The Art of Selling Nintendo Games

It’s a little difficult to explain how I ended up with more than 200 Nintendo cartridges — a system I never cared that much for in the first place. For those who know me, it may be even more difficult to believe that I’ve decided to part with them.

The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, was released in North America the fall of 1985 just in time for Christmas. Several of my friends ended up owning a Nintendo, and while I enjoyed playing their games when I visited, I never wanted a Nintendo of my own. By the time the Nintendo was released I already had a Commodore 64 computer in my bedroom. While Nintendo owners had to buy (or rent) games to play, I was downloading new games every night for free using my computer’s modem.

I didn’t get a Nintendo until the summer of 1991, right around the time Nintendo released their follow-up system, the Super Nintendo. A fast food coworker of mine sold me his NES including 30 games for $100, in part to help pay for a Super Nintendo. I hooked the Nintendo up in my bedroom and played games on it while my computer was downloading other games. When I got my first apartment I hooked the Nintendo up in the living room, where Jeff, Andy and I occasionally played Super Mario Bros. 3 or Tetris. By the winter of 1993 I had assembled my first PC, and both the Nintendo and my Commodore 64 went into storage.

I didn’t think about the Nintendo again until I joined Digital Press, an online haven for video game collectors. Being (virtually) surrounded by like-minded gamers gave me the collecting bug, and I began buying video game cartridges at garage sales and thrift stores — not just Nintendo, but Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis games as well. From the late 90s though much of the 00s, old game cartridges could be picked up for pennies on the dollar. At one garage sale I bought an Atari 2600 console with joysticks, paddles, and 40 games for $20. Every garage sale you went to had Nintendo games for a buck.

The thing I discovered about myself is that I loved the hunt for games infinitely more than I loved playing the games. I loved the excitement that came from walking up to a garage sale in hopes of finding a title I didn’t already own. I created a spreadsheet of all the games I owned and copied it to my Palm Pilot (remember those?) so when I was out shopping I could easily check whether or not I already owned a specific title.

Sometime in the early 00s, Blockbuster launched GameRush, an offshoot designed to compete with GameStop. Some GameRush locations were stand-alone stores while others were nestled inside Blockbusters. A few years later — I want to say this was 2007 or 2008 — Blockbuster announced that all GameRush locations were closing and that all their inventory would be liquidated. Armed with my electronic spreadsheet, a friend of mine and I spent an entire weekend driving to every local GameRush location, about a dozen, buying every NES game I didn’t already own. Not only had GameRush dropped the price of used NES games to 99 cents, but they were also offering a buy two/get one free sale. The funniest thing about this sale was that GameRush put all their NES games in clunky, oversized antitheft boxes that definitely cost more than the old games they were protecting. The plastic containers were difficult to open, and by the end of that weekend every GameRush cashier in Oklahoma City had cursed my name after I had approached them with towering stacks of cartridges that they had to open one at a time using a janky plastic key device.

By the end of that weekend, my collection of NES games had soared to approximate 250… and still, I didn’t play them. Sure, I sorted them, arranged and rearranged them, cleaned them, and made lists of them, but I never played them. I bought a set of shelves to display them, and when they outgrew that, I built some custom shelves to house them.

In 2011 we moved from that house to the big house. When we moved, I put all those NES cartridges in a big plastic tub where they slept for several years. On a whim one day I pulled those games out of the tub and put them on a shelf in my closet; when I needed the shelf space for my DVD collection, I put the games back in the tub. I’m positive I never played any of those games during the seven years we lived in that house.

The next time I touched that tub was to move it from that house to this house in 2018. The tub has been sitting in the back of my closet, unopened, for almost three years.

