Listen.

Do you hear that?

It is the sound of Bidder 24's wife crying.

$358 a game isn't wacky batshit pricing? When did you start shitting gold?

Meh, it's only Canadian money.

I understand Ebay tends to be somewhat shady and all that, but can someone explain to me the logic of one person bumping it from $42K to 160K in a matter of 2 minutes? Unless it's some random 14 year old who thinks it's funny to fuck with a decent auction, that guy's got a Peter Griffinish grasp of the bidding process.

At $358.65 a game, the virtual console haters can now shut up.

Its Bill Gates i tell ya!!

The toploading NES isn't superior, it's totally lame. The original is much cooler, and doesn't look like some ugly bastard SNES. Grey box ftw!

Why does everyone think it's Gates?
Gates=rich so buy crazy NES auction?

Does not compute!

Check out the high bidder's auction history. He's bid on 11 items in the past hour, out of a total bidding history of 12 items. The person is obvious just playing around. I feel sorry for the kid though when they realize that they're under legal obligation to pay...

I call shenanigans.

Maybe I forgot how eBay works, but doesn't this mean that there are no fewer than TWO bidders willing to drop a quarter-mil on this collection?

Sucks for the dude selling the games trying to make an honest attempt to get some $$ out of this.. now chumps are going to fook it up for him.

"I understand Ebay tends to be somewhat shady and all that, but can someone explain to me the logic of one person bumping it from $42K to 160K in a matter of 2 minutes?"

Yeah, it's called a "joke."

This is not a serious bid. Any time we see an auction like this, somebody bids some ridiculous amount and everybody goes apeshit. Meanwhile, the bidder sits there chuckling because he's never gonna pay. Look at the guy's history. He apparently signed up 5 days ago, bought one item, and has now bid on 14 separate auctions in the last hour.

Anyway, this is not even *every* NES game - it's a lot of them, but a few of the really rare ones are missing. So I'm not sure a real hardcore collector (the kind of person who *would* spend thousands of dollars) is even really going to be interested.

museum possibly?

yeah, someone is messing with the auction, but i agree with hegemonyhog; this isn't crazy enough? i'm almost scared to see what "wacky batshit nutball pricing" is michael.

I understand Ebay tends to be somewhat shady and all that, but can someone explain to me the logic of one person bumping it from $42K to 160K in a matter of 2 minutes?

Bidder number 24 had entered a "proxy bid" when the action was around 42k, and had placed it up to somewhere above 160k.

An example to explain proxy bids:

Person A and person B are bidding on an auction. Person A puts a bid of 5 dollars. Person B is willing to pay 20 dollars and puts in a proxy bid of just that. The proxy bid then bumps just past A's bid as little as the auction allows (usually a dollar if I'm not mistaken), so now it is priced at 6 dollars with the high bid to person B. Person A can input 7, but B's proxy bid will automatically place another bid for 8 in return. Only once Person A (or C?) passes person B's proxy bid of 20 dollars do they actually take the lead.

I'm pretty sure this is fairly accurate, but anyone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

There is one possible explanation to the bidding on this auction. It could be Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade getting it for the Grand Prize of the Omegathon at PAX. I know they bought a similar item a couple of years back for taht very reason. In fact I think it was posted on here or Joystiq right before they bought it.

Another possibility: Someone from Nintendo looking to get carts to grab the roms from for their virtual console...

Kidding...?

Check out the bid retraction history on this auction. That combined with the outrageous prices makes me think that this isn't serious. I've got to agree with instantpop on this one...

Shenanigans.

Considering most of ebay is being scammed constantly by Nigerians, I'd say there's going to be one disappointed seller come auction close.

AHAHHA ^nice one DarkNight_DS

Well, all the bidders have the same name? What's with that? On top of that it's the known LICENSED games, which does not include any tengen games or color dreams, etc. So it's fairly accurate, i myself have gathered about 325 of the known 714 us release games (licensed and unlicensed) and his collection looks nice. Hope it's the seller's self fluffing his own auction and not some jerk off.

Hell,
This is ridiculous. I mean, you could almost get a PS3 for that kind of money!

Wasn't that similar PAX prize something along the lines of every Nintendo product ever made? Seems like a much better prize than this auction, and they probably still paid less than this bidder. That collection even had a virtual boy, if I remember correctly.

Huh? It's at $30 THOUSAND dollars right now, NOT $240,000!

Inaccurate!

A ton of bids were canceled, around 30 or so.

Dear eBay Community Member,
The bid that you entered for the item (110083483658) has been cancelled. You can view the reason provided for the cancellation by selecting the (bid history) link from the individual item page.

Regards,
eBay

My bad, somebody did bid $240,000, but s/he was just messing around. It was cancelled.

Nintendo is just spending all that money they are making on the DS and Wii. We will soon find out it's Reggie and he will drive to personally pick up the games after beating up some peeps using PSP.

They need to spend that Ad budget some how.

If you actually read the auction description, the seller is culling all bids that he doesn't hear from the bidder.

That auction that PA bought a couple of years ago was for every NES title, including the unlicensed games. And I'm pretty sure that they paid far less than $20,000. I thought it was something around $12,000.

I can't imagine that it wouldn't be THAT hard to put a similar collection together by simply buying singles and collections from ebay and local game stores. Certainly not 12,000$ hard. If this does sell for a real price, I can't imagine that it will be that long before other people realize the money to be made by creating similar collections.

Pfff, top loading superior? It only had RF out, no AV cables. It was also annoying to fit in any kind of shelving.

Jackasses who up bids just to be jackasses are annoying. They should be banninated on the spot, IP/domain/whatever it takes to get rid of them. You don't have that kind of problem in any other retail environment. And I don't recall ever hearing of "real" auctions where someone bids 10 times the going amount just to be a jerk.

Even at 25k it works out at around $37 per game. People thought the virtual console was expensive lol.

Was the top-loader NES really superior? I thought it only had an RF-out and no RCA ports, while the original had both.

If each title were $19.99, then this guy has hit the 100% profit mark. Not bad. If the seller had ALL the original packaging for the games, they might set a new record.

I'm friend with a famous toy auctioneer and he said that there will be a generation of collectors for electronic games. He joked once that, someone should have bought each colour of the iMac when it first came out (5 fruity colours). I think after seeing this auction and those of old Apple and TRS80...he is right.

A bit more "reasonable" now at $21,000...but the bidder's name is Bidder_36 so we'll see how that goes.

You need to check out eBay's new policy, Parsifal. For high price auctions, they are not showing bidders names any more, unless you are the seller. They are trying to reduce the number of spammers just hitting up the people bidding on auctions.