Over the last year Mrs Miner and I have been cleaning out our house as we’re planning on making a big move when everything works out. We’d have already moved but Covid-19 decided to throw a giant wrench in that plan.
We have way too much stuff as we bought a big house 10 years ago and have lots of hobbies so we had rooms full of shit. Some of it went to friends, some to goodwill, a good deal of it was sold and some into dumpsters. I have rented three (THREE!!!!) 20 yard dumpsters in the last year and filled them all.
At any rate the point of this post is to check ebay/CL/FB marketplace when you’re going through things and find something that seems like it might be worth something. When cleaning I’ll usually do this real time with my phone and make that decision right there whether or not it is worth it to me to sell. Sometimes things are worth a lot more than you would think.
Right before Christmas I found a box of Nintendo 64 carts and while going through it popped them into a N64 to test and play a bit, then one caught my eye as unusual when I started to play it.
The front is non-descript enough but on the back it had this sticker.
So it send me down a google rabbit hole and apparently I have in my possession a very rare cartridge. It was created to go in a N64 demo console in a retail store and give people a taste of Donkey Kong 64 before it had been released. It’s unusual because carts used in those consoles were mostly the full game and this one is just a video of the Monkeys rapping (yes it is as bad as you think) then 3 simple games followed by this screen.
These were supposed to be sent back to Nintendo once the real game was released so they could be destroyed. Of course anyone who’s worked in retail knows this doesn’t always happen. I worked at a Circuit City in 2004 and stuff like this walked off all the time.
So after google not telling me much other than it’s uncommon and a single ebay listing of the cart for ~$500 I turned to the N64 sub on reddit. They were quite helpful and immediately sent me here which had all the information I was looking for.
It turned out this random cartridge which I have zero recollection of buying is rare enough only 2-3 come up for sale on ebay every year and frequently command north of $500 if in good shape. Jackpot! I kept it for a while but as I keep going through my keep pile I find things I’d rather sell than keep so it moved into the sell pile.
I listed it on eBay earlier today with a price of 575 OBO which I though was high and likely would settle for $450 but it sold at full price less than 6 hours after the listing started!
So the moral of the story is when going through things give anything slightly odd a closer look as you never know when it’s strange enough to be rare and valuable.