus because you accidentally fell into the right pit without a Walkthrough. I want to hear about Eliminator Boat Duel, your favorite piece in Archon, and which genre-switcher you prefer: WURM or Golgo 13. Does Baseball Stars II rank ahead of Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball on your mental ranking of all NES baseball games? Are you a Lunar Pool man, or Side Pocket? R.C. Pro Am I or II? Tecmo World Wrestling or Pro Wrestling? The Black Bass or The Blue Marlin? I want you to explain which Mega Man echo, The Krion Conquest or Whomp 'Em, you prefer. Justify The Legend of Zelda getting the press Crystalis never did, or Life Force rather than Gun-Nac, Zanac, Image Fight, Gun.Smoke, Burai Fighter, or S.C.A.T. Who in their right mind prefers Ikari Warriors to Guerilla War, or Ninja Gaiden to Vice: Project Doom, or (for that matter) the original Super Mario Bros. to Felix the Cat, Bucky O'Hare, Little Samson, or Clash at Demonhead? You gotta be kidding me with this Konami Code nonsense. And Super Mario Bros. has been ranked the #1 NES game for 30 years. That's like saying George Washington is your favorite U.S. president. You could literally be an alien wearing human skin to try to "pass" for all I know. Voight-Kampff test failed. S. PS: In the event the "you" you used throughout wasn't me but overseas millionaires, (a) the "hobby" I was referring to was collecting sealed and graded games (not collecting games generally, which is indeed a very old hobby), and (b) gamers need to have gamer-type conversations, not be dragged into rehashing old discourse about two of the best-known NES games. There are still lost classics that need their day—I mentioned many above.

I can't speak for others but I am a collector only—I don't sell games and I don't buy them as investments. And I'll only buy games I've played and loved. My collection is not massive but it is also not small. I play retro games regularly; this week I've been replaying Mappy-Land (NES), which I think is a criminally underrated retro game title for 1,000 reasons I could enumerate, and last week it was Low G Man (NES), and next week it will be something else. I don't know how many collectors like me are in this market, but I agree the number is low. And no, I'm not counting those who sell 90% of what they buy and keep 10%. Absolutely those are collectors, and they may have loved gaming in an intimate way at some point in their lives, but you can't build a hobby on people who participate in it with only 10% of their activities and who spend 95% of their time talking about video games talking about (a) selling them, or (b) investing in them with an eye toward selling to non-gamer millionaires at home and abroad. Right now the sealed and graded collecting market is hollow; it's essentially a shell. There's a high-end market for a very, very small selection of titles that are either bought by resellers to be sold to millionaires or bought by millionaires via proxies or procurers on the front end. Sometimes the resellers sell to one another because one reseller thinks they can sell an item for more than the other reseller can. Items at auction usually get under 10 bids; it's remarkable if an item gets more than 10. Meanwhile, the actually rare games for any system are ignored because most of those in the market don't know (or if they know don't care) which games they are; and all of the underrated games for a system are ignored because neither the millionaires nor their proxies have ever heard of them. Metal Storm is the #5 Underrated game in the entire NES library, according to 100+ industry experts (all passionate gamers), but as Jonebone just pointed out it was basically ignored in the Heritage auction yesterday. Every once in a while you'll get a reseller like David Robbins who buys a more obscure NES game like Renegade (actually overrated and widely disliked; it's the #31 worst game on the console, per 50+ experts) for $1,500 in sub-investment grade and then puts it on eBay for $22,000, but this has nothing to do with understanding the NES, underrated retro games, or titles that actually should be going for reasonable three-figure prices (the market value of a near-mint Renegade for the NES, based on its #187 Scarcity and #155 Underrated rankings at RETRO—as with its worst-games standing, taken from data offered by 150+ experts and industry outlets and two dozen public markets—is approximately $500). The point in these instances is to hype the game sufficiently in the eyes of overseas buyers so that someone in Saudi Arabia or China or Japan will break down and stupidly buy this conspicuously bad NES game for $8,000. Meanwhile, you can get an infinitely better game (Dragon Spirit: The New Legend) at auction for about $400 in near-mint grade, or Low G Man for $350, or Kings of the Beach for $300. All much better games than Renegade—more scarce, more respected. So the market is hollow because it has no 50%-of-the-time-plus collectors in it who have an emotional attachment to the majority of the activities they're participating in in the hobby. The way to fix this would be for folks who claim to want to advance the hobby to purchase rare and underrated games for each console and deliberately sell them for three figures at narrow margins in order to bring real collectors and gamers of modest means into the hobby. Once you get people into the hobby and make it broad rather than narrow and deep rather than shallow, interest will ultimately be there domestically for mid- and even high-end items rather than having to run overseas or to other resellers. That well will dry up soon. This could be a great hobby if it wasn't largely the province of rapacious robber barons. S.

