9 ms·

Rare video games collection heist

121 points by mmasu 4y ago

MarkMarine 4y ago
I felt crushed for the owner, reading this. What sounds like a lifetime of work collecting these rare, perfect condition games, just to have it destroyed in service of making the games harder to track when being pawned for short money. Personally I don’t think I’d collect and not play these games, I like using my things for what they are for and I think the regular use enhances the value, but still I empathize with the store owner.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I’m sure he had multiple copies of the non-rare games that were not mint and which he played.
GaelFG 4y ago
Edit to clarify : I don't doubt this specific robbing story, and I'm sad for the owner. It's the narrative about million dollars game cartridge, which can be read "a lot" in press and appear in the middle of the article which intrigue/bother me. I'm geniously wondering (but not too hard I admit) what part about theses stories of 'million dollar videogame cardridges' are trues and wich are urban legend. There were multiple alleged scam story about this 'milieu' and stories about crazy prices were indeed fake (or more exactly PR for derivated product like 'expertise' and 'unusual placement and money laundering friendly'). But I wonder if there is really a market of people exchanging game copy for really high amount with 5 or more digits. (no doubt for dedicated fans, I know a few, but event if they pay hight sum we are still in the 3-4 digits sums and often a lot of time, it stays a hobby). People passionated about a specic game, willing to pay hundreds of dollar for a legit cartridge and nostalgia kick not doubt. People willing to spend thousands of dollar on an occasional project of making a restoration of an old arcade cabinet, not doubt (it's a nice tinkering hobby, but the hobby part is probably the most important, not the result). But "numerous insanely rich and anonymous peoples willing to spend millions on black market with shady people to buy stolen video game cartridge" I doubt ^^
- mr_gibbins 4y ago
  The people paying $00,000s or more for games are not people who are interested in the games, as such. They'll never open them and play them, or even do what the store owner here did and keep them safe, showcase them to interested people. They'll just keep them squirreled away in a safe deposit box, wait a few years and sell on when the games have appreciated some value - i.e. an investment opportunity.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    But like most collectibles, they are poor investments. It’s extremely difficult to not a priori which game will be rare and valuable in 30 years. Meanwhile you are paying for climate controlled storage.
    - sumtechguy 4y ago
      I accidently have a few of these 'collectable' games. I did not buy them 20+ years ago to put them on a shelf. I play them.
  - gennarro 4y ago
    To be fair it seems like the topic of the story didn’t play most of these games, based on their condition and description of their packaging.
  - GaelFG 4y ago
    That's the narrative and it may be true but do you know people doing this for such amounts ? I mean it's based on : - video game are a popular subject - some people like to collect things for disproportionate money values (it's even a 'nerd' cliché) - some rare art collectible like famous painting can be worth hundred of thousands or even millions - everyone dream of a small item you can store and sells with an increased value just by waiting But an old video game cartridge is not a piece of art, it's a cheap industrial produced thing. I'm curious if there are really people investing in theses for company grade amounts of money.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Beltiras 4y ago
My heart is aching for the owner. At the same time I feel a sense of relief because I am moving between countries. A lot of what I am doing these days is giving away my "stuff" and shedding attachments to "things". I do understand him thou. My 8 cases of Magic cards will be sorely missed, but I am happy to know that the Magic cards don't own me.
- gigaflop 4y ago
  When I was in college, I had stopped playing MTG, but several of my DnD friends still did. Once in a while, I'd bring down a box of my cards, and let them pick through whatever they wanted for 80%-ish of their value, traded towards food. In a way, that was probably one of the best ways for me to get rid of some.
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    My problem is that this is a 20 year plus collection. It's of a size where logistics are needed to move the darn thing and monetizing it's value will be somewhat hard.
    - khalilravanna 4y ago
      On the monetization front I’ve been looking for something to automatically catalog a large collection of cards but it looks like the only ones that exist are for large outfits (https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000 https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000) given the cost. I imagine it’d be pretty easy to have a camera identify cards with OCR being what it is today but then you have to go about laying out every single card which is labor intensive. I would just love some automatic way to have my cards automatically registered in a database. Then it becomes incredibly easy to quantify the worth of a collection and identify which cards are actually worth the time to sell (anything over $5, $10, etc.).
      - Hallucinaut 4y ago
        I have the perfect HackerNews link for you, my friend! https://www.hackster.io/chev-eldrid/trading-card-inventory-tool-pricer-a5e819 https://www.hackster.io/chev-eldrid/trading-card-inventory-t... Buon appetito!
elephanlemon 4y ago
1) Always bolt down your safe. 2) Most “safes” are not actual safes but “residential security containers.” A real safe will be UL rated and one this size (guessing it was large, didn’t see any pictures) weigh in the thousands of pounds.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  The threat model for (2) is really more of a fire thing if I understand correctly. Which does make a lot of sense for most people. I’m pretty confident I will never be burgled. I could see my house burning down.
  - aerostable_slug 4y ago
    Almost all gun safes are at this level, and California DOJ just released the home addresses of thousands of legal gun owners. The threat model for those people has dramatically changed, but unfortunately the barriers to entry for a 'real' safe are quite high (cost, weight). I expect a statistically significant bump in stolen guns hitting the streets directly attributable to CA DOJ's incompetence.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Why would you prefer to rob someone who has a gun? A gun in a locked safe is hardly a good target compared to the typical valuables. It’s also likely to be deep within the house in a harder to find spot. And, they have a gun.
      - aerostable_slug 4y ago
