arch_8ngel

Surprised they would do this for all items and not just "new" items.

And Mike Tyson, as a person, is the most popular he's been since he was young.

No offense Bronty, but as one of the few among us trading in original artwork, he already knows you're better off that most people in the world

Agreed. I definitely didn't make my initial comment to stir the pot, just to help connect the dots on why Deniz and WATA were connected to comic book people to begin with.

The tone of your last post certainly seems to disagree with your assertion

Oh, no doubt. I guess I just always had the impression he grew up steeped in the attitudes of how comic collectors view their hobby (not necessarily the deeper knowledge of comics themselves) and he applied that to HIS interest - games. Nothing right or wrong about it, IMO. Just how it always struck me. (but again... always tricky to separate that sense/recollection from the obvious generational divide of him being a young teenager and the rest of us being adults)

I don't see any reason to make it a class battle...

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, since we're talking early-days of the forum. And it very well could have simply been hard to distinguish the "comic collector" side of how Deniz went about things from the "excited very young guy in the hobby" side of things

I don't mean to say he isn't a great guy. I haven't met him, so I don't have any opinion on how he is as a person. I just knew that he was deep enough in the comic book hobby that he had the store you mentioned and that Deniz had been raised with a ton of exposure to comic collecting and it had pretty clearly shaped his attitudes toward video game collecting all along. But yeah... "big time" is probably not the right term in the context of comic books where the big time are literally millions of dollars (I'll stand correct on that one!)

Thought the comic book connection with him was common knowledge, but I guess that info probably did the rounds fairly early on in his time on the forum and never came up again.

He's in his 20's at this point, I think. His dad is some kind of big-time comic book collector in Chicago. (which, presumably, is why $1000 for the top item in the gaming hobby didn't phase him ;))

It really isn't. I can pretty readily make a distinction between brands and products I like/dislike, and the people most closely associated with them. Dave (fcgamer) made this same point, and I think he is spot-on.

The news around the newer Genesis Mini was on the heels of the success of the Nintendo plug-in consoles, though. It was definitely more widely anticipated, and would have had broader recognition than stuff from Analogue (in terms of the "everyman" buyer) I would think. Maybe Analogue is way better known than I give them credit for, though.

I think you're right. Fleer Ultra were the other very-high-end collector cards of the time... probably even more expensive than Upper Deck, in general.

That was it! I remember having one or two packs of Upper Deck (a friend of mine and his brother had damn-near the complete set -- though they were HEAVY into baseball cards and even had a Beckett subscription). They were maybe $1.25-$2/pack in a time that the cheap red packs (Diamond, maybe?) were $0.25, and Topps still came with gum! The quality of the Marvel comics cards was really good (they might have been Upper Deck, as well). So anyway, the leap to $2-$3/pack for MtG didn't seem too bad after that!

Did that timing not correlate with a broader release of some other rerelease Genesis system, though?

Well, fortunately, nobody expects you to really keep it together during your parents' eulogy. I went into it, thinking it was expected of me, as the oldest son, and hoping that it would be cathartic to work through how I hoped he'd be remembered. But it was nowhere near as cathartic as I'd hoped, though I'm definitely glad that I did it. (and in my grandfather's case, as well -- though that was at the direct request of my granddad after I did my dad's eulogy)

Quite a few involved parties had decent hopes around it (though nothing astronomical obviously -- but a 5-10 bagger didn't seem outlandish at the time), since Adam (the director) had managed to make a decent profit previously on an EXTREMELY obscure documentary -- that incidentally my brother-in-law had seen and had high-praise for, which kind of locked-in my wife and my interest. But yeah, Adam, Robin, and Vince definitely put in a TON of unpaid effort on the gig. And the rest of us got some really cool stories and meet-and-greets out of it. It was a truly novel experience to go to the Austin Film Festival and have people see our badges and excitedly ask about "the Tetris movie". So we definitely all got our money's-worth. The reality, though is that the movie debuted a year too late to get the "easy" Netflix money that a lot of lesser (in my opinion) video/arcade documentaries pulled in. And (fortunately for the investors, I guess, but UNFORTUNATELY for the director/producers) a couple of years too early to tap into the Kickstarter craze. Definitely a sort of "moment in time" that things shook out the way that they did. EDIT: and it all sounds a little crazy in retrospect, I guess, but that "easy" Netflix money apparently all revolved around one buyer at Netflix and that well dried up literally a month or two before our release. It was really unfortunate timing. (though we did crack the top 10 for our release day on iTunes! ;))

Fair enough, we DID do better than strictly "break even" (30% total "dividend, right?) and Dain and I both made a little extra by loaning another $2500 each to the production to get it over the finish line. So you're right, "break even" wasn't quite fair. I just meant it didn't pull a King of Kong and EXPLODE like we'd all hoped EDIT: in terms of a "tipping point", I just feel like that whole ordeal was a big time and financial investment. He did part of the festival circuit and attended the production events. My wife and I did too. It was a lot of fun, and made for some memorable and unique vacationing. As far as Dain, I recall quite a bit of message traffic in those days, and as things wore on and it became increasingly clear that there wasn't going to be a big payoff, and instead a long-tail-slog, it really seemed like that marked a bit of a transition of him "checking out". Could all be coincidence, of course, because that was also the timeframe of one of his kids being born! Ha! But it would be a lie to say we didn't hope for a better financial return on that time! (and maybe that's where my "break even" mentality comes from -- the "profit" basically covered our trip to the Austin Film Festival and our trip down to the Wilmington NC festival showing)

Glad you joined. I'm a big fan of your work. Project Blue looks incredible.

I have a huge backlog of RPGs I have picked up on sale over the years that I am skeptical I will ever have the time to get into. Since having kids I tend to lean towards genres that are a little more pick-up-and-play so I can squeeze my gaming into nap time on the weekends.

I think there is some interesting data mining that can go on, and interested parties could probably "improve" with human interpretation of questionable datapoints. Hands-free, you could at least automate cart-only BINs (current asking) and completed BIN/auctions. That could show trends/spreads. If you have enough volume to populate that kind of data, you could probably similarly automate lot values, by value-weighting the games in a lot. CIB/sealed obviously get a lot harder, though with slabbed auctions becoming more frequent, automatically tracking those and doing some grade-weighting as well as clearly tracking not just what the buyer paid but what the seller received, net fees, could be "useful" in the context of taking a stab at whether any private transaction represents a fair deal for both parties.

Exactly. Dain ran a pretty successful forum in an internet age when forums were no longer particularly popular. He was into his mid/late-40's and into a much different phase of life than back when he started. For the amount of effort he put into the site over the years, he owed it to his family to make an exit that paid dividends, given the opportunity. (and it wouldn't have surprised me if things would have turned out differently if the gamble some of us took on Ecstasy of Order had paid off, rather than just broken even -- since looking back at message traffic with him over the years, that really does seem like a tipping point in interest from him) It was nice while it lasted, but he didn't owe us anything more than we'd already received in benefits of the general forum, at this point. It sucks that GoCollect screwed the pooch so royally, but any negative outcome is really on them and nobody else.

Could be. I definitely remember comic-series collectible cards being a thing for awhile then, too. (one of my friends had the complete set of X-Men cards, and I remember those packs being EXPENSIVE )

My dad died back in February (brain tumor - recurred after 20 years of remission) and my granddad died in September (complications from hip surgery). I did both eulogies. I don't recommend it. "Most recent" was last weekend, though, for a guy I knew at church (rare bile duct cancer). It was somewhat cathartic to be able to be a more passive participant.