It has been said that during the winter, sales of retro games boom as a lot of people spend their evenings staying in the warm and thus need entertaining. We wouldn’t be surprised if a few people hope to recreate the magic of a Christmas long gone by purchasing a vintage console off eBay too.
This month’s eBay round-up backs this up with lots of things selling for silly prices. Money is hard to come by in January? Not if you’re a retro gamer it would seem.
Quite a few Sega Master System items have caught our attention. An Action Replay cheat cartridge sold for £109 on Buy It Now, a copy of Power Strike II went for £91 and a TecToy version of Road Rash shifted for £34.
A French seller has also been listing some reproduction carts containing the Game Gear versions of Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic Drift Racing complete with authentic looking cases but only the former found a buyer.
On Game Gear meanwhile a factory sealed system sold for £225 on a US auction, a copy of The Itchy & Scratchy Game in its fetching bright yellow box went for £79.99 while a copy of the European-exclusive James Pond: Operation Starfi5h went for £50.
From Sega to Sony. A brand new PSone “bumdle†sold for £74 after 13 bids, containing a new joypad, memory card and a factory sealed copy of Spyro. A fully working PS2 development kit with manuals and software also went for £280. The seller wanted £50 postage. Is it made out of lead?
Onto Nintendo. The highest grossing auction this month was for a factory sealed copy of 10 Yard Fight on NES, which still had the plastic shelf hanger on it. It ended at $2,125 (£1,368) after 14 bids. Selling for a similar amount was this copy of Zelda II on Famicom, sealed and marked “Not for Resaleâ€. It really is a curious looking little thing. A factory sealed Captain Commando on SNES also ended at $1,332.98 (£858.49) from 12 bids while a sealed copy of Konami’s Metal Warriors sold for slightly more – $1,350.00 (£869.45).
The seller of this Atari Lynx bundle undersold it a bit. Well, it sold at a decent price (£154) but you would have thought he would have made a bigger deal out of it including 47 games. That’s got to be half the entire Lynx catalogue.
In last month’s round-up we covered the fact that the Sonic Generations collector’s edition has been selling for large amounts. The prices have dropped at little – this one went for £86 (8 bids) and this one for £84 (27 bids) – but a few auctions have reached almost £200, like this one.