Jonebone nailed it. I think everything he says here is correct. The community is still too small to absorb this many large, highish-end auctions in such a short while (along with the perpetual low-level hum of activity on eBay, Mercari, and the double-digit number of indie video game dealers listed at RETRO). I think the size and pace of auctions is likely to continue, however, especially with Hake's starting to sell video games, Heritage increasing its pace of video game auctions as Jonebone said, CGC coming online, and the possibility (however remote) that we will start seeing a few more items at market that were graded by P1, UKG, IGS, CAS, VGG, or RGS because resellers are fed up with the WATA and VGA wait-times and generally poor customer service. Not to mention that pop reports—which benefit buyers much more than sellers, whatever sellers say—will, when they come, adjust various game prices in a way that offers a chance of actually expanding the hobby to more than just those who can afford to pay four or five figures.

Yeah, when the buyer at an auction is a friend of the auction house owner in the midst of a national scandal about auction house owners being corrupt (see the Jobst video about James Halperin and Heritage), and the game the auction house owner's friend buys sets a world record and does bonzo PR for the auction house despite having a massive rip on the front of its seal... that's, uh, very bad.

And I'll say again that the millionaires and billionaires bidding on these items could have saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars if they had just spent five bucks on this market research. {shaking my head}

Uh... it's not on a $10 million pace. I think it's more likely this auction is viewed as a disappointment and less successful than the first one. Things could turn around, but right now it's not looking good. My take (perhaps an odd one): I think they would have made more money without a live auctioneer, i.e. if this had been conducted in a fashion similar to the weeklies. (Only caveat here would be if they had high-end bidders only able to work by phone, but obviously there are ways around that.)

Do you mean VGA? This whole thread is about WATA lying about its wait times and charging people for services it has no intention to provide or ability to provide. VGA has a delay but it doesn't seem like it was the focus here.

VGA is the better company by far. Far older, more respected, more competent and professional in what they do. But WATA games sell for more than VGA games, like for like—about 25% to 75% more—because they're backed by a massive market-manipulation campaign and a legion of fanboys who have convinced everyone that WATA is amazing contrary to the tsunami of evidence confirming otherwise. This fanboy campaign was explicitly designed to raise prices for WATA games because all of these fanboys are also investors and resellers. They urge people, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, to "cross over" their VGA grades to WATA grades because they inexplicably think that everyone is a reseller like they are; they do not contemplate that as this hobby grows it is mostly going to be populated by actual collectors who have every conceivable reason in the world to prefer VGA-graded games. If you are an actual collector, buy VGA games—they're less expensive (again, like for like) and more likely to have been graded accurately. The cases are usually crystal-clear and feature the games rather than WATA's branding. They're a good storage and display size. If you are an investor and/or reseller, go with WATA in the short term because your games will sell for more. (Disclaimer: I own both WATA and VGA games, approximately 4 WATA games for every 1 VGA game, though since the recent WATA scandals I have turned more toward VGA games and will continue to do so.) I have no idea what WATA's long-term future looks like. The company is mismanaged and unethical and has terrible quality control. Their customer service is non-existent; they charge customers for services they can't possibly provide (making you pay for a promised turnaround that they can't come within 1,000 miles of honoring, but they'll never refund you); their cases are filled with scuffs and bubbles and human/dog hair; their grading accuracy varies wildly; they promised population reports and a game-scanning app "within a month" 3 years ago (I have the video of company president Deniz Kahn saying this at a convention) but never released them; they have managed to get the entire gaming world to hate them because they were caught faking appraisals on television (three times, actually) and letting their executive class (in at least two systemic instances) grade their own games with WATA contrary to explicit company policy; and much more. Candidly, as a journalist and market watcher I struggle to think of anything—literally anything—the company does well or honorably besides hype itself and get self-interested shills to hype it. In no other industry would a company like WATA even continue to exist; but because they're making a small group of rich men a lot of money, and because collectibles are basically unregulated and investors act like it's the Wild Wild West and no moral compass is necessary, they continue to have defenders. My two cents as a video game collector and video game journalist.

Oh, got it. Missed the tone on that one. Agree 100% about the folks on Reddit—they decided (via wishcasting) that Karl was some sort of anti-graded-collecting warrior-zealot when I don't think that's what the evidence shows.

