Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 267: The Holy Grails of Collecting

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Hide your wallets: Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Chris Kohler, and Steve Lin discuss the pricing perils, pitfalls, and occasional perfidy surrounding the rarest/costliest/most non-existent video game collectibles in history.

This week in Retronauts, we have chosen poorly. Everyone, welcome to another episode. and here in the room at the heart of Alexandreda with me, we have a cast of luminaries, including none other than. Steve, I have chosen Wisely Lynn. Wow, just daring to be different, I see. Chris, can't I just take all of the cups in this room, Kohler? And finally.

I'm Bob Mackie. I've chosen adequately. And we are here because we are sons of carpenters, and we're talking about video game Holy Grails. That's correct. It's the humble-looking. video game with the copper interior. Spoilers.

Yeah, so I thought it would be fun to do... So was Jesus drinking a Moscow mule? Is that what I'm saying? Or a julep. A Jesus julep. Yeah, yeah. A mint Jesus. There we go.

Yeah. So anyway, it's been a long weekend, as you can tell, by our punchiness. And so I thought, you know, as usual, it's always nice to end a lengthy weekend of podcast recordings with a kind of softball session. And so I thought this would be a fun topic. Just talking about rare and interesting and covet-worthy video games that collectors drool about. And because Chris and Steve have spent so much time and energy collecting games and, you know, have sought down so many rarities, you know, for collections and for more altruistic purposes, both. I really wanted to get them in here to talk about their experiences.

seeking these games and also just their perspectives on them. And I'm sure you guys know about rare and hard-defined games and high-priced games that I'm not even aware of. Like, I know, Steve, a couple of years ago, you were in Japan and you found that game with the fire truck or whatever on it. What is that one? The game with the fire truck on it. The Famicom game with like the, it's like the fire train or something. It's made by an insurance company. I can't remember the actual title

at the street right off the top of my head but yeah it was just sort of randomly sitting there and it was designed as an educational piece for insurance. Right, but it's like really hard to find and very expensive because who wants, what child wants a FAMECOM game about insurance? I ask you.

The answer is not very many. And so games like this become, you know, they have almost no value for a while and then as people start to build collections and say, oh, what's out there? what can I, you know, collect that's interesting or unusual? Then they start to, you know, gain notoriety and therefore they rise in price and desirability.

So that's the kind of thing we're going to be talking about today. And I'm not really necessarily a person to talk to this subject because I do, you know, hunt for video games, but it's mostly just for the sake of documenting them, you know, photographing them for videos and books. And I don't have any interest in keeping them. and if I can borrow them instead of having to buy them, that's even better. I don't really need a lot of games in my life. I, you know, I own the ones or, you know, try to own the ones that I think are worth having

that, you know, mean a lot to me, but I just don't have the space for more than that. So I don't have a lot of treasure hunting experience. And I know Bob is very down on the idea of physical possessions in general being the Marxist that he is. True, true. Shed them all. So, really, it's kind of about picking the brains of these two guys over here, our visitors today. Yeah, well, I mean, I can say from my point of view, I actually have acquired a lot of the games that are on this list.

And did it fill the hole in your heart? No, no. In fact, it's always anti-climactic. This heart can only be filled by you. Yes, yes, by love. It really is anti-climactic. Even kind of finishing collections, you need that one last game. And, yeah, you put it on the shelf next to all of the other games for that system.

And then you're like, oh, I guess what's the next thing? Yeah, you don't level up or anything. It's really disappointing. You listen to dust in the wind and cry. Yeah, yeah. It's like, what have I done? And I think this is why you see escalation for people, especially that have huge collections. It's, well, I finish this.

What's the next thing I need to chase? And then it ends up being a lot of stuff that we're going to talk about today. The answer is the chuck wagon. Right. Yes, correct. It's really kind of where it all begins. Yeah, that's right. So, Chris, how about yourself?

I mean, I feel like as long as I've known you, you've had basically one eye glued to an eBay watch list. Yes, that is definitely true. Well, yeah, and it's not that I am always looking out for bargains. I am always, I do always have those eBay safe. searches open, you know, mostly because you want to, you know, catch a really good deal the second that it hits eBay and grab it, right? But just doing that does not get you to the Holy Grails usually, right? You know, sometimes you might extremely luck out and, you know, get something like that. But in general, it's, it's the very, very rare stuff is stuff that you do have

to, like, specifically, like, make a plan for how am I going to acquire this? And really, by the time that you, by the time that you start thinking about the rarest games for each system, you've probably already kind of like, even if you don't already own the not rare stuff, you've already kind of made the list and looked at everything and have kind of started thinking in your head, well, what would it take to put this whole thing together? So it's more of an involved process, I think. But it is true that I am, I have been an active collector since you have known me. Do you have an end game for your collection? No, I've got to figure out what that is.

Right now, yes. I mean, I know you completed the Square collection, which was like really important. Yes. Well, so, yeah, so it's all, for me, it's all about waiting until I get interested in some sort of smaller subset and then going, okay, I think I'd like to collect that and then doing the work for that. So in this case, it was, well, yes, the Squarespace set, but primarily what I did not have was all of the PC games that Square had made. prior to making Famicom and console games in Japan. And so that is the fun of it for me, which is step number one, make a list, actually figure out what games were released, because that information can be tough to find, especially when it's obscure like Japanese PC games. Like you, it's not, there's, there might be a list out there, but that list might not be complete.

They might include games that didn't actually get released because the person compiling the list was doing it from second part, you know, second, second, uh, Secondary sources, rather. So the first fun part is actually make the list. You know, the second, and then, and then it's like, okay, now where do I, where do I find this stuff? And in so doing, I mean, I went from having a vague notion that Square had made PC games. But then once I sought them all out and bought them all, collected them all, got all the pieces, I now have a much, you know, better appreciation for what the games were. You know, especially in this particular case, it was like these manuals are not scanned, the boxes are not scanned, the information is not out there.

And some of the games included credits in the manuals that are just not, it's just not online. So, yeah, so that was really fun. But yes, that is what I tend to do is not, it's not about like I want to collect all the Super Nintendo games because I really don't. It's about what's a smaller subset of things that I can collect. I bought all of the games that renovation made on the Genesis, the company that put out Valis and stuff like that, because I thought that their library was really cool. I got all the Castlevania games. And actually, now I'm not working on anything in particular. I actually, so I really don't have anything right now.

I think what's kept me from being a collector outside of money, not having it, is hearing Chris talk about the process of collecting things gave me anxiety right now, just like making a list and hunting. And it might be because I'm from a working class background in town where if something takes effort to buy, I just check out immediately. Like, I'm not getting in line for a thing. I'm not hunting for a thing if I can't go online and find it immediately. I'm just, I don't want it anymore. Like, I feel like I just, I don't want to take that much effort to get a thing if I have money for it. Just like, take my money, please. Or if I can't, then just I'll forget about it completely.

Right. Well, this is, sorry, go ahead. No, I just think what's important is, I mean, certainly something that I've realized is it's a lot better to collect things that nobody else is actually. actively collecting. That helps too. Yeah. And certainly I found that to be the case when I did like my collection of, say, electronic games magazine, the first video game magazine.

Like, there wasn't a lot of competition happening there. And the square games, nobody's really that excited about collecting all of them. So it's just finding those things that scratch that itch that I personally am really interested in that aren't necessarily the super expensive things. Right. And I think that was something that for a lot of this is some people want it just because it's worth a lot of money. Right? It's expensive. There's no other reason they're looking for it.

Yeah. Whereas, you know, in your case, looking for something because actually there's a lot of things that we know have been produced. We know they existed at some point in time, but we don't know where it is now. And so that's what I'm looking for a lot of times. Sometimes I don't know that I was looking for it until it pops up, right? And like kind of like that NBA jam ball. It's like we didn't realize that was a resin prop that they used for the box. So, like, oh, that's cool. But things that I put in here, like, you know, Earthbound 64. Right. And that first prototype, they said, like, it's like 60% done or something. And so there's some playability there. Or, you know, recently the high 10 bomber man was dumped. But that's just the disc.

There's a hardware component to it that you don't know where that is. And those are supposedly like a million, $2 million for the hardware. Oh, God. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that whole thing is pretty wild. for myself, I, yeah, I haven't really found myself desiring anything in particular. Like, the Castlevania games might have been interesting, but then, you know, I started to realize, like, some of these games aren't actually any good, and I don't think I want to own them. So, yeah, the one collection that I really have sought out recently was the, I mentioned this in the Game Boy episode we just recorded Hudson's set of, Bandage 10 Game Boy games.

Oh, right. There were like nine games that they put in these little metal tins and released in Japan. And I came across one of them a couple of years ago. It was Samigame, or same game, depending on which translation you read. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like this cute little puzzle game that I picked up because I remember playing it on my Macintosh, you know, back in, like, 1995. And I said, oh, they put this on Game Boy.

Cool. And it comes in a weird little box. Okay. And there was a copy of Game Boy Wars Turbo that in CSX had, you know, just like overstock and sold for like 20 bucks right when I started doing Game Boy stuff. So I picked that up too. And then I said, you know, I wonder how many of these there are. This is interesting. And it turns out there's like nine apparently that I can find.

So I handed those down slowly and progressively. And I didn't mention that, hey, there's this neat thing that exists online until I had pretty much locked everything down. And then I was like, hey, here's the thing that I found and was pretty cool. Now I'm mentioning it because if you guys want to go chase it and raise the price, that's great. But I'm done. I'm out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, in my case, I don't even want to own anything that we find. Like, just go directly to the museum, just send it there. That's awesome. I don't need to hold it. Yeah, I mean, I've mentioned this before, but when I collect stuff, I generally keep it long enough to document it, you know, to do videos around it, put it in a book, and then it's out. And I'm liquefying it to turn it into things that I can, you know, do. for the next book. Right.

So you are, but even still, you are participating in the market. I am, but I'm trying not to cause problems with the market. I'm trying not to exacerbate problems. Right. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but, you know, for the most part, I'm trying to kind of like find ways around that. If only for the sake of not spending ridiculous amounts of money on a game that's probably not very good and I just need the, you know, a photo of the box. For the most part, I would say that the things that I'm interested in collecting are not games, but rather the means to play the games.