        Because gun safes aren't actually safes according to insurance companies. They're easily defeated with a crowbar or a saw, and generally light enough that criminals can just take them (if they aren't bolted down) and defeat them somewhere else if need be. These aren't currency/jewelry-grade safes with relocking plates and the like. They're thin metal that's just about good enough to keep a child out and that's it. Re: someone with a gun — just wait until the person goes to work. Many burglaries happen in the middle of the day (like the one my family experienced).
hnbad 4y ago
This is as good a time as any to remind people that the prices for vintage video games are artificially inflated and largely the result of wash trading via auction houses and grading services, which locked out the preexisting retro gaming communities and turned a beloved hobby into an instrument for dubious financial speculation (and arguably set the precedent for NFT crypto trading, which has even fewer regulations and even less transparency that could prevent these wash trades): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A The story says the collector described his collection as an "archive". This flies in the face of actual archival efforts like The Internet Archive, which persist digital copies of old games and make them available to the public when possible. Having a large collection of rare games in pristine condition in locked cases in your vault is not archival, it's hoarding at worst and financial speculation at best.
- GaelFG 4y ago
  I don't know the collector personally, but for having been/witnessed friends being interviewed by entertainment press reporters a few times, it's totally possible the article author just wanted to make the story more dramatic and overwhelmed him with oriented questions full of superlatives :)
jnsie 4y ago
That was an enjoyable, nostalgia filled, and depressing read. It's obvious he didn't have the right security in place, but it seems he also didn't insure his collectibles appropriately. It's hard not to feel sorry for someone who collected as a labor of love, moreso since he seemed generous in opening his collection up to the greater community.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Does anyone see an irony that these pieces would have been less likely to be stolen if they were on a shelf in plain site?
- RajT88 4y ago
  Sort of like if you drop off a Monet at a thrift shop. Nobody would steal it. Someone might buy it for 5 dollars.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    The street artist Banksy put real works for sale in NYC at a booth outside the met. He sold very few, for almost nothing. This after people going through extraordinary lengths to preserve anything he created. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/video-banksy-set-up-pop-up-booth-in-central-park-and-only-had-three-customers https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/video-banksy-set-up...
    - RajT88 4y ago
      He's nothing if not a humorist. He did a work for "The Outlaws" show. If you're OK with spoilers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59236187 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59236187
upupandup 4y ago
During peak bubble, heists are common, I wonder if there is a deflationary event coming to collectibles in general. They've ballooned astronomically in the past few years and I wonder if its sustainable seeing that in auctions the buy or sell it to each other in order to increase the valuation in hopes that some billionaire will come and buy their rare super mario bros cartridge. I don't know if you had the money and can't think of what to buy next, you end up collecting these insanely expensive nintendo cartridges that you don't even know will work. The FPGA and CD emulator hardware that lets you run games off SD card seems to have put some liquidity suppression. However, there is a novelty to owning the complete game box, complete with mint condition manuals and covers, so there will always be demand for that. Not a good spot for the owner to be in.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > During peak bubble, heists are common But I didn't get the impression that the thief here really knew what he was after - he seemed to do a really poor job pawning the stolen goods (and settled for a lowball figure in some cases for games that were worth much more). To me it seems like a boring robbery - they went after the safe because those typically contain valuables (in this case it also contained cash and precious metals). I'm not sure he ever realized the value of the games he'd stolen.
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    When you're selling a stolen rare "artifact", you have to pay the "don't ask the five people who are known to have one of these" fee
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      I'm not convinced - if he was aware of the rarity of these items and the difficulty fencing them he wouldn't have taken them. If he was knowingly stealing them in order to pawn them for a lowball figure, he could've instead taken the numerous PlayStations that were also in that store and would've sold for similar amounts while attracting much less attention.
4oh9do 4y ago
I don't understand the cognitive dissonance seemingly on display by the game collector throughout the article: > He’d had a kind of philanthropic hubris as an owner and collector, someone who never gave a second thought to keeping his legendary game collection a secret. He’d gladly let YouTubers film in the back; he would even open the safe back there and show them, item by item, his Louvre. Other collectors had rare games, sure, but in the back room of his store, and especially in the safe, he was proud to own 10,000 of what he described as “cherry” copies—his preferred term for virgin condition. and again... > And though the value of retro games had exploded in the past few years, he’d never been concerned about the safety of the thousands of games from his legendary collection—some of the most valuable video games on earth. and yet again... > Though the vault door didn’t work then and was mainly for show, that anything behind it could be, would be, stolen seemed unimaginable. It is repeated time and time again that these items are valuable, that the collector was keenly aware that they are extremely valuable, and yet he also repeatedly seemed to refuse to acknowledge that you need to take steps to protect valuables, and the more valuable something is the more steps you need to take to protect it. I don't want to 'victim blame', suffering a burglary is a horrible experience, but it is one compounded by foolhardiness.
- ballenf 4y ago
  I can really identify with the dissonance you identify. Until you've had your bike stolen (or known people who have), you just can't imagine it happening with clarity. Therefore I don't really think it's cognitive dissonance as much as lack of imagination. Dissonance would be if there were break-in attempts that he ignored. Or if he got threats and did nothing. He didn't actually have concrete reason to believe that he was a target.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmckn 4y ago
    > Until you've had your bike stolen (or known people who have), you just can't imagine it happening with clarity. It's _very_ common for cyclists to use bike locks even if they personally haven't suffered a bike theft.

