The climactic moment of any given Classic Gaming Expo generally arrives during the Saturday night auction. This is where all the rarest games and ephemera from the dealers' tables end up, and there's never a dull moment -- every single item is hotly contested, and prices got pretty insane this time. The highest-ticket item by far was an Intellivision Computer Keyboard unit, which was actually manufactured but only made it so far as being test-marketed before it was pulled. So retail units are out there, and this was one of them -- from the private collection of Intellivision game designer Keith Robinson. I guess he wanted $3000 more than he wanted an extra keyboard. Can you blame him, really?
More pics and stories, including the legend of the Mystery Boxes, after the jump.
I'll get right into the story. So last year, the CGE guys debuted the "Mystery Boxes." What's inside? Who knows! Bidding started at ten bucks. The first box climbed up to over $100 or so, and inside was... a bunch of junk. So the second mystery box came up, and bidding didn't get nearly as high this time given that nobody figured it was worth anything. But the guy who won it, again for about $100, ended up with Magic Card, an Atari 2600 game worth a couple few thousand dollars.
I always thought that, even though the event went down in CGE history, that it was a bad idea. The money was going to charity (the Special Olympics, at that show), so why not just announce that you're selling a Magic Card and raise thousands instead of a hundred? But I didn't see the big picture. This year, the Mystery Boxes were some of the highest-bidded items. One guy, shown right, bought the first two boxes for $400 and $600 each. They were filled with junk. He got a couple of Coronas for his charitable donations, yes, the most expensive Coronas ever.
But then, the CGE guys showed everyone a stack of five different unreleased game prototypes, which were put inside a Mystery Box. Later in the auction, they pulled out two boxes, and said the winner of the next auction would get to choose one. An Italian journalist won it for well over $1000, and picked the box with the prototypes -- luckily, he thought. But then, the last Mystery Box auction went for $1600, and it was another super-rare Atari 2600 game called Video Life -- again worth even more (although just slightly) than the auction price.
Now that's how you raise money for charity. And how you screw with people's minds. A joke with a two-year payoff!
Here's the Intellivision keyboard component. Actually it's just the cardboard box, for security purposes. Can you imagine this selling for $3000?
Lovely spokesmodel Crystal holds up four Famicom Box cartridges, from a Famicom unit that sat in Japanese hotels. I was thinking of maybe bidding, but it got up to $200 really quickly and I just don't care that much.
More of the items for auction, including a sealed copy of Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel for SNES, the rare Coca Cola Game Gear, a Nintendo DS signed by a bunch of random game developers at Video Games Live, and a German game system called Black Point.