And it's not even the means to play the games because that's not hard. It's the means to play and record the games. So my Holy Grails are things that don't exist yet, like a NeoGeo Pocket Color with a video outtap or the same thing for WonderSwan. I was going to say, next 68,000. That was going to be my Holy Grail after I played it last year at Portland. or Long Island Retro Expo and had this amazing experience with the X68,000,

but then a few months later, someone hooked me up with one as a trade. I'm still trying to get it up and running completely, but I have this thing that I thought I would never be able to acquire or afford. So I'm like, that's cool, but it's not having it that's great.

It's the fact that it will be a vehicle by which I can have video game experiences and record them and just, you know, both enjoy games and kind of, you know, make work out of them. So that's, I guess that's what gets me going is the means to play video games. Yeah. I mean, I think so we talk about, hey, there's all, you know, you're trying to check off a list or something.

I think if I found satisfaction in any of this, it's something that had a very personal connection to me. And so it's like, oh, like the NWC, I was part of that in Cleveland. And so that has a connection, even though it is also, you know, one of the Holy Grail cartridges, It's something that I found personally really interesting. It's like, maybe I played on this cartridge when I was playing in the competition. Right. So the notes I put together here, I see someone has added some philosophical stuff. Ooh, that was me.

Okay, like talking about what a Holy Grail even is and getting into history. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I made some Indiana Jones jokes, but here we go with, like, actual talking about antiquities and religious artifacts. Right. Do you guys want to talk about this? Well, because, yeah, because, you know, we use the term Holy Grail. to refer to certain items in various collecting pastimes really because the original Holy Grail was the Holy Grail. Like the original collectors in modern times were, what did they collect?

They didn't collect comic books. They collected antiquities. They collected artifacts of history. And they collected religious artifacts as well, whatever. You know, I mean, that was sort of the height of collecting was that this is a splinter off of the cross. This is a, this is the shroud that such and such saint was wrapped in, you know, that sort of stuff. And so, you know, and in that sense, you know, what was the one thing that every collector of antiquities wanted to get their hands on was the Holy Grail. And so then it sort of, you know, became a metaphor for other collections.

Should we even explain what that is or do we think that, you know, everyone has seen Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade? That's where they learn from it. Yeah. Right, right. It's not in the Bible. No, it is not in the Bible. Well, no, it is mentioned in the Bible because. They don't drink out of their hands.

It's mentioned. But no one's like, and Jesus drank. and then this was a highly coveted collector's item. It was the, this grail is holy. Yes. Right. Yeah, yeah, yes. It was the cup that he had is Moscow mule and the night that he had his final dinner with his disciples.

And so then, of course, it's like, oh, we got to get that cup. I don't know why they want the cup and not like the salad fork. You know what I mean? Like, why not the salad fork? But for some reason. I thought the cup was, the grail was like the, supposedly. You know, when they pierced Christ's side with the spear. Oh, they caught the blood in the cup.

Come on, he dies, but it's okay because he comes back in the second chapter. I know this sequel. Yeah, like, you know. Langeness, the soldier, pierced his side with the lands of Lodgenus, which is also a relic. Which is also a holy relic. Yeah, exactly. And then they, I thought the story was that they caught some of his blood. Oh, could be.

That's my understanding as well. And so, you know, Jesus' blood made the grill special. So no one wants the holy flatware or the holy tablecloth. No, unless he, like, accidentally poked himself with the holy steak knife, in which case, that would also be sanctified by his blood. Right. Well, I think it's the question is, I've talked to people and said, oh, my holy grail is, you know, earthbound on Super Nintendo. Right. If I had that in one hand and then NWC gold and the other, which one are you going to take?

Is it really, you know, your holy grail? Because everybody loves using the term holy grail, but people seem to want to define it at not. as thing I will never get, but as a thing that I actually could get and that I'm currently hoping to get. And, you know, it got to the point where I saw somebody online say that their personal grail was a loose copy of Contra for NES. Okay. I was like, all right.

Ambig. So are these more gaming white whales then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. White whale, I feel like, is the thing that keeps slipping through your fingers every time you think you're going to get it. I think white whale is a more personal thing. I think that because that is that more personal quest, whereas the Holy Grail, the idea is, you know, it's, we're trying to define like the ultimate, ultimate item for people who collect in that particular. And that was really what I had in mind when I suggested this topic.

But it's okay for it to, you know, to have some slippage to do some, yeah, the whale grail. And also, the Holy Grail is a shifting. thing because, I mean, as people discuss when we get into Atari collecting, I think that as you mentioned, the original Atari 2,600, the idea of the Holy Grail was the game Chase the Chuck Wagon, which you, which was licensed by Chuck Wagon dog food and you had to purchase by, I think, collecting UPCs possibly from Purina dog food bag. That was very of the era, yes. Yes, like flagpoints on G.I. Joe's.

And that's how you got the game to the point that, you know, an original synonym for collecting video games was chasing the chuck wagon, going out and trying to find those, you know, Atari games. And this, we're talking about like the 80s. We're talking about like the early 80s, you know, to mid-80s to late 80s. It's interesting because I feel like of anything that would have been a holy grail for Atari collectors, it wouldn't have been chased the chuck wagon, which was available, not in stores, but, you know, easily enough if you sent in UPCs from dog food, but rather Coke wins, which was that cartridge that was distributed. like within Coke executives or something like that. So here's the thing. Nobody had ever heard of that because it was distributed to Coke executives. And the way that the Holy Grail kind of shifts around is awareness.

Because once you become aware of something's existence, then you can start looking for it. I can't believe no one had posted about it to social media. I think it only kind of came around later on as more and more people started disseminating information about what was out there. Yeah. Was that like a David's Chef revelation or something? I have no idea. I'm not sure when that would have been discussed and talked about. But, I mean, you know, originally with Atari collecting, it was, well, what can we verify it exists?

Well, we know that Chase the Chuck Wagon exists because, you know, we've seen the ads and things like that that it existed, but we just can't find it. Yeah, I feel like collecting kind of like contemporary pop culture ephemera started to take off in the early 80s because with Star Wars collectors, you had the blue snaggle tooth. Yep. Which I think the story there was that when Kinner made its first set of. Star Wars toys. They just had like black and white photos of some aliens to go on and their sculptors were like, okay. So they made, you know, figures based on these really kind of poor source photos. And so they made one character who is actually supposed to be wearing like a red space suit and is very, very short. They made him very tall and put him in a blue space suit.

And then once the movie came out, they were like, oops. So they retooled him and repainted him and put out the proper version of snagletooth. So blue snaggle tooth was like, you know, this chasable figure, this rarity that only came out in the first wave before Star Wars Mania really took off. And so people kind of obsessed over that. Like culturally, was this because boomers were entering, not entering adulthood, but finally, like, achieving, like, real adult jobs and having disposable income. And they were the first generation that were really raised to consume. I cannot say. That's my correct by theory.

Well, you can always ride that wave, right? It's when people start hitting their 30s they have, at least nowadays, people have nostalgia for whatever they had as children, right? And so you start seeing the decline of one as one group ages out. And then the next one's like, oh, now it's N64 because those people are, you know, hitting 30 years old. Just like with your grandparents, we're roughly the same age in this room. Your grandparents would be like, oh, I remember that song. That's a nice song. That was a fun movie.

But your parents might have been like, I got to get this re-release. I got to get this, you know, funny old radio. or whatever, just like some sort of merchandising they wanted. But your grandparents were more like, at least mine were just like, oh, yeah, that was fun. And that was a fun memory. And then they moved on. But my parents were like, I want this in my house. I want a reminder of this.

Well, I think this kind of thing emerged out of other forms of collecting. You know, back in the day, back in my day, you had coin collectors and stamp collectors. And so, you know, philatelists were like, oh, I've got to get that stamp that was printed with the airplane upside down and that became this, you know, this ultra rare thing. And then you had comic books and, you know, I've got to get Action Comics 36 or whatever. Yeah. Action Comics 1, Tech to Comics 36. Whatever.

Right, right, right. But, yeah, you know, and on that note, I mean, it's probably a good time to insert the fact that I do go to a lot of flea markets. Don't find a lot of video games these days, but I sure as hell find a whole lot of giant-ass books full of stamp collections. Lots and lots of stamp collections. Every month... This must be worth millions of dollars. Oh, yeah, millions of dollars. Yeah.

Just really goes to show you that things are only worth, you know, what somebody's willing to pay for them at that point. Yeah. All right. Well, you were talking earlier about kind of awareness and like Coke wins and how can you figure out that that existed. One of the games for Atari that was, for a long time, there was a lot of rumors, was Air Raid, right? Because we just had the cartridge. I mean, I want to say for like 20-some-odd years, there was only the cart.

And I had the cart, but there was discussion about, did this ever have a box? And some people was like, well, I remember seeing in Texas, it was in like a baggie with like a cardboard top. And we're like, you know, all these rumors like, oh, they sold it in Mexico. And so for the longest time, we really just didn't know. Yeah. And then a box showed up. Right. Right.

And then there was no manual. Yes. And there was no manual. But just the fact that, hey, this box exists. Here it is. It sells for $35,000. Right. Because that's the only box we've ever seen.

And then, of course, a little bit later, one shows up with the box. and manual, and the same collector bought that one as well. Yeah. So, I mean, what ends up happening, I think, as we've discussed previously on this podcast, is that, I mean, so, and those, both of those $35,000, you know, air raid box sales happened in a major downturn for Atari game prices because, you know, in, like, they were going to, like, you know, classic gaming expo in, like, 2007. And that was where, you know, Atari loose cartridges were at their peak. And you had to pay, you know, 10, 15 bucks to get a copy of pitfall. And now it's like 25 cents to get a copy of pitfall. But at the same time, at the high end, the prices keep going up and up because there's, sure,

there's only a small group of people left really seriously collecting Atari, but they still have those holes in their collection. They have a lot of money saved up. They're probably at their peak earning potential at this point. They will drop 35K on that air raid box. Yeah. Or when there's only one, right? Like, the repros have helped people.

It's like, I'm going to scratch that edge by buying the repo, but something like Red Sea Cross where there's only one and the one guy is not going to sell it. What even is Red Sea Crossing? I've never heard of it. It's a religious game. Yeah, just seeing on theme here.

Okay, okay. Design for the Atari. I think you're just like, I actually don't think I've, I've only seen photographs of it. I've never actually, I don't think the ROMs dumped. Maybe it is.

