I certainly would not classify myself as en eBay junky, but I do occasionally like to do some searching to see what I can find, usually in the areas of music, games or old computer hardware. I recently came across a seller who was selling hundreds of old Commodore 64 games, some of them still in their original shrink wrap. I'm going to overlook the obvious question of why someone would have hoarded shrink wrapped games for the C64 until now and assume there's a reasonable explanation.
I put a few of these auctions on my watch list because there were a few items I was marginally interested in, and some others that I just wanted to see how high they would go. One of the items I actually bid on (and lost) was a copy of the game Hacker 2, which was still shrink wrapped. I don't know if anyone else remembers the game Hacker, but I spent many, many, many hours in that game and did finally decipher it and win. I wanted the sequel for the "collection," which I'm sure sounds rather silly to most of you.
One of the other items that I watched was a shrink wrapped copy of the Bard's Tale III, which is probably on my RPG gamers' lists as one of the top 10 RPGs of all time. It certainly is on my list. I didn't really want to bid on it, but I was curious how high it would go.
When it was all said and done, Hacker 2 sold for $48 and Bard's Tale 3 sold for $51. It's amazing to me that these games are still worth so much to someone. Out of curiosity, I started poking around the seller's other completed items. What I found nearly knocked me off my chair.
Some of the old C64 games are selling for hundreds of dollars, including "Space Taxi" for $512. I haven't heard of this particular game. Next highest were the first 3 titles of the Ultima Trilogy that sold for $446. Even some opened games sold for almost $200.
I hope that the author of Space Taxi is proud that his or her game has appreciated at least 1,000% over the past 20-30 years. That beats the average invest in the stock market by several times. Does this mean we should all start investing in shrink wrapped computer games? Time to re-evaluate the portfolio, I'd say...