Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Playing Atari for fun and profit

This week, a guy made $31,600 because he enjoyed Atari games as a kid--so much that he spent $10 of his precious 8-year-old allowance on what turned out to be an awful game. None of his friends even wanted to borrow it. So it sat, unused, in its original box, for nearly three decades.

It turns out that in 2010, it is the only known complete copy of this (apparently) bad game called "Air Raid." And that increased its value by approximately 3,100 percent.

With convenient handle for bludgeoning.

This is interesting to hear, as I have a fairly massive collection of Atari and Colecovision cartridges left over from a misspent youth. I bought literally none of them from a store. All of them came from various garage sales and rummage sales and general scrounging. Some of them were fun. Others were not. But apparently, quality is not a good indicator of value.

All I need to do is paw through some dusty cartridges looking for dollar signs. Now that's not a bad living.

1 comment:

Gerry said...

it has been pointed out to me that the delta in value was 310,000 percent, not 3,100 percent. the author regrets the error and blames it on the fact that he is a words guy.