But, yeah, somebody contacted a guy who's the programmer and he sent all the material he had. He didn't have any cartridges. What he had was a print ad for it in, I think, like a Christian magazine or something, which is one of the only other artifacts we have that this was sold at some point, but he's like, I didn't sell everybody of them. It really comes back to religious relics.

Yeah. Yeah, so for myself, I kind of agree about repro carts. Another thing that has been, I think, helpful in mitigating pricing, price inflation for games, has been flash carts, like Mega Drive, or EverDrive, Mega EverDrive, Super. effort drive, that sort of thing. Back in like 2011, 2012, I started trying to buy NES and Famicom games

that I knew were never going to show up on virtual console. Yeah. Like licensed games or they kept publishing, you know, the arcade version of RIGAR, but never the NES version. So I was like, well, you know what? I should make an effort to hunt down these games that are either by defunct publishers and no one cares about them anymore, like Little Sampson or something along those lines. You know, that I'm, they're just not going to show up in any kind of reprint ever.

And so, you know, I made a decent investment in some of these games not, not to resell them, just like I want to own these games and be able to play them. And there's not going to be a way for me to do that on virtual console. But then, you know, a couple of years later, Everdrives come along. And now I can play not only the Japanese version of Little Sampson that I own, but also the American version of Little Sampson without having to pay $1,500 for their privilege. And that's great. Like, you know, you can get into the question of morality and ethics and blah, blah, blah, legality with ROMs. But it's not hurting anyone, and it's nice for people to be able to play the games that have completely vanished from the market and have become just inaccessible due to the rising aftermarket prices that no one cares about that, you know, no publisher has any interest in whatsoever. Yeah.

I'm really grateful these things exist. Yeah, I think that also allows people to do things like long plays or like, you know, like, complete toolist to play throughs on games and have that on YouTube and so there's if you're the one person

that has the game and you're you suck at it right how can you actually document what happened there and so now people are able to access that

kind of show everyone hey here with the entirety of the game and for a lot of people that's really all they wanted to see you.

Why don't we talk about some of the Holy Grails of game collecting? We've talked about some Atari stuff. You talked about Chase the Chuck Wagon. Which, by the way, not very expensive. now. No. No. I'm sure they distributed hundreds of thousands of those.

They did. Yeah. So, you know, you kind of get into the reality of things. That's really, it's really thanks to, well, A, declining interest in Atari games, but also eBay, because, like, if, I mean, again, like, if somebody were to find tons of chase the chuck wagons, you know, but there was no eBay, it's like, how do you get that out to all these people? Maybe you sell a few in your local area, and then you just kind of sitting around.

You're like, what do I do with these? And they go in the dump, you know? But meanwhile, if there's, since there's a global. sort of way to sell these things. Actually, a lot of Atari stuff that used to be considered pretty rare is now very common because there have been people in Venezuela, just like selling Atari. I mean, Venezuela and other, like, South American countries also, just like selling a brand-new Atari games through eBay.

They seem to have an infinite supply of formerly rare, like the 2,600 version of Icari Warriors, you know, used to be super... I did not realize that existed. There is one, and it used to be super hard. Yeah, it was first party also. It was super, super hard to get. And, like, for the last decade, there is just somebody with an infinite warehouse supply of them in Venezuela, just selling them constantly. Now it's worth like $10.00.

Is this like us shipping the losing team, like in a championship game, like sending the bad shirt over to, like, some country? It's basically, yes. That is precisely what it is. It's all this stuff got sent there, you know, after Atari's Day in the Sun and in the U.S. and it's just all got shipped down there, and now it's all getting shipped back to collectors. That's wild. So we talked about Air Raid,

which is one of the more notable ones, I think, just because the cartridge is so weird. It's like this sky blue cartridge with like a plunger handle on it or something. It's really strange. You got to get your grip. I think also it's funny because it's made by a company named MennaVision.

Oh, yeah. Everybody's like, oh, that's pretty goofy. So. And then Red Sea Crossing, which I had never heard of until just now. And do we consider the sword quest games, Holy Grails? I think those might be, the latter two at least, would be proper Holy Grails because did they exist? Will they exist?

Well, Waterworld came out. Right. Yeah. I thought the first two games did come out. No, Waterworld did come out. The third game came out. It was just sold through Atari Age magazine. He just had to buy it via mail order.

Right. But the fourth one did not go. So that would be the Holy Grail. That would be the sword. The sword that you could have won. Oh, yeah. So that's an actual artifact that we suspect. suspect we know where it is.

Oh, yeah. But it is... Are we allowed to say? Well, it's... Atari went bankrupt or kind of sold. And apparently it's in the house of one of the Tremiel's. Oh, okay. Interesting.

Over Jack Tremel's fireplace. Right. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, that was like $50,000. That's what it was worth. Yeah. Right. It was like a gold sword.

Yeah. And it actually, they actually put in like jewels. Like, so there was proper, like, value put into that. But then Samwell's going to come and stay. and steal it if it goes off to the library. Yeah, the problem is even it's like you can't buy it, right?

Like nobody can buy, well, I mean, somebody could buy it, but like Tim Sweeney, who has $7 billion could buy it, but like actual game collectors, like there's people out there who could buy it just because the scrap value of the gold and the jewels is,

I mean, it was $50,000 in the 80s, right? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So on to things that maybe are more familiar to Retronauts people which is the NES era. And I think, yeah, NES would be the first time I was aware of the concept of like a rare, hard-defined Holy Grail type piece.

Yeah. And I don't know who added this, but I think you were absolutely correct. The first Holy Grail of NES collecting was probably Tengen Tetris. That was me, and I am right. Thank you. Yes. No, I remember, I mean, back of the day, like, actually, like, we had an NES and that was our main system. And it was like, we got to get Tengen Tetris.

And, like, it was 100% the hardest NES game to find and, importantly, the most expensive NES game. I think it sold for, like, $100. Yes. Can you imagine paying that much for an NES game? My God, $100? And it was purely, but it was purely so you could play two-player Tetris, you know, against somebody. It was considered to be the better version of Tetris on the NES. And it was more expensive than stadium events.

If you could find, it wasn't rarer. It was more expensive. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I. I think I talked about this on the Tetris episode, but I got mine by renting it from a video rental place and losing it and having to pay the $40. I mean, I remember seeing that version at a rental place and it didn't mean anything to me because I didn't know what it was at the time. Right.

But, yeah, like at that point, you know, Tetris was brand new and I don't think anyone had any idea that Tengen Tetris was going to become this scarce commodity. So I was just like, oh, it's that Tetris game I keep hearing about, okay. Right. Yeah, usually when things are pulled off the market, they enjoy that explosion and that quick explosion in price because, A, there's that notoriety of, oh, this is pulled off the market. So if you see it, you better get it to the fact that people do actually go out and start buying it, which drives the price up. And yes, I realized it just did A and two. It's fine.

That's okay. Well, that's one of the cases where information traveled a lot slower then, right? If you saw it and you wanted to buy it and like, oh, I just can't find. find it in stores, which was pretty common for a lot of games. They just didn't sell it. And so it's like, oh, it's kind of hard to find. Was it order to be destroyed, like Two Human was? I think, yeah,

they had to pull it off the shelf. They did. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep, it was. Yeah, I mean, for me, back in the NES era, for a while, my Holy Grail was Castlevania because I knew it existed, but it wasn't for sale anywhere. And I would go to rental stores and they would have the tag for it. I would go to

Toys R Us and they had the little plastic tag for it. But it wasn't anywhere to be purchased because it had, you know, gone out of stock. And then, you know, a few months later, Konami did a repressing of it and distributed a new release of it. But for that, you know, for like six months, it was this game I desperately wanted. And literally, I looked for it all across the country as my family went on vacation. And it just, there was no such thing.

And I had people tell me like, oh, I think I saw that at this rental place. And I'd go and it wasn't there. So, like, to me, that was just infuriating. It was like, I covet this game so much. I want to play it. It looks so interesting. So then I finally got to play it after they reissued it. And I still love it.

So sometimes Holy Grails pay off. Yeah. Well, I think we've talked about this in obliquely a couple times. But if you want to define Holy Grails, it's something that you can't buy or it's very difficult to buy. Like, you know, to your point, Chris, like eBay makes almost anything rare available at some price. And then there's some of the things that we list off here are like not available. any price. Yeah, we started talking about, yeah, when Holy Grail started being discussed in terms of

like comic collecting and things like that, it definitely was a situation. It was this pre-Ebay situation where you, if you wanted something, you couldn't just buy it. Like, it wasn't just like it was for, you know, you'd just go somewhere and it was for sale. You had to maybe wait around until one came up at your local comic store or wherever it was, but maybe one would just never come up. And it was like, well, how do you, how do you buy that? Yeah, I would say my greatest enemy now, you know, for stuff that I'm trying to find is not rarity, it's lack of interest. Because there are games that I have been looking for for years that, you know, I have searches out for them on eBay and so forth.

And I know that, you know, they're probably not super rare. I doubt that, you know, they were printed in quantities of a few dozen or something. Yeah. It's just no one cares. So, like, who cares about the game, Ponta Tohinako for Gameboy? What even is that? I don't know, but it's on the list of games that I need to track down and photograph and review. Yep.

But guess what? There hasn't been one of those complete inbox on eBay in the past two years. And I don't know that there ever will be until I finally managed to track one down in Japan and put it up on eBay and sell it for five bucks to someone who's like, okay, sure, why not? Right, right, yeah. Well, it was like Bronte. He was trying to complete a complete sealed NES collection. And as he got near the end, he didn't want people to know what he was looking for.

Because at that point, he'd been looking for it for a really long time. So if one showed up, he would have to be the one to win it. And I think that what had happened was someone did find out what he needed. And I remember this being a pretty common game. You're thinking, like, that's the one he was looking for. Yeah. Wasn't it, like, volleyball or something? Soccer.

Yeah. So, and yeah, he just needed the black box soccer sealed. And he had not seen one in, what is it, eight years. Yeah. Bonkers. And also, you know, there have been like multiple times throughout the course of me, like, interacting with people in the video game industry and then finding out that I'm a collector of them saying, oh, you know, such and such a game is really rare and it's going to be worth money someday because I know that we only made X number of copies of it. And it's like, that may be true, but it never happens that way. And it doesn't happen that way because demand is such a part of that equation.

