“Friend of mine received this sealed and graded original copy of Pokémon Yellow,” Kick said. “U.S. Customs: Broke the acrylic case, ripped and discarded the seal, [and] sliced the front of the box off. Maybe they weren’t fans of Wata Games?”
Wata Games is an independent company that grades and certifies games for collectors. Chances are you’ll encounter Wata Games if you’re looking for high-quality, mint copies of old games. The company was responsible for grading and certifying The_Master_Of_Unlocking’s copy, giving it an A+ rating and a score of 9.2. According to Wata Games’ website, the game is in “exceptional condition” and worth $3,800. Or it was until U.S. Customs came through and decimated the certification.
“So…either they hated the battery inside the cartridge…or they thought it’d contain drugs or something,” one tweeter suggested in Kick’s mentions. “Can U.S. Customs just destroy things without recourse,” asked another tweeter, with many others demanding consequences against the agency.
...
"Says here this package contains a... Game Boy game, valued at 4,000 dollars."
"No way that can be right, there's gotta be drugs or something inside that thing" :pika-pickaxe:
They probably interrupted some money laundering, whether they and the buyer knew it or not...
It's so cool how few rights you have when crossing any international border.
Okay just so we’re clear no level of law enforcement should be able to just break your stuff and not pay you for it, unless we as a society are saying “You are too rich and we’re taking your stuff”
No matter how you feel about collectibles I feel like “The TSA shouldn’t destroy people’s things with no recourse” is a pretty easy line to draw
On one hand; fuck these people driving up the cost of games that they will never even open or play. I hate treat grading and overvaluing with a passion. Thank god for emulation or these nerd fucks would make playing old games impossible for normal people
On the other hand; fuck US customs.
On the third hand; lol lmao get wrecked
There should really be a museum that has these retro video games preserved while treat consumers should really just be left with emulators.
Honestly I wish someone would flood the market with cheap reproductions just to fuck with treat investors
I think the classic game collections should be viewed similarly to that of art. And by that I mean we should break into the houses of collectors seize their shit. Video games are a medium where we have a chance of preserving most of if not all of it. Imagine if we could have done that with movies.
We need a centralized authority dedicated towards the preservation of video games, presumably under the authority of a global communist historical preservation society. These games, they aren't going to last forever, their parts have shelf lives, dvds expire, batteries expire, we have no "permanent" means of storage. What we need to do is have all the retro games in one place and restore or emulate them. Also it probably won't be bad to just destroy shit like clusters revenge or other racist video games.
Thank god for emulation or these nerd fucks would make playing old games impossible for normal people
Sometimes they're successful. There's a handful of canceled games that only exist as prototypes in private collections, doomed to bitrot, their code never released.
This media dark age happened at a much bigger scale when copyright hit, with culturally significant works like films of Pancho Villa's fighting and Metropolis being left to rot. Same deal with literary works.
for display on my office desk
Who is that attached to Pokemon Yellow? It was such a minor blip between Red/Blue and Silver/Gold.
It was my first Pokemon game and the early interaction with a Pokemon following you around constantly was super cool, but I definitely wouldn't spend money on a new-in-box copy when I can just run a ROM on my phone if I get specifically nostalgic for it.
I always wondered if you could trap yourself in a one way alley with a dead end with pikachu behind you
Yeah, but the guy specifically says he has no time to play video games anymore. He just wants a 4,000 dollar paperweight to remind him of when he was a babby
You could just have the box printed for you for a lot cheaper. What a fuckin dweeb lol
:soypoint-1: BuT ThEn It WoUlDn'T Be iT's OriGinaL PaCkaGiNg!
:think-about-it: seal it in plastic yourself, and tell people it's the original wrapping.
Obviously it's bad that they broke this person's stuff for no reason, but also a copy of Pokemon Yellow isn't worth $4,000 sealed or not lol
DISCLAIMER: pigs should not be able to rummage through your shit, damaging it, and when they didn't actually find anything get off scot free
anyway, Wata Games gets paid a percentage of the market value of the game you sent them for them to certify it; they decide how much the thing is worth; if you don't see the issue with that, i don't know what to tell you
Yeah this is a big case of “multiple things can be bad simultaneously.” Regardless of all my problems with the antique and collectibles industry and all that, cops should not be able to break your shit, and just go “Huh, nothing. Whoopsies.”
I would like to see my major cheapass hobby not become as dense and unapproachable as vintage cars over the course of my lifetime, so uh, critical support for the TSA or whatever
Wouldn't destroying the few remaining vintage game cartridges make the others even more expensive?
Edit: oh I see it was damaged not destroyed
dang cant imagine how theyll live with this treasure missing in their life
I’m sure this doesn’t happen to uber-rich people and museums. They’re not gonna slice into the Mona Lisa.
yup, the "graders" are just started up by auction houses that pump up the value of the carts by putting in shill bids, overpricing the carts as evaluators, and finally, buying the carts from themselves in auctions in order to get attention-grabbing headlines to the tune of "wow, this soopa mareao cart was sold for 2 mil"
The creation of this kind of ridiculously expensive collectibles market is proto-NFT behaviour and to that I say critical support to US Customs for fucking with an NFT-brained loser.
It's honestly almost identical to NFTs. Why should I care about this any more than some guy losing his apes? Lol
Exactly, it's completely artificial. They've taken a collector's market and intentionally distorted it into the analog equivalent of NFTs.
The value of these was created by them, and it is then held up by other people trading them purely through speculation. The entire market is commodity speculation rather than genuine interest in memorabilia. These people claiming it's about memorabilia and memories of childhood are full of shit, if it were they wouldn't want the extra-special-ultra-expensive-inflated one. It's all NFT brain.
specifically, its hypercommodification, where things are completely stripped of their use-value. with NFTs, they never had them. with this kind of speculative collectable, they once had use-value but even that has been taken away (by the collector who removes it from the hands of someone who might use it and instead hordes it in an unopened package, hoping it's more valuable in the future after all usable copies have been destroyed).
the other person replied with an explanation of why they're different. this sub-thread is about why you should still be upset. analogies are still useful in that context.
I get you're posing a hypothetical rhetorically but that's not physically possible and that's part of the reason NFTs are stupid.
You definitely don't need to care, but physical memorabilia like this at least has some history and organic demand attached to it, which classes it far above any NFT. Like anything to do with collectibles, it's just my opinion or whatever so who care?
There's memorabilia and there's the "never removed from box" bullshit ultra-preserved hyper brainworms shit that is fundamentally indistinguishable from NFTs.
The box is simply becomes an analog NFT.
It's not bad because they broke a "valuable" game. It's bad because it is so unnecessary to be checking like that
That was me, we got a hit for this unusually-high valued game and I flagged the game for the CBPOs to take a look at. I told them to fuck it up because lmao get wrekt nerds
