213 replies to this topic

[dommie]

Ok, I got a call from a good friend of mine today. He's in the scrap metal business. A client contacted him about selling a massive inventory of factory sealed 2600 and 7800 games. When I say massive, I mean massive. As best as I can tell, he's got 30 or so titles and literally about 40,000 copies of each title. All factory sealed. The guy that is in possession of these games is some kind of liquidator who acquires massive amounts of crap when say a factory goes under or something along those lines.

I think he attempted to sell them individually but was a bit overwhelmed and his marketing skills were kind of shabby. So end result is he wants to scrap them. Since the PCBs were manufactured with small amounts of precious metals, this is probably his best recourse to liquidate the lot in his mind. Long story short, he contacts my friend who runs a scrap metal recycling plant. My friend's business is prepared to offer him a fair market price for the scrap value of the games. But my friend contacted me and wants to know if I knew anything about diverting some of the shipments to resell instead of scrapping them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around this kind of find. The purchase price per game will be very cheap because I don't think there's very much precious metal on the standard 2600 or 7800 PCB, but I'll find out an exact amount in a day or 2. As of now my friend's getting a sample shipment to take to his smelter to test metal quantities.

So now I need to figure out a few things. Like for starters, will reintroducing this kind of quantity of games totally F up the market value for factory sealed 2600 games? And how do I unload whatever quantity I decide to take. Does anybody have any ideas? I thought about ebay at first, but seriously, I think I'd have issues moving more than a case of each title.

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the location of this find or which particular titles are in this lot, but lets just say they are neither extremely rare nor extremely common titles. More or less average in that department.

I dunno, I think it may require me to fly halfway across the country and see the actual lot for me to better visualize what I'm looking at. The owner of the lot estimated it at somewhere between 20 to 30 tractor trailer loads.

[yuppicide]

30 x 40,000 = 1,200,000.

1,200,000 x .25 cents each = $300,000.

Even at .10 cents each that's $120,000.

Neither I doubt you have, but maybe you have.

40,000 of each title will be hard to move if you ask me.

AtariAge buys carts for 50 cents each. I'm not sure how many Al would take off your hands, but there's one place to start.

I'd hate to see these goto scrap metal. Even if they are all E.T.

[Wickeycolumbus]

Wow, over 1,000,000 NIB games I don't have any advice, but I'd hate to see them all go to scrap.

[4ever2600]

Maybe it's OSheas? He is about the only person I know who has that many still sealed... Hmmm

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:37 PM, said:

Ok, I got a call from a good friend of mine today. He's in the scrap metal business. A client contacted him about selling a massive inventory of factory sealed 2600 and 7800 games. When I say massive, I mean massive. As best as I can tell, he's got 30 or so titles and literally about 40,000 copies of each title. All factory sealed. The guy that is in possession of these games is some kind of liquidator who acquires massive amounts of crap when say a factory goes under or something along those lines.

I think he attempted to sell them individually but was a bit overwhelmed and his marketing skills were kind of shabby. So end result is he wants to scrap them. Since the PCBs were manufactured with small amounts of precious metals, this is probably his best recourse to liquidate the lot in his mind. Long story short, he contacts my friend who runs a scrap metal recycling plant. My friend's business is prepared to offer him a fair market price for the scrap value of the games. But my friend contacted me and wants to know if I knew anything about diverting some of the shipments to resell instead of scrapping them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around this kind of find. The purchase price per game will be very cheap because I don't think there's very much precious metal on the standard 2600 or 7800 PCB, but I'll find out an exact amount in a day or 2. As of now my friend's getting a sample shipment to take to his smelter to test metal quantities.

So now I need to figure out a few things. Like for starters, will reintroducing this kind of quantity of games totally F up the market value for factory sealed 2600 games? And how do I unload whatever quantity I decide to take. Does anybody have any ideas? I thought about ebay at first, but seriously, I think I'd have issues moving more than a case of each title.

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the location of this find or which particular titles are in this lot, but lets just say they are neither extremely rare nor extremely common titles. More or less average in that department.

I dunno, I think it may require me to fly halfway across the country and see the actual lot for me to better visualize what I'm looking at. The owner of the lot estimated it at somewhere between 20 to 30 tractor trailer loads.