Remember somebody telling me that Ms. Pac-Man for the Super Nintendo had an incredibly low print run and that that was going to be a big one. And, I mean, that game goes for like $3. It's like, it's in no way it's like supply is part of it. But like it just proves that demand is a huge part of that equation. Right. And, you know, sometimes those things can be manipulated. Supposedly Little Samson, a game that now sells for about $1,200 loose. and I don't know how much

more complete in box you know for a long time that game was worth nothing no one cared about that game it was like you could pick it up for 40 or 50 bucks that's fine and from what I've heard

some people discuss and complain about at some point someone just decided that they were going to buy up all the copies of that game and like remove it from the market and so like

one person was buying it and the price kept going up because every time one would go up for sale, they'd buy it. So someone else would list it for more. And that is how we got to the point where it is like this highly coveted game. I don't know if that's true or not, but I have seen online where people have engaged in some shenanigans to see if they could fix prices and set prices. And apparently it's kind of effective. Yeah.

I mean, I spoke to someone who has dozens of, well, had, I don't know if he's leaked them out over time, but had dozens of copies of Flintstone Surprise of Dinosaur Peak. And he was doing exactly that, where he was buying it as it was going up in price. Yeah, and that game is, what, thousands of dollars now? Yeah. And anytime a box or manual came up, he would

just buy it. The stuff that interests me more than games that were released to be purchased are items that were, like, contest items or promotional items, especially things like Nintendo Power would give out. And it just jumped into my mind that, like, a decade ago,

someone was selling one of the Final Fantasy orbs. Oh, yeah. And I couldn't find a follow-up. Like, in 2010, somebody was selling it for $250,000. Didn't you? I think so. I think so, yeah. But there was never a follow-up.

Like, did someone buy? I don't think anyone bought it. You just need closure. There were 50 of those orbs. They've got to be somewhere. Like, stuff like that, I find, like, fascinating. Like, all the custom things that you would win through magazines or through other sort of contests.

That's my holy grail. There it is. The Final Fantasy orb. Yeah. And, like, they just, they discover things. Like, I think in recent memory, they discover there's an earthbound ruler. Yeah. Yeah.

That was actually always known about. Oh, okay. $750, though, for a piece of wood. For a piece of wood, yeah, yeah. But things that are just, like, that are new to me. I are fun to find out about, like, oh, they made this. They manufactured this. Yeah.

I'm going to say this. I know somebody that uses that as their ruler. I mean, if I pay the $100. I have, I have tried. to say in my best possible way that I will buy them a real nice ruler. Interesting. Yeah, so getting back to the, you know, the idea of price fixing and shenanigans,

I actually had someone accuse me of that last year. Really? I was trying to pull together enough copies of baseball 2000. Oh, yeah. To do a 16, like to see it would be possible to do a 16-person competition. And I had a few copies already. Some people sent me some because they work in, like, game shops, So we're like, oh, yeah, we have something.

They're like three bucks. And, you know, then I had like an Everdrive. So I just needed to get like, you know, I guess another eight copies or so. So I went through a process of buying those. And was kind of, you know, tweeting about it and just like, oh, that's the thing I'm doing. I don't know if it's going to work, but it'll be fun. And so people got really angry. They were like, you're fixing the market.

You're just trying to drive up prices. That's not what I'm trying to do. It's not illegal, baby. Well, also. Capitalism. 16 copies of a $3 game are not going to affect the market. It went up, though, right? It has gone up.

It's not actually – like, whoever was working in the game shop was like the wholesale price is $3. But, yeah, the market price is actually closer to $20, I think, for a bare cart. Okay. But I don't think I had any impact on that. I don't think I moved the needle. I think for like two or three weeks, it was kind of hard to get a copy of baseball $2,000 for Game Boy because of me. But, you know, I cleaned out the channels very briefly and then, you know, it's self-heeled. I guess we'll get to this. This reminds

of me, well, Genesis is coming up, but I want to know what you guys think about Moonwalker and the fate of Moonwalker. Do you think it's a lot of money right now? But then when people realize, like, oh, there are many copies of Moonwalker because people are saying that about, so as of this recording, we are post-Michael Jackson documentary. Yes. And people are like, we got

to buy the Simpsons season 3 on DVD. We got to buy Moonwalker. Oh, really? Because these things are being taken away by their owners or made, being made unavailable. But to be fair, Moonwalker has been unavailable officially for like 30 years. Yeah, yeah.

But have you guys even looked into that? Like if there's a price spike for Moonwalker? Things in the news, when something happens in the news, it can cause prices to spike, but it's temporary. Yeah, it's always temporary. Well, it's like the Bleeding Gums Murphy record, right? After he dies, it goes up in price. There are certain things that, yeah, news events can potentially alter,

but, you know, Moonwalker is one of those things. It's weird. Yeah. It's expensive because I think a lot of people liked playing that game. Yeah. Right. But it was a pack-in at some point.

No. Some like stores like the big... Like the big... What's that? Yeah, like a Sam's Club or a Costco or whatever. I've heard of people getting that... Yeah. So I imagine there's a lot of Moonwalkers in the world.

I think they're... Yeah, Michael Jackson. He was kind of popular back in the day, you know? There's probably a lot of copies of it. Pretty big deal. I mean, this is not Retronauts thing, but recently that Japanese actor who was arrested for cocaine use, right? And then they pulled the game off the shelf.

Yeah, it was like Yakuza 6? Yeah. No, it was judgment. It was by the Yakuza group, right? Yeah. And so now that's like doubled in price, right? Yep. Yep.

Anyway, so back to NES. We've mentioned the NWC cards. Do we want to talk about what those actually are? They are kind of a bit of video game infamy. And there's two different versions. There's like the high grade and then the ultra high grade. Sure. It's like platinum club and diamond club.

Yeah, I mean, if you're listening to this, I'm going to guess you know what these are, right? It's the cartridges used in Nintendo World Championships in 8990, and it's Super Mario Brothers, Radracer, and Tetris. And it does this, you know, six minute, 39 second thing where you get multiples of your score in each one and then you have a final score, right? And so, yes, everyone says, oh, there's only like 90 great carts. Like, we know there's more because 90 is just the number that were, yeah, but they all have zero numbers on them, right? But the 90 were the ones given out to the contestants, and that was because I think it was like Thor Ackerelin's parents were like, hey, you should give us one of these and like, okay, sure. And then this handed them out. But then the rest used in the production kind of have been floating around and then Nintendo Powers contest for a gold colored version of the same cartridge.

And my... Were there five of those? 26, yeah. So the thing is like... One for each letter of the alphabet. Well, yeah, it's like, what a weird number, right? And in my head, I'm like, they probably just said, like, oh, here's 26 working carts. And let's just make these into the gold ones, right?

I don't think that was like... Because I don't think they wanted to... I think they looked at the gray cartridges, which sort of looked like these very, you know, functional, you know, very utilitarian things. Yeah, they just had like a white label with black print on it. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, why don't we dress these up by putting them into... The Zelda cartridges and put a nice little... color label on them, and that's how we'll give them away.

Yeah, but that label's pretty janky. It's like inkjet printers, right? And then it glued to the front. Yeah. Well, they weren't supposed to be around, you know, now. But, yeah, so these became, these were always, I mean, these were known about, you know, because of the Nintendo power thing. And because, you know, they started turning up every now and again in, you know, somebody would find a whole bunch of NES games and somehow the kid would have had, you know, and NES, a World Championships card.

But a lot of, they made a ton of these, and, I mean, you know, hundreds, hundreds of them. And a lot of them, you know, came from, you know, former Nintendo employees who had, who had, you know, taken them from work or were given them rather. And so, yeah, I mean, so those were always sort of like, you know, people would pay $1,000 to get the gold cartridge. People would pay hundreds of dollars to get the gray version. and the gray was not as desirable.

Now, these days, if anything, they're almost coming into parity, right? I mean, they're getting near there. Well, I think the last two gold sales, one was $100,000, and then the other was like 68 or something like that. So it's way up there. Oh, okay. So, but the grays are getting into like the $30,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I had unsolicited offer $30 for mine. So, yeah, I think it's one of the most recognizable. And to, like, Bob's point earlier, the whole, you know, contest aspect of it, I can't, the, one of the reasons all the golds are, the goals that, most of the goals we know exist are because of someone calling up phone, like, looking through phone books of, like, the cities where the winners were and trying to find that the winners and offering them money for the hard. Some light stocking was in. Yeah, and this is, like, decades ago, right? And so he was able to grab. We got seven.

Yeah, yeah, for like a hundred bucks a piece or something like that. And so that was just foresight. It's crazy. So, and the thing is with these particular, with the Nintendo World Championships, cartridges both of them for a while. And really even now, to a lesser extent, like it is, it was possible that while you were out like at a flea market, you know, looking through a box of Nintendo games in somebody's driveway, it was possible that one of these might turn up in there, you know, that

they somehow got it from Nintendo Power or, you know, being in the championship or whatever. There's one where a kid ripped the label off it and just wrote Mario and pencil across the remnants of the label. Awesome. You know, like, these were in children's bedrooms at some point. And, you know, so they do have that, like, you know, when you find that box of NES games, that's what you're hoping against hope is going to be in there. Like, that's the Holy Grail of that area of collecting. Right. But it's also one of the, like, Holy Grails on here that's probably the easiest to acquire, like, if you have the money.

Yeah. I think because there is effectively always one for. sale. Unlike some of the other things where they, you know, it's amongst a small group of people who don't sell. For these, if you put up the money, one of these will shake loose pretty easily. Right. There's similar cartridges on the Super Nintendo as well. Star Fox Weekend. Yeah, Star Fox Weekend Donkey on Country Competition cartridges. Now, what's interesting about these is that sometimes even collectors, they try to argue around this, is the fact that, unlike the Nintendo World Championship cartridges,

Star Fox Weekend at Donkey Kong Country, what is it called? Championship competition. Competition edition. Yeah. We're sold to people by Nintendo because just like SwordQuest Waterworld was sold only in the pages of Atari Age magazine, the Donkey Hung and Star Fox cartridges were sold in the Super Power Supplies catalog that came with Nintendo Power.