121 points by mmasu 4y ago

I felt crushed for the owner, reading this. What sounds like a lifetime of work collecting these rare, perfect condition games, just to have it destroyed in service of making the games harder to track when being pawned for short money. Personally I don’t think I’d collect and not play these games, I like using my things for what they are for and I think the regular use enhances the value, but still I empathize with the store owner.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I’m sure he had multiple copies of the non-rare games that were not mint and which he played.

GaelFG 4y ago

Edit to clarify : I don't doubt this specific robbing story, and I'm sad for the owner. It's the narrative about million dollars game cartridge, which can be read "a lot" in press and appear in the middle of the article which intrigue/bother me. I'm geniously wondering (but not too hard I admit) what part about theses stories of 'million dollar videogame cardridges' are trues and wich are urban legend. There were multiple alleged scam story about this 'milieu' and stories about crazy prices were indeed fake (or more exactly PR for derivated product like 'expertise' and 'unusual placement and money laundering friendly'). But I wonder if there is really a market of people exchanging game copy for really high amount with 5 or more digits. (no doubt for dedicated fans, I know a few, but event if they pay hight sum we are still in the 3-4 digits sums and often a lot of time, it stays a hobby). People passionated about a specic game, willing to pay hundreds of dollar for a legit cartridge and nostalgia kick not doubt. People willing to spend thousands of dollar on an occasional project of making a restoration of an old arcade cabinet, not doubt (it's a nice tinkering hobby, but the hobby part is probably the most important, not the result). But "numerous insanely rich and anonymous peoples willing to spend millions on black market with shady people to buy stolen video game cartridge" I doubt ^^

