Your best "I didn't know that was rare!" moments?

[Emperor Megas]

A friend of mine gave me his copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga back in the day, and tossed the manual because he dropped it in the ground outside of his apartment and it got wet. It wasn't ruined or anything, just wet. He was being an asshole that day, so I didn't feel like saying anything about it (he's the type of guy that just looks for any reason to get into an argument about anything). Of course neither of us have any idea it had a fairly limited run.

I purchased another manual to complete it a few years ago for about 30 or 40 bucks. I don't remember exactly how much, but it was awesome to have a complete copy of the game for under 50 bucks.

He gave me Burning Ragers and a bunch of other Saturn games as well. This is around the time the Dreamcast was all the rage.

My Popful Mail for purchase from EB for less than 20 bucks, and I'm pretty sure that goes for a fair price now. M.U.S.H.A. I just bought because I never owned it but friends had it back in the day. I bought my copy for maybe 20 bucks about 9 years ago, and that thing goes for ridiculous prices, especially around Christmas time.

[theclaw]

Just found another surprise looking at my stuff. Keep a watch out for wrestling Attitude Era DVDs. Look at prices on Wrestlemania X-Seven now!
I've also got Wrestlemania 2000 and Royal Rumble 2000, though not cheap either, they don't hold a candle to that.

[Esquire Fox]

Berenstain Bears for the Atari 2600. Picked it up from a local Pawn Shop many months ago. Came to find out it was considerably rare, ranking R7 on the Digital Press rarity guide.

[Carnby]

I bought at top loader NES for 20 dollars. I had no idea it was the rarer version.

[MachineGex]

Most of the NES stuff that has gone thru the roof in the last few years. Many of them mentioned in this thread. Anyone know of a good place to find values of NES games that are over $20 in value??? I am sure I have passed up on a few wacky races this year....

[Space-Ace-13]

Most of the NES stuff that has gone thru the roof in the last few years. Many of them mentioned in this thread. Anyone know of a good place to find values of NES games that are over $20 in value??? I am sure I have passed up on a few wacky races this year....

So frustrating isn't it?

[csgx1]

Years ago, my brother(not into video games) was at a flea market and called me asking if I wanted a box of Panasonic 3do systems for $25. He said there were 3 Panasonic consoles: 1 black and 2 white. White Panasonic systems?....I didn't think too much about it and told him to grab it since it was cheap.

When he gave me the box, the white systems turned out to be prototype Panasonic M2 FZ-DR21 testing drive boxes. My dumb ass didn't know what the hell they were and stupidly gave one away back then. I held on to the other one and a few months later, I realized to my surprise what exactly it was and how rare they are.

Still kicking myself for basically giving one away.

[madman77]

I don't get too caught up in rarity stuff, but back in the 90's I went to E3 and won one of the gold N64 controllers at the Star Fox competition. After Nintendo released the gold console and controllers I assumed my controller was the same thing so it was tossed in a plastic bin of video games and forgotten about. Only recently when I started collecting N64 did I realize I had a big rarity on my hands.

[The 1 2 P]

It's sort of 50/50, but even if someone is more of a gamer than a collector, I'd think people would be more inclined to sell a sealed game and use a portion of the money to buy a used copy rather than open up the sealed game and flush money down the toilet.

This is the point I always try to tell people about sealed games. You don't need to be a collector of them in order to use them as a valuable commodity. If you find them cheap pick them up, sell them and use that money for whatever you really want, gaming related or otherwise.

Reminds me of a member we used to have who would buy all of his games to play, except he was insistent on buying everything brand new because he was uncomfortable with the idea of used goods. So he'd pay the super high prices to get classic games sealed only to immediately rip off the plastic.

I remember him. It wouldn't of been a big deal if he was just buying sealed commons but he was buying sealed rares like Radiant Silvergun, Panzer Dragoon Saga, etc.....just to play them. Even if I was rich I wouldn't do that. But my mentality has always been to have opened copies of the sealed games I collect just for playability purposes.

[SparTonberry]

I remember him. It wouldn't of been a big deal if he was just buying sealed commons but he was buying sealed rares like Radiant Silvergun, Panzer Dragoon Saga, etc.....just to play them.

Oh no, treating a video game like a video game.

[Aussie2B]

It's not about treating a video game like a video game, it's about being smart with your money. If you were left a perfect condition, perfectly sealed up copy of Action Comics #1, would you treat a comic book like a comic book, taking it out of the plastic, handling it with your bare hands, flipping through the pages casually as you read, chuck it on the table when you're done, throw it loose in a backpack to carry it around, etc. etc. or would you recognize its value and preserve what you have? If you had a sealed copy of Stadium Events, would you rip off its plastic just because it's a video game, or would you keep it sealed in order to preserve the value, whether you keep it or sell it? If you're rich and can throw away money left and right, cool, but I personally have never had that luxury. The thought of doing so would just make me sick to my stomach. If I got a sealed game that's worth way more sealed than opened, no way in hell am I removing the plastic.

