There's such brinkmanship evident in game collecting today. I may come across a rare NES cart, but then someone tries to top that with a rare unlicensed NES cart.
Of course, just like night follows day (except in Japan, where you occassionally get an extra sunrise in the middle of the day), some irritating guy will top that with an unlicensed competition cart. And then some motherless soul will ante up a proto version of that...which is followed by a W.I.P...followed by box art..followed by an incomplete design document...followed by an autograph of a game designer that "had this one idea"

I'm tired of trying to keep up.

I'm now collecting vaporware. It's harder to show off your collection to your friends ("I keep them in storage, for insurance reasons"), and it can be a little embarrassing when one of your vaporware games turns out to be a hoax (my vaporware Sonic 2 cart is almost worthless now).
These problems aside, I still feel that I now have a definitive leg-up on the collecting community at large.