Spring has arrived, which means that flea market season is upon us. I've been out and about over the last few weekends making all kinds of unexpected discoveries, and they've been piling up waiting for that special moment when I take pictures of them, then shove them into my closet forever. Now is that moment.
San Francisco remains, as ever, a Sega town; most of the old videogames that I find tend to be Genesis, with a few Master System scattered in for good measure. That said, I did have a couple of worthwhile Super Nintendo games show up here and there, including one with a mint condition box and manual, which you hardly ever find out in the wild considering how flimsy they are. Heck, some of my Super Nintendo games that I bought brand new back in the day are kind of messed up now, just from normal wear and tear. Imagine how they held up in the care of people who weren't anal-retentive about their game collections.
More information on each of these finds, below.
Discovered at one of the Bay Area's dirtiest flea markets, a few Dreamcast games. This is why you should always look in boxes of CDs, or in the music CD racks at thrift stores, because more often than not you'll find at least one game. Of course, finding a game case is only the first step. You then have to make sure to open it up and check if the game is in there, and whether or not the disc has been scratched beyond oblivion -- especially in the case of the Dreamcast's fragile GD-ROMs.
Miraculously, considering that these had been unceremoniously dumped into a cardboard box, the discs were all nearly perfect. Metropolis Street Racer, Vanishing Point, and Worms World Party are all about as rare as U.S. Dreamcast releases get. That is to say, they're not that difficult to get a hold of. But at $5 for all four of these -- total, not each -- well worth it.
Later that weekend, I was actually running late for a dinner, but there was a Goodwill between me and the restaurant. "What could it hurt to poke my head in?" I thought. As it turns out, it was worth the brief social faux pas, as there was a copy of *Pac-Attack *for Super NES sitting in there for $5. I'm serious, this thing is in near-perfect condition. I added it to the small stack of Super Nintendo games that I've been able to find out here. Also new to the collection are Gods and Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose, which were about $2 each.
One day, as I was headed out to the corner coffee shop less than a block from my apartment, I saw that one of my neighbors was having a garage sale. What I actually found was a large cardboard box full of every piece of random electronic junk that they'd accumulated over the last few years. This stack of NES games, a beat-up NES, two controllers, the AC adapter and RF switch, yes. But also a couple Dual Shock 2s, a power supply for a slim PlayStation 2, a couple extension cords, a bunch of speaker wire, a battery tester, and who knows what else.
So here I am, looking at this box of random stuff, and for the life of me I can't find anyone who can help me. There's a chair where someone had clearly been sitting, but nobody's outside. Just as I'm thinking I'm going to leave, go to the coffee shop, and see if anyone's there when I get back, I hear someone behind me.
"One dollar each item."
I swing around. The woman who's running the garage sale is sitting in a chair that is literally in the street, just off the sidewalk.
"Sorry?"
"One dollar each item. Everything one dollar."
"So, how much for the game system and the games?"
"I don't know. I don't know. You tell me how much."
("This is the best kind of garage sale," I think.)
"Five dollars?"
"Yes, yes."
So in addition to a box of random useless dirty electronics, an NES with Super Mario 3, 1942, Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road, Dr. Mario, TMNT, Zelda, T&C Surf Designs, and Legacy of the Wizard. Almost a "Greatest Hits" lineup of games that everyone, at some point, played.
This installment's requisite selection of Sega games falls, as my purchases often do, into two categories:
- Bought them even though they aren't especially rare or really interesting to me but they were remarkably cheap (Winter Challenge, Blade Eagle, Bart's Nightmare). $2 each.
- Were kind of expensive but rare, worth more than that, or are interesting (Fireshark, a shooter created by Zero Wing maker Toaplan and released in the U.S. by little-known publisher Dreamworks). $7.50.
Later on, a thrift store turned up an Atari 2600 with two controllers but no power supply, which kind of sucks because the 2600 had a unique power supply that doesn't work with just any AC adapter. $10.
And finally, this is why you also always look through stacks of Nintendo 64 games, even when most of them are worthless garbage like Madden Whatever Year It Was Then or Cruisin' USA. At the very bottom of a pile of crap was this demo cartridge for Banjo-Tooie, which was only given out to stores to put into their Nintendo 64 display units. As demo carts go, Nintendo 64 ones aren't especially rare, but certainly worth way more than the $2.50 I paid.
Photos: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