And you could buy these from them. And so then it gets into the question of, okay, are these games necessary for the retail set of games? Because they were sold to people. They were not, like, walked out of or giving away his prizes or anything like that. Who knows? I don't care. That is why I don't want to collect a complete set. Of anything, yeah.

Yeah. So back to NES, what do we feel about stadium events? To me, that's kind of like a symbol of how something can go from. basically unknown to infamous in the flash of an eye. Well, Steve Lincoln were collecting the NES games in the 90s. Yeah, in the 90s, I couldn't find stadium events. And when I got it, it wasn't one of those cases where I was trying to get multiple copies because there's effectively no resale market.

I was like, oh, I want one for my own collection. And it took me a long time, but I finally got one for not much. I wasn't a regular game price, 30, 40 bucks. But I did recognize that I never saw it, right? And so it was one of those like... Even though it was listed, if you got the... People look at those funcolan price sheets, which themselves now go for really crazy money. Like $100 to get a funicle land price sheet.

Yeah. Well, nobody saved them. That's the only place you're going to find the black bass is the most expensive game in the world. Yeah, exactly. And you look down it. I mean, it is fascinating to look at it because, yes, you see like stadium events. The stadium events is like 37 cents. Right.

But the thing is, what that didn't tell you is that they actually never had it. Even though it was really cheap, they never actually had one to buy. Yeah, you could place an order with them and they'd be like, you had to call them up and they'd be like, oh, yeah, we don't have it. Yeah. But I always wondered why the black bass was so expensive on those sheets that always stood out to me. Dad's love fishing games. Black bass was excellent and apparently it was just hard to find. Something like that.

Yeah. Well, the thing that kind of drove me crazy is I worked for a small video game chain in Northeast Ohio, and the thing is stadium events was so rare that if a game came in that we didn't have on our inventory list, people would just put it under stadium events because they'd be like, oh, yeah, that's the game that's not on the list yet. And so there would be like some stores like, oh, we had five copies of stadium events. Like, oh, no, it's like these games, you know, from like quattro or whatever, we didn't know where to put them. So that was like almost like the holding pen. So even, I guess, amongst employees we knew it was rare. It was rare enough that that was our hack for kind of putting things in. Right, right.

Okay. Well, as someone who followed NES but not as a passionate collector, I had no idea about stadium events until, you know, that one copy sold complete for like $20,000. Oh, okay. And then all of a sudden it seemed like everyone was like, I got to sell my old Nintendo games. I found a copy of Duck Hunt in my closet. That's worth $20,000, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think the most recent stadium event story, this is such a sad story for the guy, but went into a Goodwill, looked at a glass, in the glass case at the front of Goodwill, and there was just like, you know, a ton of mint and box NES games there, including Family Fun Fitness World, which was the game that came packaged in with a family fun fitness package. It had a very similar package to stadium events. They were all $8. He bought a whole bunch of them, including an athletic world itself, and a really nice. Mint box like that can go for hundreds of dollars, you know, on up. Because just like stadium events, it was taken off the market when the family fund fitness pad removed and the power pack came out. Felt really great.

Walks out of Goodwill with all those games. Goodwill employee looks down and says, oh, somebody bought all those games. Goes to the back. Pulls more games out of the giant ass box of NES games that they have back there, including a complete-in-box stadium events, puts those into the case where the hole was. next customer comes in, sees those, buys them, and then that person gets the stadium events.

Yeah. Is there like a confirmed amount of stadium events in the wild now at this point? No, I think it's common. See, it's not as rare as a lot of things, right? It's a common game, just that, you know, nobody really sells it. Right. I think that

the closest in terms of authority we have is Howard Phillips talks about like, what's the minimum print run for games at that time, right? And I think it was like, between 5 and 10,000. Right, really? Because you had to make a certain number of them. Otherwise, you know, the tooling doesn't make sense.

Right. But they were recalled, right? So they were recalled. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. They might have been recalled. Or they might have just said, okay, you know what? We're going to make the power pad ourselves.

But there had to have been, when the Family Fun Fitness pad came out, there had to have been a transition period where Nintendo said, that's really cool. We're going to make our own version. But it would take them some number of months to, you know, actually create that their own version and get the games all right. And during that period of time, they probably told, I'm guessing, they probably told Bondi like, okay, just sell through your inventory. You know, my guess is they're just like, oh, just stop shipping it. And it's not like stores are selling out a stadium event when it gets released.

And so no one reordered. And so there's no reason to have any more of it, right? Who knows? Who knows? Somebody probably out there knows. I'm sure Frank Sefaldi has tried to track them down. I think he found people who worked in the Bondi office at that time. Nobody has any idea.

Nobody cared. Like, it was some random nothing game that, you know. Yeah, they're like Ninja Kid. That's where the money is. Oh, right. Chubby cherub. All right. That is where the money is.

Yes, that's true. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Thank you. So before we move on and talk about more video game Holy Grills, Steve, I think you wanted to talk about hardware. I did. So I see, oh, there's some really interesting stuff on this list, actually.

This is going to be fun to talk about. Okay, I'm an idiot. I put PC Engine LT. Well, sort of. Because, I mean, by the true definition of Holy Grail, that's not a Holy Grail. That's just you have to have a stupid amount of money that you're willing to throw at another way to play PC engine games. But for me, someone who loves handheld games and is super into the idea of, you know, playing PC game on the, PC engine games on the go. Like, I would love to own a PC engine LT because, you know, then you can plug it into the CD-ROM and everything.

It's ridiculous and extravagant and fittingly priced. Yeah. Well, they also have that 4-inch active matrix LCD screen attachment, but you could have gotten. And that's actually much harder to find than the LT. I didn't know about that. So if you were going to get into a PC engine hard. hardware madness, I think that's probably near the top of the list. Okay, so let's start, we were talking about NES, so let's keep going.

Nintendo M8 demo unit with stackup. I'm familiar with all of these individual components. Like all of these words speak to me, but I've never heard of this thing. Right. So the M8 is a series of Nintendo demo kiosks, and this isn't the one with the cartridges in it. This is one where it's like, it almost looks like a slab, and there's an angled piece towards you. and the big red button that allows you to switch through different games to demo them.

So, yeah, I think everyone here is thinking about the one where it's, it actually has all the cartridge slots. Yeah, exactly. So this was just like a slab and a TV set on. The one piece thing. Yeah, one piece thing and a TV stacked on top of it. And there's three different versions with different games. And there's a version of it that includes stack up, which if you think about it, is crazy. Can you imagine thinking stack up, this is what's going to sell people on this video game system.

People who are like video games are bad and stupid. I should never own a console. They're going to look at Stackup and be like, oh, hell, yes, this has changed my mind. And how do you even have this set up in a store, right? Would it be like under glass or something? Well, Rob has to look at the TV. Right. Also putting a sheet of glass in between Rob and the TV might be difficult.

He does have that filter. He does. Oh, yeah, he's got the sunglasses. But then you have to have the blocks. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I assume, like, the blocks would be under glass somehow, but, yeah, I don't know how that would work.

Someone had to supervise. Yeah, I think so, I think so. I think so, I think so, I think it's one of those, like, I get a demo kiosi, you want to get people to buy your games, and they're really cool because I've got this menu and everything. Yeah, but don't stack up. But, yeah, don't do that. I think that's why. So it is clearly the rarest of the three, and it never comes up for sale. I think I was looking for mine for, like, 15 years or something.

Oh, wow. Because I'm, and then one's like, I'm selling mine. I'm like, give me that. And now, of course, I have it, and it's one in the museum. So it doesn't matter. What am I going to do with this? I don't want to put it. Yeah, I mean, actually, I probably should play at least one game of stack up on it before it gets shipped to the strong.

That's right. Then again, you could not and have that part of your life back. Yeah. True. It's a tough call. I know. Once in a lifetime experience or just enjoying life. True.

All right. So, let's see, another Nintendo thing. the Nintendo PlayStation. I think we all know what this is. I've touched it. I've seen it and touched it. So, I think so, yeah, at this point. Yeah, I've got my Greek.

Yeah, I wasn't, like, bragging. I'm just saying, like, of all the things on here, I've actually, like, made physical contact. It's the most accessible of all of these things because its owners are just in year three of just taking it to every single video game convention on Earth and letting people play it. Yeah, I think the guy, what's, Terry Dibold, told me, like, yeah, this is my chance to basically have people pay. for me to travel to see the world. So I'm going to take advantage of it. And God bless him. Good deal. Yeah.

I think that's a great attitude. He's not getting rich of it, but he's getting to see places he's never been. So that's cool. Yeah. I mean, you can't blame him. I worry about this hardware that every trip he takes is going to be the one where, you know, TSA drops it. Right.

I mean, sir, what is this? I mean, when I... The TSA, like, it does a controlled explosion of it in a canister or something. It's like, well, it wasn't a bomb. I mean, when I gave that, the, like, see that presentation at Midwest Gaming Classic a few years ago. It did not work then. He had Street Fighter 2.

And it just wouldn't boot like it had worked the night before, but then we got it in front of people. And I had to stall for half an hour until they finally said, yeah, this isn't going to happen. It's got stage fright or something. I guess. I had to cover for it. They had to swap out the CD-ROM drive and that thing

to get that working too. But yeah, I mean, so again, yeah, the Nintendo PlayStation is definitely like this sort of thing where again, like, you know, if you find some weird piece of hardware at a flea market, you're hoping it's one of those. And, you know, honestly, I think more will come out. Like, I think

that, well, you know, eventually there will be, you know, two or three of them that are known because I know that they made more than just one. So, the people who have them are probably guarding them very closely. So there's also a Nintendo Space World DS. I don't know what that is, but I do know that I would love

a Nintendo Space World GBA, one of the two that were designed to look like the IMAX or the iBooks, with like opaque white and then translucent Tangerine and Bondy Blue basically. Yeah, I think rose-colored gaming did reproductions of those at one point of time. I would actually be interested in tracking one of those down.

Yeah. So out of all of the things listed on here in terms of closest to Holy Grail and that I know it exists, but I have not seen it ever, is when they first introduced the DS, You're holding it up on stage. It's a different D.S.

Yeah, totally different model. Yeah. And there's different corners on it. Oh, is it the really bad, cheap plastic-looking one that was on the cover of EGM, I think? I think so it's got like white buttons and everything. I don't know. I know about that. You can just do a searcher like Space World DS and you'll see that there are actual physical differences.