Two weeks ago I was looking for something in my closet and ran across that tub of games, which I had essentially forgotten about. I already mentioned that I don’t play a lot of NES games, but if I wanted to, I have three ways to do it within 2′ of the chair I am currently sitting in. Directly in front of me, I have a Nintendo emulator installed on my PC. To my immediate left I have two devices, a MiSTer FPGA computer and a Raspberry Pi, both of which also play NES games. All three of these solutions allow me to play every single NES game ever released with minimal effort. If for whatever reason I want to go back and revisit some of these old games, I have plenty of ways to do it. Pulling physical cartridges out of storage and playing them on vintage hardware is the least convenient way, and the method I’m least likely to do.

I feel a lot of anxiety when it comes to parting with certain things, old video games being one of them, but when I realized the games inside that tub hadn’t been played in over a decade, something inside my kooky brain finally clicked. Like I said before, I never liked playing those games as much as I liked hunting for them in the wild and displaying them. With the proliferation of eBay and Craigslist, I very rarely see vintage games at thrift stores or garage sales anymore. There was a time I got enjoyment from putting all those games out on display, but today it feels like a burden to keep lugging around all that old plastic.

Last weekend, Operation Nintendo went into effect. I spent about $20 at Dollar General on isopropyl alcohol, Goo Gone, Fantastik spray cleaner, a pack of Q-tips, a roll of paper towels, and a four pack of Magic Erasers. I’ve been cleaning and testing my way through the pile of games, one at a time. Some of them have previous rental stickers that need removed. (Curiously, some of the games that came from Blockbuster have stickers on the back reminding customers to “rewind the tape.” Somebody at Blockbuster had a sense of humor.) Lots of the games needed cleaning before they would even work. Sometimes early in the morning and sometimes late at night I’ll grab a stack of games and scrub their little contacts as the sun is either coming up or going down.

My office is filled with multiple piles of NES games. There’s a pile of games that haven’t been cleaned, and a pile of games that have. After the games are cleaned I plug them into a Nintendo clone I have (the RetroN 1) and test them out. If the game fires up, I take a picture of it working along with shots of the front and back of the cartridge and it goes into the “ready to list” pile. Games that don’t work go into the “try again” pile. When the “ready to list” pile gets so tall I’m afraid it will topple over it gets moved over near the computer (the “list it on eBay” pile). As time permits I list them on eBay and the games are moved to a “they’ve been listed on eBay” pile until they sell.

Over the past week I’ve listed 78 NES games on eBay; 15 have sold. The vast majority of my games are listed at $9.99, which includes free shipping. Shipping a padded envelope with a game inside costs $3.50, and eBay now takes 12.55% plus $0.30 off of the total price. For a $9.99 sale, that means eBay keeps $1.55; add in $3.50 for shipping and I’m making just under $5 on a $10 sale. eBay is a good way to part with old video games, but not a good way to get rich doing it.

There have been exceptions. My copy of Tecmo Super Bowl sold for $30, and a game I don’t even remember buying (Bible Buffet) sold almost immediately for $70. But again, these are the exceptions to the rule. Most of the games I’ve listed haven’t sold, and most of the ones that have sold went for $9.99.

To be honest, selling these games has been the most fun I’ve had with them in years. It’s been fun to go through and touch them all, to find random people’s names written on the back of them in Sharpie, and to look at the label artwork. It’s pretty satisfying to pull a game from the non-working pile and clean it until it fires up. Frankly, I get more enjoyment from that than playing them.

For anyone worried (or excited) that I’m “selling it all,” I wouldn’t go that far. The hundreds and hundreds of games I’ve been cleaning and listing on eBay have come from a single tub. There are more tubs in the closet. There are dozens of tubs in the garage. I have miles to go before I sleep.

I haven’t decided what else, if anything, I plan to get rid of. For now, I’ll focus on these NES games. They’re small, easy to ship, and I won’t miss them too terribly much. Except for ExciteBike — I’ll miss that one. That was such a great game and I might hang on to it. Oh, and Dr. Mario, which was fun, and Tetris, which Susan likes. And Super Mario Bros. 3, because it was such a classic. But other than that, I’m selling them all. Wait, is that Gauntlet? Maybe just one more…