scharlie
Ei mãe, 500 pontos!
- Mensagens
- 9.895
- Reações
- 35.233
- Pontos
- 503
Vintage baseball cards, antique coins and rare comic books, originally bought for pennies, now regularly sell for millions of dollars, sending enthusiasts in pursuit of the next hot collectible: retro video games.
Interest in factory-sealed video games has soared in the past year, with some companies aggressively targeting collectors from more established markets. The hottest investments are games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, which popularized characters like Link, Mega Man and Mario in the 1980s.
Collectors have been able to quickly flip the most coveted titles, making thousands of dollars in profit and fueling concerns of unsustainable hype.
One collector, Donald Brock Jr., who runs the website Columbia Comics, said he had spent about $50,000 buying vintage video games since his first purchase in March. One sealed N.E.S. game cost nearly $1,500. He had its condition graded, and then sold it for more than $12,000.
The top end of the market has also been invigorated. In September, Eric Naierman, a dentist who had primarily collected sports cards, spearheaded a $1 million purchase of dozens of games, months after video game collectors jointly bought a rare Super Mario Bros. game for more than $100,000. A copy of the original Mega Man recently sold at auction for $75,000.
Collectors say that multiple gold copies of Nintendo World Championships — only 26 were distributed, making it one of the rarest N.E.S. games — have reached the six-figure threshold in private sales.
Artigo completo: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/us/video-games-wata-heritage.html
Mr. Lecce, who organized the group of Super Mario Bros. buyers that includes Mr. Halperin, is confident in the investment, trusting that future collectors will care about Mario because the character is embedded in pop culture.
“To me, Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda are artworks that are far more important than, say, the Mona Lisa,” said Mr. Lecce, who tried unsuccessfully to sell the Super Mario Bros. copy for $1,000,000 in a recent episode of “Pawn Stars.”