And this is not like Nintendo can't afford doing tooling for different types of cases. But this was they had all the demo units on the. floor and then they brought it to the next show. Did you go to E3-2004? I did, but I didn't get to go to the Nintendo booth. I was a peon at the time. It was not allowed. But I do know that they had like a very

crappy looking DS at that show. Is this the same thing? That was what Reggie pulled out of his pocket during the press conference. And they would eventually totally redesign the outer shell. Yeah, in a very short amount of time. Yes. Yeah. Like months.

Yeah. Because when I looked at that E3 demo unit, even in photographs, I was like, that looks like garbage. That looks like a cheap piece of crap. This is such a huge mistake. But then the actual thing came out in the DS, you know, it was very chunky. Yeah. But it was a higher grade of plastic than those early demos and looked more designed as opposed to accidentally fallen together.

Right. But, yeah, of all the Nintendo prototypes that have come out, that that's something that I don't think anybody has ever gotten their hands on as far as publicly known. Outside of those two events, like, and I've had. had like people I know searching around for it and ever since actually I noticed that they were different when it launched. I'm like, oh, how do I get that other one? Maybe someone's got one like as a dev kid

or something? Like, no, don't have it. So if you've got it, let me know. Reddy's taking them all with him as he retires. Yeah, yeah. We've got to get one with the strong. So what is the RDI Halcyon? That is something I've never actually heard of. See, this is why I love hardware. This was definitely the Holy Grail

for the sorts of people back in the early 80s, you know, the 80s who were like collecting game consoles, right? So this is probably the rarest commercially released console. It's a laser disc console. Okay. And it's a laser disc player, and there's an interpreter, and then there's a keyboard, and it effectively plays, like, two games.

It plays Thayer's Quest in, like, the football game. And so they are arcade laser discs, basically. So it's like the arcade guts, like, kind of shoved into a console. And, I mean, neither of those games are, are any good at all, and it had extremely limited release because it was really expensive. I think when it was released, and it was like 83 or something, it was like over $5,000. Wow. And so think about that.

Like, who's buying this? Like, the NeoGeo kind of pales in comparison to this thing. And so very few of them made, sometimes you'll see like just the player or just the keyboard or little pieces of it just sort of coming out. but most people just use it to play laser disc, like video laser discs and it's like I'm not going to play these games and I think National

Video Game Museum has a great one with all this documentation and everything because it was the one that they gave to the salesmen who went to the different stores to try to get the stores to carry it and so that's the only reason like something that nice with boxes exists. Otherwise, I think I've seen

one box student in the past like 10 years. Yeah, wow. Have we talked about game, have we talked about game prototypes yet? podcast? We have not. Man, I feel like that's an episode in and of itself that involve Frank Sevaldi.

I'm doing it, damn it right now. I want to know from everybody at the table just one thing. Like, I mean, because like I said earlier, like the things that aren't, that were never made for sale are the things I care about. It was interesting to see finished games that were localized and not released like Earthbound beginnings now has been officially released by Nintendo, but for

about 15 years, it was only like a prototype that you could find on the internet. Unfinished things like Star Fox 2. My thing that I would love to see, is Mother 3 for disc drive, whatever you want to call it. Just because that game was pretty far along and I would like to see

what it played like, what it looked like, how it moved outside of like the tiny videos we've seen, the tiny screenshots we've seen like that is something I wish would escape Nintendo in some way. Yeah, Steve, you said it was 60% complete? Yeah, so something like 60%. And I think in the

interview, they have the three people working on at the time. It's like in the interview, they're like, well, you know, he's says it's 20%, but, like, technically it's that, but we had all the things there, like compression wasn't working or whatever, but we knew where the story was, and my understanding is they were

actually doing it, doing the content linearly. And so it's not going to be, if you were to play it, it wouldn't jump around. It would just get up to whatever that the part they were done, and then it was almost like title cards after that. Wow. Wow. And so, yeah, I mean,

that's, yeah, so in the sense of like, prototype, type collectors, people who are not necessarily interested in owning the physical thing, but who are out there looking for the data. I mean, for a while, yeah, so, like, people wanted Bioforce Ape for some reason. People got really excited about that, and that was found. And, yeah, now probably the big one as far as, like, unreleased games that we know about that people really want to play, yeah, Mother 3 for 64D is probably it.

And all of Rest and Evil 1.5 is out in the wild now at this point. And it's well known enough to the point. where Capcom has a reference to it in Resident Evil 2 remake. It's one of the costumes you can wear is from that game. Yeah. So there are some like prototypes where we just have video or, you know, once again, we know it exists, but no one can play it. And there's other ones like I have, I'll just jump real quick to like arcade, like Marble Madness 2. You can play it at California Extreme.

It's there. But the ROMs are not out there. And so you can't play it at home. But, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. Like the weird thing with prototypes is sometimes you. Like, we don't know they exist until they just appear. Yeah, that UWC wrestling game. It's just like, oh, this was nowhere.

And then all of a sudden it's with us. So kind of combining the two things we've been talking about hardware and prototypes. You mentioned the heightened bomber man earlier, but I feel like we should talk about that because it is fresh in everyone's mind. Yeah. So. Who wants to take that one? Not me. I'm still not entirely clear on what it is.

Yeah. So, I don't know what hardware ran on. Yes. Well, supposedly, oh, sorry. No, no, go, guys. Is it a high-time like a high-five? So supposedly it ran on something called the Tatsu gene board, which was then eventually kind of refined into the PCFX. So supposedly it was basically like a prototype PCFX years before the PCFX launched, but it also supported ultra-high resolution.

It's not like 1920 by 1080, but it's. something along those lines. It's very close to current, you know, high definition resolution. And up to 10 people could play bomber man together on it, hence the name high 10 bomber man. It's high definition, 10 people, bomber man. Yeah. And it basically ran on like, what, early 90s high definition televisions, which cost

a million dollars. They were crazy expensive and the hardware was way ahead of its time. And it wasn't like sold to the public or anything. It was like they would take this around, I guess, or like Hudson Soft, like festivals and demonstrations and stuff. Yeah. I think it was in a, you know, like those trailers and you would step in and they would have like the two giant CRT, HDTVs. And in front of you, I think, was a PC engine core graphics too with a tap, but like this giant cable coming out of the back.

Gotcha. Right. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And so that hardware apparently eventually became the PCFX. And supposedly the virtual boy just runs on leftover PCFX chips. I don't know how true that is, but it is essentially the same.

same chip. Oh, okay. That sounds absolutely just like Nintendo going like, well, what should be inside the system? Okay, well, what's cheap and you have a lot of them left over? Right. Yeah, sure. Right.

So the interesting thing is this showed up the week before I published my panic bomber virtual boy retrospective. So that is like the closest thing to high 10 bomber man because it is a bomber man game running on the same chip that powered high 10 bomber man. That's going to be a totally different experience. But I will say that the virtual boy had like extremely high resolution for its time. That's something that I've been really kind of astounded to experience. You know, now that I'm like playing these games on a television and capturing them in high definition,

it's basically got like 3DS resolution, you know, including the two screens being processed at once. Compared to any other system on the market at the time in 1995, that was like super high res. So there's a little slice of that. High Ten Bomber Man, if you don't mind it being a puzzle game. Yeah. Well, I think that's the question is, will we be able to ever play High Ten Bomber Man? And, like, well, we've got one piece of the equation, then we have the disc that, given how proprietary that hardware was, it was super expensive.

But then so we're like one megabyte hard drives, you know, like 50 years ago. Right. It's like, oh, it's big iron. We'll just like toss it. Well, somebody would have to find the, find an original board probably and then try to program an emulator based on the build of the board. It's all Konami, right? Right, that has all that stuff now?

It's probably gone. They've turned it into gym equipment. Like, wow, what is this television that I'm watching as I'm doing my exercises? That's really strange. So one of the very strange system libraries is Game Boy. And that because it's sort of this perfect storm of it's a Nintendo product, so it's highly collectible. A lot of people, as soon as they got a Game Boy game just through the box and the truck. and put the game into their Game Boy holder.

Let me tell you all about it. Yeah, exactly. And then additionally, you know, they're really low print runs because I think it was really easy and cheap to make a Game Boy game. So you had a lot of companies that were like, oh, yeah, we could put one person on just making a simple Game Boy puzzle game, you know, do a low print run of them and make some money. And so you have just butt tons of Game Boy games out there.

And if you want to do a complete set, like Jeremy, you are doing in fits and starts and game by game. You're not keeping them. Like an aggregate. It's like a cloud distribution. By the end of all of this, you will have had. In my hands, if not in my possession. It's your hands.

Yeah. And so you're finding out that there are just tons of games that are very rare. And so you wouldn't think it. But like on the Game Boy itself, there are many, many, many games that are super hard to find, especially in complete in box form and go for ridiculous amounts of money. Yeah. To photograph Amazing Tater, I am going to go to Atlas's office. in Irvine.

My goodness. Wow. That's an effort. I'm glad that they still have one, though. They do. That's pretty cool. They never let me see it when I worked there. I guess you didn't ask. I demanded it.

You didn't make the... Did you? They just lied to me. They said they didn't know. And you couldn't pull the fish dude connections before you had to do that video. Yeah. I still haven't seen a complete copy of that. I'm not sure what's going to happen when I get to like burning paper or sumo fighter.

There's a lot of these games that are just like... It knows where they are. I think we were talking about this. I mean, I have seen Sumo Fighters sell on eBay for like $900. That's more than I want to invest in holding onto a game for a week. Yeah. Well, I think Fishood was an interesting one because you told me you were looking for. This is years ago, right?

And so I think everybody had like save searches kind of hunting for it. And it's like, it just doesn't sell. No, no. Sometimes it does. And we don't get notifications. Right. There was one that sold like a year ago for $250,000, complete. And I'm like,

it's so frustrating. Yeah, I would have jumped on that for sure. Was it a buy-in now? No, it was an auction. Really? Yeah. That's weird. Yeah.

So, you can't rely on technology, man. I guess not. Yeah. You just got to be on your guard all the time. Right. Ever vigilant. Like, the Game Boy boxes, just similar to turbographic boxes, right? Like, why would you keep them?