mr_gibbins 4y ago
The people paying $00,000s or more for games are not people who are interested in the games, as such. They'll never open them and play them, or even do what the store owner here did and keep them safe, showcase them to interested people. They'll just keep them squirreled away in a safe deposit box, wait a few years and sell on when the games have appreciated some value - i.e. an investment opportunity.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  But like most collectibles, they are poor investments. It’s extremely difficult to not a priori which game will be rare and valuable in 30 years. Meanwhile you are paying for climate controlled storage.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    I accidently have a few of these 'collectable' games. I did not buy them 20+ years ago to put them on a shelf. I play them.
- gennarro 4y ago
  To be fair it seems like the topic of the story didn’t play most of these games, based on their condition and description of their packaging.
- GaelFG 4y ago
  That's the narrative and it may be true but do you know people doing this for such amounts ? I mean it's based on : - video game are a popular subject - some people like to collect things for disproportionate money values (it's even a 'nerd' cliché) - some rare art collectible like famous painting can be worth hundred of thousands or even millions - everyone dream of a small item you can store and sells with an increased value just by waiting But an old video game cartridge is not a piece of art, it's a cheap industrial produced thing. I'm curious if there are really people investing in theses for company grade amounts of money.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

Beltiras 4y ago

My heart is aching for the owner. At the same time I feel a sense of relief because I am moving between countries. A lot of what I am doing these days is giving away my "stuff" and shedding attachments to "things". I do understand him thou. My 8 cases of Magic cards will be sorely missed, but I am happy to know that the Magic cards don't own me.

gigaflop 4y ago
When I was in college, I had stopped playing MTG, but several of my DnD friends still did. Once in a while, I'd bring down a box of my cards, and let them pick through whatever they wanted for 80%-ish of their value, traded towards food. In a way, that was probably one of the best ways for me to get rid of some.
- Beltiras 4y ago
  My problem is that this is a 20 year plus collection. It's of a size where logistics are needed to move the darn thing and monetizing it's value will be somewhat hard.
  - khalilravanna 4y ago
    On the monetization front I’ve been looking for something to automatically catalog a large collection of cards but it looks like the only ones that exist are for large outfits (https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000 https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000) given the cost. I imagine it’d be pretty easy to have a camera identify cards with OCR being what it is today but then you have to go about laying out every single card which is labor intensive. I would just love some automatic way to have my cards automatically registered in a database. Then it becomes incredibly easy to quantify the worth of a collection and identify which cards are actually worth the time to sell (anything over $5, $10, etc.).
    - Hallucinaut 4y ago
      I have the perfect HackerNews link for you, my friend! https://www.hackster.io/chev-eldrid/trading-card-inventory-tool-pricer-a5e819 https://www.hackster.io/chev-eldrid/trading-card-inventory-t... Buon appetito!

elephanlemon 4y ago

1) Always bolt down your safe. 2) Most “safes” are not actual safes but “residential security containers.” A real safe will be UL rated and one this size (guessing it was large, didn’t see any pictures) weigh in the thousands of pounds.

oneoff786 4y ago
The threat model for (2) is really more of a fire thing if I understand correctly. Which does make a lot of sense for most people. I’m pretty confident I will never be burgled. I could see my house burning down.
- aerostable_slug 4y ago
  Almost all gun safes are at this level, and California DOJ just released the home addresses of thousands of legal gun owners. The threat model for those people has dramatically changed, but unfortunately the barriers to entry for a 'real' safe are quite high (cost, weight). I expect a statistically significant bump in stolen guns hitting the streets directly attributable to CA DOJ's incompetence.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Why would you prefer to rob someone who has a gun? A gun in a locked safe is hardly a good target compared to the typical valuables. It’s also likely to be deep within the house in a harder to find spot. And, they have a gun.
    - aerostable_slug 4y ago
      Because gun safes aren't actually safes according to insurance companies. They're easily defeated with a crowbar or a saw, and generally light enough that criminals can just take them (if they aren't bolted down) and defeat them somewhere else if need be. These aren't currency/jewelry-grade safes with relocking plates and the like. They're thin metal that's just about good enough to keep a child out and that's it. Re: someone with a gun — just wait until the person goes to work. Many burglaries happen in the middle of the day (like the one my family experienced).

hnbad 4y ago

This is as good a time as any to remind people that the prices for vintage video games are artificially inflated and largely the result of wash trading via auction houses and grading services, which locked out the preexisting retro gaming communities and turned a beloved hobby into an instrument for dubious financial speculation (and arguably set the precedent for NFT crypto trading, which has even fewer regulations and even less transparency that could prevent these wash trades): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A The story says the collector described his collection as an "archive". This flies in the face of actual archival efforts like The Internet Archive, which persist digital copies of old games and make them available to the public when possible. Having a large collection of rare games in pristine condition in locked cases in your vault is not archival, it's hoarding at worst and financial speculation at best.

