Hey guys, could you all pass the word around about this great auction on eBay?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270420781029

The listing party originally had a starting bid of $75 on it and they had it listed as a wood-grain. I emailed them and politely corrected them. Then I convinced them to drop it to a $1 for starting bid. I didn’t really expect them to take my advice, but now it will be an interesting auction. It looks to be in great shape, and the seller is new to eBay. So if you want to pass this on to anyone who may be looking for an awesome Vader system… meow is the time.

Most of you have seen this, but I just joined flickr and this is my Tron Photo Set. Thought I’d share. I also documented it pretty well over there.

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.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN. Today, GridCycle.com suffered a temporary outage due to the owner of the site violating storage laws laid down by BlueHost.com. About a month ago, BlueHost began informing the owner that the hosted account they were using had exceeded performance guidelines. They then listed the problem directory. It was an old gallery that was being spammed daily. The owner of GridCycle then renamed the gallery and removed the link from the site. Thinking everything was OK, he went about his business. Over the next few weeks these cache files continued to grow. Unfortunately the owner of GridCycle.com and it’s parent company KOYR Studios was unavailable. He has been traveling to and from Duluth over the past couple of weeks to attend to an ailing aunt. Today he was made aware that all of his subsidiary websites including GridCycle had been disabled due to excessive files. With BlueHost there is an apparent file limit of 50,000 files. This is a loosely enforced file limit and easily exceeded. However, the number of files that KOYR Studios was now housing with all of its websites exceeded well over 289K.  As of 30 minutes ago the total number of files is under 119K and going down as you read this.  The Abuse department has allowed all KOYR Studios sites to resume normal operation.

Madaracs
GridCycle Press

This is just a quick blurb for pinball junkies and those of us who appreciate a fine machine. There is a very old pinball machine on craigslist right now for veddy cheap.

Linky.

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