[homerwannabee]

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:37 PM, said:

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the location of this find or which particular titles are in this lot, but lets just say they are neither extremely rare nor extremely common titles.

Dude, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out these are the O'Shea games!

Edit: Here is the order form of the massive amount of Atari 2600 games, and Atari 7800 games which happen to number 31 different games.

https://www.oshealtd...riorderform.htm

Edited by homerwannabee, Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:51 PM.

[dommie]

yuppicide, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:46 PM, said:

30 x 40,000 = 1,200,000.

1,200,000 x .25 cents each = $300,000.

Even at .10 cents each that's $120,000.

Neither I doubt you have, but maybe you have.

40,000 of each title will be hard to move if you ask me.

AtariAge buys carts for 50 cents each. I'm not sure how many Al would take off your hands, but there's one place to start.

I'd hate to see these goto scrap metal. Even if they are all E.T.

LOL, no, one of the 30 titles is not E.T. (at first neither of us knew if the lot consisted of a single title or every title, but we later got a hold of an actual list from the guy). But seriously, the money to purchase the lot isn't the issue for me. It's the being able to move them part. And I don't have to buy the whole lot. The scrap company is already going to do that if the owner of the lot accepts their offer. I just have to decide how many I want to "save" from getting melted down. Like, do I take 10,000? 20,000? More? Less?

[4ever2600]

Well, how big is your house?

[dommie]

homerwannabee, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:48 PM, said:

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:37 PM, said:

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the location of this find or which particular titles are in this lot, but lets just say they are neither extremely rare nor extremely common titles.

Dude, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out these are the O'Shea games!

Edit: Here is the order form of the massive amount of Atari 2600 games, and Atari 7800 games which happen to number 31 different games.

https://www.oshealtd...riorderform.htm

Doh! I should have known that somebody from AtariAge would have guessed the source. Anyhow. How many should I attempt to save from getting smelted?

[Nathan Strum]

Well, Albert will buy them for 50¢store credit each. Sounds like a real money-making opportunity.

[Wickeycolumbus]

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:56 PM, said:

yuppicide, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:46 PM, said:

30 x 40,000 = 1,200,000.

1,200,000 x .25 cents each = $300,000.

Even at .10 cents each that's $120,000.

Neither I doubt you have, but maybe you have.

40,000 of each title will be hard to move if you ask me.

AtariAge buys carts for 50 cents each. I'm not sure how many Al would take off your hands, but there's one place to start.

I'd hate to see these goto scrap metal. Even if they are all E.T.

LOL, no, one of the 30 titles is not E.T. (at first neither of us knew if the lot consisted of a single title or every title, but we later got a hold of an actual list from the guy). But seriously, the money to purchase the lot isn't the issue for me. It's the being able to move them part. And I don't have to buy the whole lot. The scrap company is already going to do that if the owner of the lot accepts their offer. I just have to decide how many I want to "save" from getting melted down. Like, do I take 10,000? 20,000? More? Less?

I would save a bunch of the Superchip games (Super Football and Dig Dug for the 2600).

Edited by Wickeycolumbus, Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:03 PM.

[Shawn Sr.]

So does this mean Oshea's is getting out of Atari?

[homerwannabee]

Nathan Strum, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:02 PM, said:

Well, Albert will buy them for 50¢store credit each. Sounds like a real money-making opportunity.

Oh no he won't. Albert does not buy the Silver carts because they are a HUGE pain to remove. The ones he would have use of are Super Football, Venture, Gravitar, Solaris, and Football.

[dommie]

4ever2600, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:00 PM, said:

Well, how big is your house?

Before I even finished telling my wife the whole story, she interrupted me and said "don't even THINK of bringing them here!"

They'd obviously get stored in a warehouse. I have a few thousand square feet I can spare in empty warehouse space, but the whole lot would require plan B (which I haven't figured out yet).

[dommie]

Shawn Sr., on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:02 PM, said:

So does this mean Oshea's is getting out of Atari?

I would say yeah if he accepts the scrap offer.