Yeah. It comes in a jewel case, so in most cases, right? You throw the box away with the jewel case on the shelf and that. And so you see, like, games, like, the, the value was all in the box. It has almost nothing to do with the game. Yep. Yeah, if I had to do Game Boy Works all over again,

I would have just been like, here's a photo of the cartridge. God bless. Good times. Yep. I talked about a PC game collecting. Are those boxes easier to find just because they were made to house and keep things and they were sturdier? No, they're not sturdier.

Okay. No, they're not sturdier. But if they are easier to find, it's because I think a lot of those PC games were owned by adults. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Who bought them and really liked the box and appreciated it and kept it in really nice condition. Because they felt, I think, like going out and buying a collection of hard. hardcover books or something like that, that they were, in fact, building a library of these

experiences. Okay. Right. And on top of that, so many PC games, especially in the 80s, had Feeleys, you know, there was more to it than just the box and the discs. It was the box and the discs and the book that came with it. And then there's the cloth map that folds out. Right.

And there's some little tokens and pieces. And here's a momento and some no tea. Yeah. Like, there's all this stuff. So you did want the box to store your no tea. Exactly. We're going to keep your no tea if you don't have the box. Exactly.

Yeah. And so, I mean, obviously, yes, those games. You know, many PC big box games can go for, you know, great amounts of money. But in general, when you do see them, somebody probably kept everything together. Like when I search for like Kingsquest games, you don't, you tend not to see like, oh, here's some loose discs. You do tend to see here's the game in the box. You might have missed, you might be missing some of the feelies and things like that. But yeah.

Yeah, and also the fragility of discettes, I think, enticed people to keep the boxes. because if you just keep loose discs around, they're going to get messed up. And then you will be able to play King's Quest. That's right. Yep. I got my little holder, like, pulls up and, like, flip through my, yeah, and my disc caddy. Yeah, that's good stuff. Alphabetically, little separators.

Yeah, a little separators and all that kind of stuff. By genre. All right, so I mentioned Sumo Fighter and Burning Paper. Are there any, an amazing Tater? Are there any other Game Boy games that are just like, and Fish, Dude? Like, what the hell is happening with these games? Will we ever see one in a person? There's a surprising number of them.

Yeah, there's, like, there's Ninja Boy, too, in the Ninja, the Little Ninja Boy series. I mean, that's just ridiculous. But there's a lot in that, like, weird $100 plus range. Yes. Right. And so, like, there's the ones that are super expensive, like, 800 to 1,000. Right. But then there's a lot of stuff.

Like, if you're trying to complete and box it, like, it's really hard. But the thing is, yeah, because they come up so infrequently, games that are considered to be in the, oh, that's one of those $200, $200 games. Well, it doesn't come up for five years. And then it finally comes up and you're like, okay, I'm ready to spend $100 on this game. And then, oops, in the intervening five years, it became a $1,000 game. And just you just didn't know it because it wasn't, it was never up for auction. God damn it. I know.

Yeah, you really picked a winner. You should have done game gear works because you might have had a lot easier and cheaper time. Well, maybe not easier actually because game gear is the same thing. Right. Everybody threw the boxes out, cheap to make the games. Lots of people made games for it. And there's, game gear is fascinating. Well, there's a lot like that's, you know, exclusive to South America.

How am I going to get a cold of this? Oh, yeah, also true. Yes, yes, of course, because like the master system games and things like that. But even just the U.S. games, there are Game Gear games. And this is another one of those situations where it's really interesting first to start building the list and finding out what actually exists out there. Because there's so many games you wouldn't even know existed on Game Gear. And one of the really interesting examples is Code Masters, which did five Game Gear games, I think. Um, they did like cosmic spacehead, uh, C.J. The Elephant Fugitive.

Oh, one of my favorites. Yeah. Um, micro machines, I think fantastic dizzy. And then also, uh, which might be like the secret rarest game gear game in the box, Pete Sampras Tennis, which is like, if you look on eBay, there actually are a few now, but everybody's asking a thousand dollars for it. It's probably not worth that. But it's like, it is this really, you, I, you don't see these in the wild. Like, you just don't see these games, especially not in the box. But all the Codemasters Game Gear games are super, are super rare.

And even the reason why Pete Sampras Tennis is only, like, whatever, $1,000 is because very few people collect Game Gear. If Game Gear collecting were to ever become as widespread popular, like, these games would be, like, they'd be five-digit games if anybody gave a shit. Well, I remember there was someone who was trying to collect a worldwide collection of Game Gear. And the only game he was missing was Zool, the Japanese version. version. And I think we took multiple trips to Japan. We're asking game scores. Never saw it. Yeah, never saw it. And he never saw it. And he had like, you know, Yahoo auctions, Japan and never showed up. So sort of the usual suspect places. And so if someone's listening and now, I'm going to do a complete game here. Well, now, now. Well, actually, you do it because you're idiots. If you go on eBay now, you can find a Zool. Yeah. Because, yeah, they just, they come in waves. It's really weird. Yeah. Yeah, it was like a couple year dry spell there where just nothing showed up.

Yeah. And again, he didn't tell anybody that that was the last one that he needed. Right. Also really weird, the Game Gear version of Zool. What is it, Zool the Intergalactic Ninja? Is that what it's called? The GameCure version is Zend, the Intergalactic. Oh, no, no, no, yes, you're right.

Sorry, Zool from the Nth Dimension, was it? Yeah, okay, okay, great, right. You can see my confusion. Was published by Infocom in Japan for the GameCere. If you can get your head around that one. I can't, as a matter of it. Unknown holy grails. People don't know that they're hard to get.

You know what? You only know if you've been doing the research and you had that eBay save search for like three years and it's never hit once. Right. Well, also on the sort of the portable side, you are the possessor of a complete virtual voice set. I am. You got in before it got really bad. I did. Yes, I did.

I know you invested a good chunk of change in virtual lab and Gundam, I think. You know, honestly, no. So, yeah, so let's see. When did I get? You got virtual bowling for me. Oh, I'll tell the story. It's a story. Let's hear about this.

So with Virtual Boy, so I bought the Virtual Boy, like, in Blockbuster Video, as everybody did, when the Blockbuster Video was selling them off. And they had a bunch of games. They did have Jack Brothers at the time for $10 complete in box. I did not buy it because I wanted, because I wanted Mario Clash and I wanted Mario Tennis and I wanted, you know, the first party stuff. I didn't know. I mean, you did get Mario Tennis. Yeah, that's true. You've got the box.

I got the thing, you know, and it's not worth as much as Jack Brothers, but you're right. The box for Mario's tennis was hard to find because it was only at blockbusters. It wasn't sold at retail. So I got that. And then, you know, I bought some other virtual boy games. I think I got Waterworld, you know, at the store for nothing and whatever. And then I went to Japan. And one of the first things I found, I guess when I was living in Kyoto is like there was a boxed virtual boy shrink wrapped up with like.

like 10 games for nothing, for like, for under 100 bucks, you know, like cheap. So I bought that. So that's how I got a lot of my Japanese games. And then I kind of was like, okay, well, there's only like three more. There's only a few of games I'm seeing in the Akihabber at like the Japanese version of Jack Brothers, Insmouse, the horror game, virtual fishing, da-da-da-da-daggot virtual fishing for like three bucks at Super Potato in like 2003. You know, so I kind of just started building it. And then, you know, then I got really close to having everything. And then, yeah, you could get space.

So there's the four big ones in Japan. Space Invaders, Virtual Lab, Gundam, and Virtual Bowling. Space Invaders, you could buy for like $150. So I did that. Virtual Lab, I found it for about 200, actually. And that goes for like 1,000 now. That's one of the two big ones. That was 200 a trader.

Gundam, I think I paid $400 because that's, it had always kind of been like really expensive. And then Steve went to Japan and I said, oh, I guess, you know, I'm still looking for, you know, virtual bowling, found it a good price, whatever. And he comes back and he was like, okay, I found a virtual bowling and I bought it and I brought it back. If you want it, you can buy it from me. If not, I'll just keep it. And it's literally, he's got it. And I'm just like, oh, fine, I'll buy it from, you know, it's like, I wasn't like, it was just like, you know, if you had been there and said, oh, there is what I would have been like, well, I don't know, it's a lot of money, you know, but they brought it back and showed it to me. So how much was it?

900. That was, and I want to be really clear, like, I didn't have a child then. And, and, you know what I mean? I mean, that is your child. It is my child now. I had definitely had more disposable income at that moment than I had, you know, have now that have a child. And it is, it is 100% like, by a country mile the most I have ever spent on a single video game.

But it really was just like, I should do this because I have every other virtual boy game. I can have a complete set. And that's why I'm so excited to, you know, have you writing the, the version. Virtual Boy Works book because, you know, they're being used for something rather than just sitting around and then there's a benefit to having that. And I'm very grateful for you lending me these games that I would not be able to justify spending money on. Absolutely.

What is Virtual Lab sell for now? $1,000,000, $1,000, $1,200, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Virtual bowling when it comes up because it doesn't is now over two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But it does seem like a better game than Nestor's funky bowling. A funky bowling more popular, I think. Yeah. It's funkier. It is. Well, I don't know. I just recently played through that. I question its funkiness.

They didn't have to re-release it with a funky mode. It was their original. I did discover that canonically Nestor has a twin sister Hester. Okay. That was not in the comics. No, it was added after many years. That whole game. I don't know.

Nestor. This is not the episode for it, but good Lord. We're running low on time. We are. We are. Um, there's a lot of Um, actually, actually we're kind of winding down. So, uh, let's talk about NeoGeo because I feel like that whole

The whole thing is kind of a virtual grail, a Holy Grail in and of itself. I'm a video game collector, and I don't even fuck with that. Neo-JO is a shit show. It's, I don't even understand. I started actually collecting AES for a while, and it just, the rabbit holes that you fall into, it just... Yeah, because there were, like, some games that were produced in super limited numbers, and then, like, people would gut them, like, one version and put it on NBS. Yeah, well, so there's conversion carts, right?