GaelFG 4y ago
I don't know the collector personally, but for having been/witnessed friends being interviewed by entertainment press reporters a few times, it's totally possible the article author just wanted to make the story more dramatic and overwhelmed him with oriented questions full of superlatives :)

jnsie 4y ago

That was an enjoyable, nostalgia filled, and depressing read. It's obvious he didn't have the right security in place, but it seems he also didn't insure his collectibles appropriately. It's hard not to feel sorry for someone who collected as a labor of love, moreso since he seemed generous in opening his collection up to the greater community.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Does anyone see an irony that these pieces would have been less likely to be stolen if they were on a shelf in plain site?

RajT88 4y ago
Sort of like if you drop off a Monet at a thrift shop. Nobody would steal it. Someone might buy it for 5 dollars.
- acomjean 4y ago
  The street artist Banksy put real works for sale in NYC at a booth outside the met. He sold very few, for almost nothing. This after people going through extraordinary lengths to preserve anything he created. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/video-banksy-set-up-pop-up-booth-in-central-park-and-only-had-three-customers https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/video-banksy-set-up...
  - RajT88 4y ago
    He's nothing if not a humorist. He did a work for "The Outlaws" show. If you're OK with spoilers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59236187 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59236187

upupandup 4y ago

During peak bubble, heists are common, I wonder if there is a deflationary event coming to collectibles in general. They've ballooned astronomically in the past few years and I wonder if its sustainable seeing that in auctions the buy or sell it to each other in order to increase the valuation in hopes that some billionaire will come and buy their rare super mario bros cartridge. I don't know if you had the money and can't think of what to buy next, you end up collecting these insanely expensive nintendo cartridges that you don't even know will work. The FPGA and CD emulator hardware that lets you run games off SD card seems to have put some liquidity suppression. However, there is a novelty to owning the complete game box, complete with mint condition manuals and covers, so there will always be demand for that. Not a good spot for the owner to be in.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> During peak bubble, heists are common But I didn't get the impression that the thief here really knew what he was after - he seemed to do a really poor job pawning the stolen goods (and settled for a lowball figure in some cases for games that were worth much more). To me it seems like a boring robbery - they went after the safe because those typically contain valuables (in this case it also contained cash and precious metals). I'm not sure he ever realized the value of the games he'd stolen.
- dmonitor 4y ago
  When you're selling a stolen rare "artifact", you have to pay the "don't ask the five people who are known to have one of these" fee
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I'm not convinced - if he was aware of the rarity of these items and the difficulty fencing them he wouldn't have taken them. If he was knowingly stealing them in order to pawn them for a lowball figure, he could've instead taken the numerous PlayStations that were also in that store and would've sold for similar amounts while attracting much less attention.

4oh9do 4y ago

I don't understand the cognitive dissonance seemingly on display by the game collector throughout the article: > He’d had a kind of philanthropic hubris as an owner and collector, someone who never gave a second thought to keeping his legendary game collection a secret. He’d gladly let YouTubers film in the back; he would even open the safe back there and show them, item by item, his Louvre. Other collectors had rare games, sure, but in the back room of his store, and especially in the safe, he was proud to own 10,000 of what he described as “cherry” copies—his preferred term for virgin condition. and again... > And though the value of retro games had exploded in the past few years, he’d never been concerned about the safety of the thousands of games from his legendary collection—some of the most valuable video games on earth. and yet again... > Though the vault door didn’t work then and was mainly for show, that anything behind it could be, would be, stolen seemed unimaginable. It is repeated time and time again that these items are valuable, that the collector was keenly aware that they are extremely valuable, and yet he also repeatedly seemed to refuse to acknowledge that you need to take steps to protect valuables, and the more valuable something is the more steps you need to take to protect it. I don't want to 'victim blame', suffering a burglary is a horrible experience, but it is one compounded by foolhardiness.

ballenf 4y ago
I can really identify with the dissonance you identify. Until you've had your bike stolen (or known people who have), you just can't imagine it happening with clarity. Therefore I don't really think it's cognitive dissonance as much as lack of imagination. Dissonance would be if there were break-in attempts that he ignored. Or if he got threats and did nothing. He didn't actually have concrete reason to believe that he was a target.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cmckn 4y ago
  > Until you've had your bike stolen (or known people who have), you just can't imagine it happening with clarity. It's _very_ common for cyclists to use bike locks even if they personally haven't suffered a bike theft.