[pseudonym]

I agree with you 100%.

My own "I didn't know that was rare" moment was years ago. I bought Athletic World Family Fun Fitness version complete on Ebay for $10, stored in a box in my basement because I thought it was just another crap licensed NES game, it was only a few years later on Nintendo Age that I found it was pretty rare. I think I ended up trading it for about $80 worth of stuff at the time (2005 maybe).

[Tokimemofan]

Mine has to be the Wide Boy 64, I already was buying an NPDP cart (I knew that one was rare) but I almost passed on the Wide Boy 64 thinking it looked knockoffish. That thing paid for my Xbox 360!

[geezuzkhrist119]

The only time I can think of at the moment is when I bought a loose copy of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. I got it like 4 or 5 years back from GameGuy (thanks again buddy). When MJ died I decided to look up the game on online. Ebay was selling for like 100 bucks loose and a complete copy was like 200. I was like WTF I hit the jackpot. I only paid 5 bucks for it in the first place.

After all the hype about MJ's death, I looked on ebay again to see that the game dropped in price muchly. I was disappointed and sad but whatever atleast I got a good game

[Aussie2B]

Yeah, that was one of those quickly-take-advantage-of-the-moment situations. I thought it was pretty obvious that it would go down in value as his death was less and less recent. I've never had a copy of Moonwalker, but if I had, I definitely would've flipped it then and waited for an opportunity down the road to pick up another copy. It's like when that PSP Gripshift was useful in modding PSPs. The game was practically worthless before that and it's practically worthless now, but for a short while it shot up to around 50 bucks. I bought the copy at my local GameStop and flipped it immediately.

[The 1 2 P]

Oh no, treating a video game like a video game.

You completely missed the point but Aussie summed it up nicely.

[SparTonberry]

I agree with you 100%.

My own "I didn't know that was rare" moment was years ago. I bought Athletic World Family Fun Fitness version complete on Ebay for $10, stored in a box in my basement because I thought it was just another crap licensed NES game, it was only a few years later on Nintendo Age that I found it was pretty rare. I think I ended up trading it for about $80 worth of stuff at the time (2005 maybe).

Probably only worth something if you have the original print box and manual. The cart is not rare, because unlike Stadium Events, Nintendo reused the FFF carts for the first print run of the Power Pad version.

[A.C. Sativa]

I've got three instances that pop into my head right now.

(1) I had found a third-party Atari 2600 game in a Movie Trading Company store, where nearly all of their pre-NES carts tend to get the blanket price of $1.99. About a month later I'm looking through the Video Game Trader magazine and I look up the game, Rescue Terra I, and find out it's one of the more collectible games on the system and goes for something like $120.

(2) Shortly after buying an Atari Jaguar, I kept up with all game development for the system and had my eye on a game that sounded pretty interesting, called A.I.R.C.A.R.S. that was supposed to come out late 1994. Well, Atari rejected it because it was such a poor game (and let's face it, Atari didn't exactly have high standards) and eventually the developers made batches themselves and sold them by mail. I bought one, played it a small amount, then set it aside feeling a bit like it wasn't worth the wait. Then a few years back I look at the rarity listing to find that it's pretty high up there, since most people had the common sense to stay away from the stinker of a game.

(3) I was out at the local flea market at the booth I had previously bought a boxed Astrocade at, and looking at the NES carts (which I don't collect for and shouldn't have been wasting my time with) I saw a weird looking cart that I thought was worth the three bucks he wanted for it (well, technically it was five altogether for the cart and a CD from comedian Pablo Francisco, but I consider the NES game to be the larger fraction of that five bucks). It was a Myriad Six-In-One cart. Minutes after posting about the discovery on Atari Age I had two people send me PMs wanting to buy it, so I knew I had something good and rare. I held on to it for some time but then my car's air conditioning went out and I couldn't take another Texas summer without it, and I had my sister put it up on eBay since I've never bought or sold anything there before or since. I had about three messages from people all over the world asking me to end the auction early and sell it to them under the table, which I refused. Eventually that loose cart sold for $660! I never even played the game, since I don't have a working NES.

Myriad 6-in-1 isn't anything special. Here's my review of it:
http://nesquester.blogspot.com/2012/...on-6-in-1.html

[treismac]

While this won't blow the socks off of anyone reading at home, here goes. A while back, my childhood friend in the Air Force gave me his Turbografx-16 collection before he deployed. Amongst those games is Darkwing Duck. Uneventfully, I later was perusing eBay for TG16 games and I was surprised to see Darkwing Duck selling for over $50 across the board. I ask myself, didn't my friend give me that game. I check, and viola. I do indeed have a semi-valuable hucard sitting in a container with others that has gone and remains unplayed for years.

[sega dude]

Last year, I got a copy of Herzog Zewi for $0.25. I later found it at a Play N Trade for $30. Looked it up on a rarity guide and found out it was somewhat rare.