One of the stars of A&E’s Storage Wars, a reality show about storage locker auctions, just landed an incredible deal on a locker stuffed full to bursting with vintage video game hardware and cartridges. It’s a small fortune in games, over $50,000 worth, enough for the buyer to call it one of his “best ever” buys.
The big find was featured on the first episode of the show’s 10th season, which premiered on April 12 and was shot in the city of Orange in southern California. On the show, as in most auctions of abandoned storage units, the door to the unit is opened for inspection, but the buyers cannot go inside or touch anything. They’ve got to make an educated decision based on the limited amount of information available. In the show’s second half, we find out what they got.
If you’ve ever heard of video games being featured on Storage Wars in the past, it may have been the infamous “NES-001" debacle, in which a buyer pulled a dusty, incomplete Nintendo Entertainment System out of a unit and declared that it was worth $10,000, only to find out that it was barely worth $10.
This is not that.
The video game treasure trove is the day’s final unit. The two previous units were attractive, from the outside—they were clean, orderly, and full of plastic Rubbermaid tubs, generally an indication that they are full of quality items, not trash.
Buyers Ivy Calvin and Darrell Sheets each pick up a unit, paying modest amounts of money. Then the door rolls up on the final unit of the day. “I really want this locker,” says buyer Rene Nezhoda. “It’s a good room, it’s full of vintage stuff,” Sheets notes.
Many video games are immediately visible in the front of the locker. They’re all covered in a layer of dirt, the boxes are crumbling and breaking, but we can immediately see a Super NES Game Genie code book, a Coleco Pong-style dedicated machine, a Sega Master System game and a Sega Saturn disc.
And a rare “dogbone”-style NES controller, the one that shipped with the later model of the 8-bit system.
And a freaking Vectrex, a game system with a built-in vector graphics monitor. If that works, it’s $200-250 on its own.
That’s just what we, the viewers, are shown, and the auctioneer makes a point to note that this is a big locker, the dimensions of which stretch far past the door. You can barely see the back wall for the giant pile of dusty gold.
All four bidders get in on the action. Padian says she wants to try to get it “cheap,” but doesn’t want to go too high. She pushes it up, but drops out at $1400.
Nezhoda takes it for $1500, an absolute steal if the video games go all the way back
In the second half of the segment, we find out that there will be no NES-001 mistakes this time, as Nezhoda has brought an expert with him to empty the unit: The show ID’s him as “Fluffy,” and some quick extra research reveals him to be Phillip “Fluffy Gamer” Braden, a classic gaming YouTuber of some reknown. The first thing they pull out is a gigantic box of miscellaneous game cartridges containing Sega Genesis, Super NES, Nintendo 64, and NES games.
Fluffy” immediately proves his bona fides by pulling out S.C.A.T., an NES game by Natsume whose value he pegs at roughly $200. (It’s around $125-250 on eBay, but close enough for guesstimate work.) He then pulls out a cartridge-only copy of M.U.S.H.A., one of the rarest Sega Genesis games, which is another $200. I know what you’re thinking—will the next game’s title be a six-letter acronym?
Certainly not all the cartridges are worth this much, but there are just so many of them that it quickly adds up even with conservative estimation. Nezhoda and “Fluffy” line up a row of boxes down the hallway of the storage facility and start opening them one-by-one, which the show cuts into a rapid-fire montage
The Original article plus video links can be seen at :
http://kotaku.com/storage-wars-buyer-finds-45-000-worth-of-classic-games-1794333506