On one hand new buyers who don't know the history of who owns real NWCs and how to look for fakes will appeciate the fact that it has been authenticated by someone. On the other hand most sealed games look better in VGA cases but if you ask me this one looks like shit.
I don't see this one selling.
Weren't rare, nearly one of a kind games like this printed on eeproms? Don't eeproms kind of, i dunno, ERASE when exposed to light?
I don't see how any fan of NES games who has any respect for the history of an item like this would ever dissemble the game like this, let alone continue to do it.
I don't care about comics, really, but if I walked into someone's house and saw that they had disassembled Action Comics #1 and put the unbound pages into tasteful, art deco frames to hang on their wall, I'd call them an idiot. Same with this dude. He took something that's a bit more than a simple commodity; a piece of history with, what, fifty or so pieces known to exist, and wrecked it. Good job.
That's neither childish, nor spiteful. It's the truth, and calling it otherwise will not change it. I admit that doing so was entirely his prerogative as the owner, but it's still within my rights to call him an idiot, because that's how he's acting.
Simple sunlight produces enough UV light to mess up an exposed EPROM over time. Like I said, you don't need to entirely erase the EPROM; just frag enough of the data to render the cart unplayable. Hang that fucker on a living room wall, and it'll be unplayable pretty quick-like, and never mind what the VGA says about the UV protection of the slab. Even the RISK of it should have given him pause.I also thought exposing the EPROMs was tremendously stupid, but some experts have chimed in and mentioned only UV light should damage them. I don't know or really care, but it still seems silly to me.
Consider that, outside of the members of a very few NES collecting sites, no one gives a shit about owning an NWC cart, because the cart itself is completely irrelevant. It's the data that's on there, the game itself. I'll grant that a non-working NWC cart might be worth something years from now to a select, highly specialized group of NES collectors, but a non-working proto? Hell no. It's ONLY VALUE is the game on the cart, or disc. Once that's gone, it's dead, inert, worthless plastic. Your average proto isn't on some master "completion" list to be checked off. To collectors, they're 'investments' or novelties.However, one important thing for any NWC or prototype owner to consider is that all of these carts are ticking time bombs. Today we can argue about how much a non-working cart would devalue the item, but in the not too distant future, all of these carts will be non-working. Does that mean they are magically worth $0? I think not.
This is why I get so angry with prototype owners who hoard their protos. That fourteen ounce piece of plastic and silicon is worth exactly zero dollars. It's what's on it that counts, and the history of it. We'll never get to play Resident Evil 1.5 because some asshat is hiding it under his bed because he's afraid that it won't be worth as much if it gets put up for everyone to play. This is a crazy concept to me. especially considering the inevitable loss of data... and therefore the loss of their 'investment'.
Some value, maybe. Not $27,000 in cold hard cash. Eventually, it's just going to be the guys on NA selling their carts back and forth like some kind of continual, checking account draining circle jerk, pretending that it's OK that none of their carts work anymore because the very fact that they USED to work makes them valuable somehow.People haven't come to grips with reality yet, but these will still have value regardless of their working condition. Prototypes really scare me the most, because once that data is gone... does it still have any value? That's a much more interesting debate IMO.
I feel bad for people like that. Hey, guys! Remember when the reason we used to own games was because we like to PLAY THEM? Wasn't that awesome?
Um,
wouldn't it cost LESS than $27,000 to get a gold NWC and have it graded/slabbed?
"And the book says: 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'"
"And the book says: 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'"
This auction isn't over yet guys, I'm still 50/50 on whether it sells or not. Considering the insane inflation rates that I've seen in the NES scene, $27k for an NWC Gold actually seems undervalued to me. The only problem is that this display can actually be hindering the sale IMO.
If someone put an NWC Gold up for $27k in it's normal shell in Very Good cosmetic shape and with screenshots verifying it's working order, I'd bet money it sells.
WTB Clayfighter Sculptor's Cut Manual Only... PM ME!!
I disagree with almost all of this rant. If the only value of the NWC is in the data itself, then everyone would be content with the reproduction version for $70 and no one would care about the NWC.
