The venue: the Oshawa Game Swap this past Sunday October 29th, 2017.
The entrance queue moments before opening: a massive line up of young adults, teenagers, children and parents.
At the front of the line-up in position number one and number two: two full grown middle aged men… Enter Nintendo Joe and the Sega Dude.
It was a small Game Swap but it was packed with vendors and shoppers. In fact the hard part was trying to get close enough to a table to see the goods. Tons of games to browse through and a thick crowd to contend with. But despite the quantity of very cool games I ended up only bringing one home.
A complete and excellent condition World Games for the Sega Master System for $40 CAD (~$31 USD). The game was priced at $50 and when I offered $40 the seller counter with $45 pretty quickly but when I really only wanted to pay $40 he took a good amount of time to consider it. I would have walked away if he wasn’t OK with $40 but he was and now it’s home and in the collection.
The game itself seems playable enough but it’s not super exciting. What’s more interesting is my list of 53 remaining games to complete my library of every Sega Master System title is down one to a new total of 52 games. Baby steps.
I did find something that was really surprising to see at a local retro video game swap. And man, I really wanted it. I found a complete and excellent condition Pulseman for the Japanese Sega Mega Drive. It’s not pictured here because the seller wanted $400 CAD (~$310 USD) for it. That is significantly cheaper than 6 listings I found on ebay but at the same time there were also no recently sold listings for Pulseman. I’m not surprised that people just aren’t buying. At the start of the show I offered the guy $200 CAD (~$155 USD) for Pulseman and he was not impressed. I thought it was a good chunk of change for one video game. But he was a store and not a collector and he was not having it.
So as I continued to browse around I found that I kept thinking about Pulseman. And I started to think about the most I’ve ever paid for a Sega game. That honor belongs to Gleylancer for the Japanese Mega Drive at $260 CAD (~$200 USD). So, close to when Nintendo Joe and I were about to leave I went back and offered the seller $260 CAD for Pulseman. He said he’d sell it for $300 CAD (~$233 USD) but I just didn’t feel good about spending that much so I passed it up.
Maybe the paths of Pulseman and the Sega Dude will cross again some day. You never know.
It’s unreal that you only have 53 more games left for a complete collection! I’m glad you were able to get something off of your list this weekend.
Yeah, it should be fun hunting the rest down. It’s funny because 53 feels like a lot of not many at the same time. I can’t really tell if I’m close or not! These 53 game account for about 18% of the Sega Master System library.
I think you have to trust your instincts when it comes to these kinds of deals which it sounds like you did. Maybe you’ll run into this dealer again in the future and they’ll be more willing to negotiate?
Had he ended up taking my $260 I’m not sure how I would have felt about it later. I probably would have been OK with it. But that is still a ton of money. I actually did contact him later by email to see if we could work out a trade. Nothing has happened yet but we’ll see.
Good luck… Hope you can come to an agreement. 🙂
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