That's interesting. I didn't get the sense from either the video or any of his follow-up interviews that Karl cared about "tanking the market." Did you? He kept saying in post-video interviews that he just wanted WATA and Heritage to clean up their act and, as to collecting graded games, while he didn't understand it himself, he didn't finally care if others wanted to collect graded games. I think some people mistook his ambitions in that video. Unless I missed something from him that you saw on Twitter or YouTube that I didn't see? After the video, VGA announced it would release pop reports and CGC said it would release pop reports six months after operations begin, which will put pressure on WATA to match its competitors in that regard. Feels like Karl achieved exactly what he wanted, it's just that results in something as big as this aren't instantaneous?

Apropos of nothing... Until whoever is acting as stateside proxy for the overseas millionaires buying all the expensive Heritage games actually starts doing research to justify their consultancy and agency fees, the weekly Heritage auctions are going to be straight bliss for those of us who do. _____________________________________________________________________________ (Game A) Batman: Return of the Joker [NES] Copies at Public Market Since January 2019: 13 (#71 most common, of 810 games) Percent of Copies in Near-Mint-Range Condition: 100% Sold (October 26, 2021): $8,100 (9.8/A+) Rank Among Consensus (100+ Expert) Top Underrated NES Games: #284 _____________________________________________________________________________ (Game B) Low G Man [NES] Copies at Public Market Since January 2019: 3 (#388 most common, of 810 games) Percent of Copies in Near-Mint-Range Condition: 0% Sold (October 26, 2021): $240 (8.5/A+)* Rank Among Consensus (100+ Expert) Top Underrated NES Games: #56 *Highest grade at market during 3-year survey period. _____________________________________________________________________________ I mention this because most of the folks in here are smart—you may be collectors or resellers or combination collectors/resellers but you're not part of the idiot investor class that doesn't understand how scarcity interacts with condition premiums. You know that the meaning of a game within its console class may end up being just as important as the superhero franchise the game hails from. (There is so much Batman paraphernalia in the world that the notion that the third NES Batman game—which almost no one played—is going to matter in the future compared to an accepted NES hidden gem that exists only in NES-game format for anyone who admires it is truly stupid, IMHO). This is especially true given that, per its condition profile above, someone clearly has a case (or many cases) of Batman: Return of the Joker and is slowly doling the copies to Heritage; I expect we will be seeing this game in near-mint grade repeatedly for the next year at least, a lot like Battletoads (the #30 most common NES title graded, and clearly extant in factory boxes around the world based on its absurd 89% near-mint-condition profile). The other two copies of Low G Man that have hit the market since 2018 are a 6.5/A and a 7.0/B+. No one has a box of those. Just a quick case study on how volatile this market is, and how little of a clue the overseas millionaires throwing most of the money around really have. This may be the best time to be a three-figure collector, not the worst. If the Guinness World Record-setting auction on Friday gets lots of press and tons of new actual collectors (not investors) flood the market, that's when the real collectors will really get priced out. My two cents, anyway. S.

Fixed it! And separate from that, I'm also really glad to know this (about the first printing) because it increases my excitement to see what happens over Halloween weekend. While I'm concerned about certain broad trends (mostly downstream effects) and the ongoing business ethics components of all this (e.g. the conflict-of-interest issues re: these auction/grading house parent companies), I generally agree with you that there's no reason to get worked up over how other people spend their money. And as an active collector, I feel like I can both enjoy being in this sphere and also criticize it (because I want it to evolve) at the same time, i.e. I'm not just a crank—I really do like collecting sealed/graded games. So there's definitely a part of me that is extremely and maybe almost academically curious about what is going to happen with this first printing of Zelda and the auction overall. I doubt it'll be as fun as the CertifiedLink auction, which felt like it was a blast to both watch *and* participate in, but this should be pretty historic nevertheless! PS You're a warrior, man—six hours of live-streaming in 48 hours! Really enjoyed watching the parts of it I did.

I realize it's on a $5/month (cancel anytime) subscription website I author, so I'm certainly not hard-selling it and won't say more about it, but I'm guessing at least one or two of you will want to know that this was just published. https://retrostack.substack.com/p/breaking-news-halloween-night-video

Thank you both so much!!

Adam, I am looking for a couple Famicom games and I'm wondering if you have a vendor in Japan you trust and can recommend? If you don't want to share that's okay, I just thought I'd ask. I just got Image Fight and ordered some CGC vertical Famicom cases, and now I want Over Horizon and Crisis Force but can't seem to find anything at reasonable prices.

PS I know "Indiana Collection" matters absolutely not at all, I was just being specific!