As for protos, I would gladly pay to own a non-working proto from my favorite franchise. Not a ton of money because I'm cheap, but a considerable amount more than $0. On released games with no differences, protos still sell for several hundred dollars (or more) on fan-favorite franchises (and even more for 1st party stuff). People aren't buying it because of the data which is identical to the released version, they are buying it because it is actually a 1 of a kind rare collectible that separates them from the other Zelda / Mario / etc. collectors.
On unreleased stuff, yeah of course the data is the bulk of the purchase price. But unreleased protos are just a part of the prototype pool, and you can't make all of your assumptions off of those alone.
WTB Clayfighter Sculptor's Cut Manual Only... PM ME!!
Player-2? Hey, I know that guy! He's Player-2 here on the DP forums. He used to have a great classic game shop here, but it's since folded and I haven't seen him since. He was a nice guy.
And waitaminute! That NWC cart is missing the original screws! Somewhere, in that guy's house, there are a set of three screws worth $1,000.00 each...
Everyone keeps asking about the screws !
He says they're actually screwed into the cart inside the coffin.
To be totally fair, this happens with every collectible at some point. It becomes collectible because a certain group of people start to want it, and it drives pricing up. Eventually, as the group that has the nostalgic connection to that era either gets what they want from it already, or stops collecting it, or decides it is time to sell, you see prices drop somewhat, and demand lower. You can already see this with Atari 2600 carts -- 10 years ago at the MGC, it was all that everyone wanted to look at. We would bring about 100 carts, and sell about 25 of them. This year, we brought 200 2600 carts and we sold three of them. And for a lot of the stuff, our prices are cheaper now than they were then. Oh, and there were about 5,000 extra people at the show too.
Nintendo has done the exact opposite, and I figure it will continue to hold it's value pretty well for a while because unlike Atari, which basically died in the early 90s and most people have forgotten about, Nintendo keeps driving demand of their own stuff thanks to them referencing their history often in their own titles and stuff like that. Who he heck is the Robot on Mario Kart? Holy crap, they made this!? I want one!
I would be very surprised though if in about 30 years, NES games were worth half of what they are worth now.
But again, that's cool -- if you collect for the reason that you want to collect, and collect the stuff that you want to collect, there is no issue with doing whatever you want. It doesn't mean that you'll necessarily get the value you want for it later, but you can do whatever you want with it.
Oh, and I'd just like to also add... a few years ago, we were seriously considering doing the 'grading' thing with the GOAT Store right about the time the VGA site started offering to do it, with the thought that we could do so a little cheaper and we were sure we had a good background to do so. But, after seeing the prices it cost to encase a game and get it graded, we thought that no one would ever be willing to pay that much.
Whoops.
Ah well, I don't really believe in that sort of thing anyway, so I'm sure I'm not the best guy to do it
Dan Loosen
http://www.goatstore.com/ - http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com/
** Trying to finish up an overly complete Dreamcast collection... want to help? (Updated 5/3/10!) http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61333
It was awesome, wasn't it?
Merely collecting games you enjoyed from childhood without actually playing them is a perverse form of nostalgia. Games have a purpose. Fulfill that purpose or collect stamps, baseball cards, or some other non-interactable item.
There have been a good bit of apt analogies used to capture something of the stupidity of this dissected NWA cart, but I want to contribute one more. Having a golden NWA cart and rendering it unplayable is like marrying the hottest trophy wife you can afford, and then castrating yourself. She might look good on your arm, but what's the point, man?
For most of these collectors the NWC isn't the game they will play anyway. I owned an NWC for years and plugged it in once I believe and that was before reproductions were available. As people said before at this point it is just a trophy of the hunt. When I wanted to play games I played Halo. When I found something I really wanted I sold The NWC but it went up from 4k to 12k in that time. Today it is more like 20k but I don't regret selling it. It was fun to show off every now and then but that was about it.
This isn't like cutting your wife in half or your dick off. This is putting a hot centerfold poster on the wall of the bedroom and still having a wife. One to look at the other to have fun with. These guys who buy these still play games but many don't play classic games. Box it up or whatever because chances are it wasn't going to be played anyway.