DENVER, CO.  June 23rd, 2009: One J.J. Hendricks, owner and operator of JJGames LLC, recently reported that he had just made the purchase of a lifetime.  He landed a rare NES cartridge… one might say the Holy Grail, nay… the Triforce of Nintendo cartridges:

Nintendo World Championships:  Gold Edition!

Seven weeks before his article was posted on videogamepricecharts.com, the cartridge was listed on eBay for a mere $25,000.  Not prepared to pay quite that much, JJ emailed the seller and offered a mouth-gaping $17,500 for the rare piece of plastic and EPROMs.

I contacted him about the condition and the history of it. I wanted to know where he got it and call those people to see if they could verify that it was authentic. After some due diligence and talking to two other people who owned this cartridge, I was confident it was real.

The seller was entertaining other offers for some time but each of them fell through.  There were times when J.J. didn’t think he’d even ‘win’ the item.  Over the course of the next several weeks he was stricken with agony as he constantly received updates from the seller on the status of other people’s offers.  Finally, the seller decided that J.J.’s bid of $17,500 seemed reasonable enough and he sealed the deal.

Reading the comments at the site, there are many NES collectors congratulating him on his find and his purchase while others scoff at the amount of money he dumped into a single piece of shiny gold plastic with a readily duplicated game.  Others attempted to shame him in not spending his own money on “something useful.”  His response was one of a true collector:

I can definitely understand people not wanting to pay a lot of money for a collectors item. But I’m not paying that much money to play the game, just like people who buy a Honus Wagner baseball card aren’t going to put it in the spokes of their bicycle or Action Comic #1 buyers aren’t going to buy it so they can read it while they eat breakfast. The same can be said about rare paintings, “why would I pay millions of dollars for a Picasso when I can just look at a poster of the same painting?”

They are pieces of history and very rare. That is where the value comes from. Not because someone wants to play the game.

That being said, I can completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to spend that much money on a video game. Just as I can understand it for a painting, a comic, a vintage car, or anything else.

Owning  a piece of relevant gaming history will likely pay off in the future for him… or maybe as a die hard collector it will simply get willed to his next of kin.  Whatever J.J.’s motivation one may never know except J.J.  And for now, he’ll be the talk of the internet with his purchase–and for that, we’re eternally grateful.  Go nuts, J.J.