I got a couple games, one of which was Golgo 13 (85 VGA, Indiana Collection) for NES for around $200—a pretty common game, but a still-underrated one I love and didn't happen to own. And I'll admit, when Greg said on the livestream, "Not bad, not bad at all!" about the sale, I blushed. The other game I got was my favorite NES game as a kid, and I got a good deal on it but I'll leave that one mysterious. I'm now a pretty big fan of CertifiedLink. There were some *insane* deals. I wish I'd had more money to spend. Like five or six rare-ish NES games I wanted and had my eye on sold for under $350 and I just didn't have the money.

Ah, got it. Thanks. PS Was playing Crisis Force (NES/FC-JP) today and totally recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it. Amazing game. Not my first or second or even third time playing it, but I'd forgotten how good it is.

Guys, I don't buy *any* game I don't absolutely love from having played a ton of it. By the time I'm buying (as you say) the acrylic material and the letters and the numbers (and so on), I'm already a fan of the game and want it in my house as a (framed) artwork that brings me joy from looking at it because of the memories of having *played it*. I can't speak for anyone else, but don't assume all collectors are investors or resellers. I'm neither.

BTW, I think all the crossover talk comes from quick-flip resellers, who need to switch to WATA because right now—but maybe only right now—WATA games sell higher. Anyone who is a buyer, a holder, a long-term collector, or a slow reseller has no reason to obsess over crossing over from VGA to WATA, especially with WATA's current QC problems and horrendous wait times. So I think anyone looking long-term should be buying VGA and not WATA.

Inasuma, I think this is where the conventional wisdom will head and soon, i.e... don't cross over. Don't let one company decide what another company's product is worth. If your 75 EX+/NM looks great, don't cross it to WATA and get an 8.0/A when it (based on condition) deserves a VG/NM (9.0/A). But *also*, don't listen to folks saying a 75 VGA "is" X or Y [where X or Y is a given WATA grade]. Anyone who *assumes* crossovers can or should or will happen is inadvertently fanboying WATA and letting WATA decide what VGA grades are "worth" when that doesn't matter (only what you think and/or future buyers will think matters, and we have no idea what WATA's reputation will be, or VGA's, many years from now). I mostly own WATA games, but when I realized that VGA games cost less and that most buyers misunderstand relative condition... I switched to mostly VGA so fast your head would spin because you get way, way, way more for your buck. My theory now is that WATA is great for sellers and VGA is great for buyers, period.

I think your assumption is that the eyeball test rarely corresponds with the condition grade test, which is a view held mostly by those who don't collect graded games. As this is a conversation with many people in it who do collect graded games, me included, I was making the point in that "blob" that the eyeball and condition-grade tests often align well enough—which is why grading exists—so it's useful to understand what the condition-grade test should cause your eyeballs to expect. And what it should cause a buyer to expect is that a 75+ VGA will roughly conform to a 9.0/A WATA.

I'm not sure what made you think I rely on words rather than my own eyeballs? My point was that, assuming an error has not been made by either VGA or WATA with the identical game titles in question, in my (eyeball) experience a 75+ VGA looks like and is equivalent to a 9.0/A from WATA. And if WATA has made a mistake while VGA has not, or if VGA has graded too strictly while WATA has done "typical" work—both of which happen frequently enough—a 75+ looks like and is equivalent to a WATA 9.2/A+ under the eyeball test you and I both use. I literally just got a 75+ (EX+/NM) in the mail that looks identical to some of my WATA 9.2/A+ (NM) sealed boxes or my best WATA 9.0/A (VF/NM) sealed boxes—which is consistent with (1) the official, listed "conditions" of each (EX+/NM = VF/NM), and (2) the fact that VGA is a more responsible and consistent grader. Are there exceptions? Sure. Just Press Play has a dogsh*t 80 Xexyz (NES) on eBay right now—which is a damn shame, because I love that game and am looking for a reasonably priced copy—while the instances of WATA 9.0/A sealed boxes being actually 8.5 or 8.0 As or even B-pluses are so legion I don't feel compelled to pick one example. But my point stands; the WATA fanboys telling everyone that VGA Gold Tier equates to 9.0/A or above are... well, not kidding themselves, as I think that'd be merely an accusation of self-delusion... but actually lying to us buyers. I credit Jonas McCammon for being honest about this, even if WATA was using his article on crossovers to make a tangential (but to them critical) point: VGA holders should always cross over to WATA if they plan to resell, because their 75-85 VGA games will be 9.0-range WATA games in many instances, and psychologically buyers are susceptible to that bait-and-switch. (Which has nothing to do with the eyeball test and everything to do with how we process the numbers "8" and "9" in 10-/100-point grading scales.)