[MausGames]

That's awful, it would be a huge shame for all of these carts to get melted. He says he started out with over 3 million though, so that means he put about 2/3 of the games into the hands of people who wanted them for what they are. Everyone and their dog should send him a note thanking him for what he's done.

[Mitch]

The reason they're not selling anymore is because he raised the prices too high. They were still selling at $2 but not $5.

Mitch

[dommie]

MausGames, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:21 PM, said:

That's awful, it would be a huge shame for all of these carts to get melted. He says he started out with over 3 million though, so that means he put about 2/3 of the games into the hands of people who wanted them for what they are. Everyone and their dog should send him a note thanking him for what he's done.

I'll have to ask everybody to please refrain from doing this until AFTER my friend brokers this deal. I'd hate to screw it up for him. It's a potential good payday for him even if it all goes to scrap and a sudden influx of messages about Atari games may make the guy reconsider selling.

[MausGames]

I want a big box of them. I'd open them all, dismantle the game boxes, turn them inside out, and use stencils and paint to make awesome homebrew boxes for Maus Games.

Help your friend or potentially help a million Atari fans.hmmmm.....J/K no problem, but I see that the order form is still up. I can see why you posted about this, it's realy exciting, and I think you can count on the AA community to not interfere.

Edited by MausGames, Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:33 PM.

[homerwannabee]

Believe it or not I actually made a thread about how much gold was in an Atari 2600 cart. According to Crunchysuperman at the time he stated that there was about .48 cents worth of gold in every cart if the cart was plated with 24 karrot gold, but stated is was probably a cheaper metal. This did not take into acount the actual PCB board which may also have some gold in it. At the time gold was $650 an ounce. Now it is $1030 an ounce. Meaning that the average value of gold per cart is about .75 cents a piece.

Edit nevermind. I found another post stating it is .86 cents a piece at the time. Making the carts worth about $1.30 a piece in gold right now not including the PCB's which could have gold as well.
http://www.atariage....ost__p__1270762

Edited by homerwannabee, Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:36 PM.

[dommie]

homerwannabee, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:30 PM, said:

Believe it or not I actually made a thread about how much gold was in an Atari 2600 cart. According to Crunchysuperman at the time he stated that there was about .48 cents worth of gold in every cart if the cart was plated with 24 karrot gold, but stated is was probably a cheaper metal. This did not take into acount the actual PCB board which may also have some gold in it. At the time gold was $650 an ounce. Now it is $1030 an ounce. Meaning that the average value of gold per cart is about .75 cents a piece.

Edit nevermind. I found another post stating it is .86 cents a piece at the time. Making the carts worth about $1.30 piece in gold not including the PCB's which could have gold as well.
http://www.atariage....ost__p__1270762

I'll have to check out that thread, but I should have an exact amount for gold quantity in a few days after we hear back from the smelter. I don't think they used 24k, but then again I'm no metallurgist.

[gdement]

You could sell them in bulk lots for other resellers to chew on.
Homebrewers may have interest in buying lots of 7800 Ballblazer, just because those all contain a POKEY chip. Not that anybody wants to desolder large quantities of those chips by hand.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Nathan Strum, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:02 PM, said:

Well, Albert will buy them for 50¢store credit each. Sounds like a real money-making opportunity.

Somehow I doubt Albert will buy them all.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

There are some carts in the list which have the SuperChip build into. That would have helped creating new carts using the SC. But with Melody around the corner, I am not sure if those are still more valuable.

[Rom Hunter]

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:37 PM, said:

So now I need to figure out a few things. Like for starters, will reintroducing this kind of quantity of games totally F up the market value for factory sealed 2600 games?

No, except if these 30 titles are (were) hard to find.

dommie, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:37 PM, said:

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to disclose the location of this find or which particular titles are in this lot, but lets just say they are neither extremely rare nor extremely common titles. More or less average in that department.

Well, obviously they will become more common in the end.

BTW: I hope you'll understand that talking about VCS game scrap metal on a VCS game collectors forum is a bit like cursing in a church?

[panamajoe]

wow, i still can`t believe the coincidence that the O`Shea stuff ended up in the hands of someone who is willing to save at least parts of it...
great!