And so the thing is, first of all, fakes are rampant, right, in the NeoGeo world because arcade operators were also using a similar or the same hardware, and there's always piracy in the arcade world. And so this was one, and games are so expensive. So it's really hard to determine whether or not what you have in your hand is real or not. And I think that there's a couple sites on the web that show, like, here's the real one. Here's the copy, and you can't tell. And I think the other thing is that I put it in here, like King of Fighters 2000, Ultimate

11, those are really late releases for Neo Geo. And this is when they were, S&K was undergoing bankruptcy. And it's like that whole Playmore thing. And so this was with a ruse, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry, yes, it was. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, it was tumultuous there for a while. Yeah, like ownership and rights. And so there was these guys that Dion, Neo Geo, They effectively bought everything. They bought remaining inventory and they even bought, like, rights to distribute. And kind of an infamous one with King of Fighters 2000 is they were at Classic Gaming Expo opening this case of King of Fighters 2000 and taking out the insert, like the paper insert that's in the case, shredding it, and then putting in their neo-geof-freak one that had like Neo-GeoFreek stamped on it because they said the quality. of the original wasn't good enough. And so, and this just, you know, there's such, like, I think there's only a hundred of those

carts, and, like, some of them there's even fewer because, like, who's going to buy this at this point? Like, in the AES, on the AES side, we're talking about the home console side. And so, yeah, you have already probably deep-pocketed collectors that are super picky, but there are so many ways of bad product entering. into this market that it's... I think it's like you get into it.

It's like if you buy... And I own an EOGO and I have like some cheap games that I bought for, you know, like 10 bucks each in Japan. And but it's like you start up by buying those cheap games. Then, okay, and now you have five games. And then it's like, okay, well, you want more games. And I start going to start paying, you know, 100, 200, 300, 400, and then you very quickly get to the end of that.

And that was just like, okay, you have like 10 games left to collect. And they're all just, you know, five figure games. Yeah, like $10,000, $20,000 games, right? And there's like, and these are like the MVS, like loose cart. We probably pick up for $50, right? And so there's this like exact equivalent, right? And so it's just one of those if you're, at most NeoGeo collectors, they don't collect just the carts, right? You want the case and the manual and everything else.

So, yeah, I would say that it's one of those areas as a collector. It's very dangerous. You know what you're doing, right? And some of these Holy Grails, you're probably not going to get them until one of these people decides to sell out. Because, like, why would they sell it at this point? Okay. Yeah, boy, this is just bleak. Let's wind down here with a few, maybe a little something more lighthearted.

Let's talk about Famicom and Genesis before we wind up here. Yay. Famicom, like, I feel like the rare stuff out there, like the Super Holy Grail stuff, is fun because it's gold. It's got a story behind it. It's like, you know, Capcom produced four copies of Rockman 4 or 6 copies or 8 or whatever for the people who submitted artwork of the robot bosses and had their stuff picked. So, like, there's a very finite number of these games, but they have, like, a legacy behind them. And that's great. Yeah, and it makes Mega Man collecting much more difficult.

Yeah, well, there are other ways to get Mega Man 4. you don't have to get the gold cartridge. But it's gold. That's true. And what was the deal with the gold Mike Tyson's punchout carts? Oh, that's actually pretty easy to get your hands on. Like, that was golf for the Famicom disc system. If you set a certain high score, you could send it in.

And then they'd pick like 20,000 people or something like that. It was like a lot of people would win a copy of punchout for the Famicom. And the way they did it on the Famicom at first, the first release of this game, had no Mike Tyson, the game ended it Super Macho Man, but otherwise was identical to the U.S. version that would come out later. And they just put it on a gold cart like Zelda, and they just gave it away as a price.

And then they later released Mike Tyson's punchout for the Famicom. And in fact, you know, it's really weird. You know, I got a gold punch out, got it in the box and everything. And then, you know, I was like, all right, now it was time for the price to explode. And it just didn't.

It just didn't. There's like a lot of them out there And also, I don't think there's, like, a lot of desireability. For some reason, people don't really want them. It's weird, strange, but yeah. I really like the aesthetics. I love it. Yeah, it's like gold and it's got bald bull and there's, like, everything on there.

It's really cool. Yeah. Maybe I'm a big punchout fan, that's well. It could be. Yeah. I think Punchout is a lot more popular here than in Japan anyways. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. The Punchout collector's Holy Grail, or it should be anyway, is an inbox punchout game and watch. Because Nintendo did take their game and watch boxing, and they actually rebranded it, punch out, for one run. And, oh, yeah, I mean, it's just, if you, if you find one in the box, it's just, it's absurd money. Really, interesting. On the Super N.E.S. side, one thing we didn't talk about is Mountain Bike Speed Racer.

Oh, yeah. Steve, you've mentioned that, like, hey, do you want to photograph this for Super NES works? Right. What, what is it? So, it was the game that you bought separately, kind of like Stadium Events, for the, like, extra cycle. it's like a, you know, like attach to an exercise bike. And so that one, I think, came with, like, Mountain Bike Rally or some game. And then you could buy this one separately.

So it's a combo cart. So it's Mountain Bike Rally and then Speed Racer together for the exercise. Right. So it's really, like, not many people are going to buy this thing because it was mostly geared towards, like, gyms. And the really weird part about that is it's really hard to find that game loose. the only ones that are trading hands are sealed ones and they all came out of the exact same seller at Classic Gaming Expo when it was here in San Francisco

this guy pulls out a case of them and we're like well we've never seen that before so all of us bought it for like 250 bucks I think he was charging us at the time Is this the inventor of the exercise cycle? I don't remember where he got them but he was just like he pulled it out and anybody who was collecting Super Nintendo at the time

I was like, oh, shit, it's a game I don't own. Right. And, of course, he was charging a premium 250 was a lot at the time, right? When it was here in San Francisco, I mean, 2005-06. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, but we were like, and so those are really the only copies that circulate amongst the collector world. It's kind of like Cheetah Men, too, right? Where everybody bought them off Usenet.

And so, once again, like, it's sealed. Yeah. Why would I open this? And so when an open one comes out, you're like, whoa, where did that come from? Who opened it? What idiot was that? Usually those are like, it's got like the sticker, property sticker of a gym or something on it. But, yeah, I think I would argue that that's probably the fewest, the fewest number of people in the world have played that game just because of all the things you need to have together to actually do that.

Yeah. So a lot, I mean, a lot of these games, like people don't even know that they exist. For the Sega Genesis was actually very similar. It was a game called Outpack Joey. Yeah, I was just going to ask, what the hell is that? I see it on the list and I'm like, what is it called the heartbeat entertainment? Yeah, yeah. Also, also, yeah.

Yeah, so also for, like the quality of life sensor? Also for an exercise bike. I think it was an extra, right? No, it's a pad. Oh, it was a pat. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so it was an exercise device. You'd hook up to your Sega Genesis and it came packaged in with this game called Outback Joey,

which was like a kangaroo racing, something, whatever. And, yeah, and so that's the hardest to find, like, you know, Genesis cartridge that was actually sold to people. But, like, a lot of people don't even know it exists because it's, because, because it's so rare and also because it's like, you know, because it was sort of packaged with an exercise machine, it's not like EGM was hyping it up or anything, you know? Yeah. Well, it's a console. It's a Genesis.

Yeah. That it's like a gray Genesis. It's like different case and everything, right? And then this like exercise pad and then this cart. And so it is one of those, yeah, I think we talked to a lot of Genesis collectors and they're like, what game is that? Yeah. Yeah.

You probably never see it. Well, you know, what actually happened when we were doing a retro game roadshow panel at, at Portland. Portland, right, is that somebody said, oh, I've got this copy of PGA Tour Golf that works with the entertainment machine and brings up this copy in a box with a manual that almost seemed like it was hand-assembled, but it was a version of, what was it, PGA Tour Golf 2 for the Genesis that was modified to work with this entertainment machine, and everybody on the panel was like, that's not in any lists. And it's like, did this come out? How did someone get this? And we just don't know. And so that actually could be like the here to four unknown rarest production Genesis

Cartridge, too, if it wasn't a, like, we don't know if it was a prototype or not. What if they were literally just hand assembling them in this company and had to call them and they'd send you one if you bought it? You know, it's like, we were taken aback. Yeah. We still don't know. And I think that's as good a place to end as any. The mysteries of video gaming and the Holy Grails are unfathomable.

Remember. Even the experts are baffled. In Latin, it starts with an eye. Yenesis, yes. Sega Yenesis. Only the penitent man shall pass. All right. And I guess that's it.

So for Retronauts, I am Jeremy Parrish exploding into an ancient skeleton at rapid speed. and you can find me decrepit on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com you can find Retronauts this here podcast on iTunes, Lipson,

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So please consider doing that. And if not, you can always listen to us for free. It's fine. We won't take it personally. Just enjoy the show. Learn a little something. And don't spend thousands of dollars on a NeoGeo game. Don't spend thousands of dollars on any game.

Yeah. Exactly. I'm just thinking NeoGio is like the ones saying this. 900 on virtual bowling is where you have to stop. Anything other than that is just ridiculous. 99 on Kid Dracula, don't do it. All right. Steve.

Steve Lynn, Stephen P. Lynn on Twitter, part of Discord and the Video Game History Foundation. Support us. Gamehistory.org. We have an amazing Discord server that includes a channel dedicated to Bubsy called Bubsy Chat. So if you want to, yeah, I mean, it's like what could possibly go wrong? But, yeah, support us there, and thanks for having me. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler, and I just remember that I did indeed, after many years of searching, I get a nice deal on a boxed copy of Indiana Jones' The Last Crusade, the LucasArts Adventure Game, that I'd wanted for a while,

which comes to the replica of Henry Jones's Grail Diary. And you can find me on Twitter talking about various garbage that I buy at Kobunheat, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T, and find my writings about retro games and occasionally other things on Kotaku.com. Bob? Hello. Yes, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo and what's better than collecting games giving to Patreon because our content is always available for everybody for a small fee. So I do a lot of podcasts for the Talking Simpsons network.

That's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Those are the podcast Talking Simpsons and what a cartoon. And also we have a ton of bonus podcast and exclusive series for you at the $5 level. We've been doing it for almost two years now. There's tons there waiting for you. If you like me talking about other old things, you'll like my podcast there. That's patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Thank you very much.

And we should have a rom hoarder tier for Patreon where we record an episode specifically just for one person. And it's up to them if they want to keep it forever or share it. Yeah, something like that, except without Martin Schrelli involved. Release retro knots on vinyl. Yes. That's what I want. Yeah, that'd be a lot of records. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening.

Retronauts will be back in a few days. And until then, remember, she talks in or sleep. Thank you.