Collector Sells Complete Set of Video Games for $1.2 Million

Aaron Broverman

Filed under: Auctions

A video game collector from France sold a complete set of video games for $1.2 million on eBay in July 2012.

The collection includes factory-sealed copies of every game for many of Nintendo's consoles, every game for all the Sega consoles and every game for the lesser-known NEC consoles, which featured the first 16-bit video game system, known as The PC Engine in Japan and The TurboGrafx-16 in the U.S. They also released the first CD-based console in the world – TurboGrafx-CD. In total, that's 22 sets with about 7,000 video games.
The man known as Andre made it his mission to collect every game for all of these systems and decided to up the challenge by only going for copies that were right off the factory line. "I perfected some full sets by getting every title of them factory sealed, just for the challenge of it," he said in an email to the LA Times. "Some titles are extremely hard to come by brand new when they're 25 years old. Now that the mission is complete, maybe it's time to move on."

He has every game for Nintendo's virtual goggles-looking system with a distinctive red screen – The Virtual Boy and the 550 games made for the short-lived Sega Dreamcast. The rare gems of his collection include a game called Go-Net for the Sega Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the U.S.) and Andre says there is only one other copy of the game in the world. He also threw in Kunio-Kun Dodgeball Gold for The Super Famicom (The Japanese version of Super Nintendo) of which only eight copies were ever made.

Though the buyer will only receive 7,000 games, it's the rarity that makes it so valuable. Andre says he has thousands of other games he won't be selling. He started his collection 15 years ago and was a big gamer until he was 25. Though the collection is impressive, when we last heard from him he told us the Quebec-based buyer had yet to shell out the $1,230,699.99 and $1,230.70 in shipping. However, he's not that worried.

"If the payment doesn't come, I'll probably list [it] again on eBay, or on Japanese auction [sites], but maybe I'll split it by selling each [full set] separately," he told the LA Times. "We'll see in time."

In honour of Andre's attempt to sell his ridiculously complete collection of video games, we've put together a gallery of the top five craziest items ever attempted to be sold on eBay.