One chilly Saturday in January I was out doing whatever when I spotted a sign for an estate sale. The sign was deceptive. The sale was actually a store that dealt with abandoned estates. The owner is exactly who you are picturing would run a shop like this. We talked for a bit. I learned that his business works like - 1) Someone dies without an estate or relatives (or relatives that want to deal with their stuff). 2) The bank that owns the mortgage for their house needs it cleaned out and hires someone like him to do it. 3) There is some agreement, like a consignment, where the bank receives a cut of what he sells. This does not sound like an easy living but he seemed perfect for it.

He had a decent collection of mostly common video games there. It's about what you'd expect. If someone had a video game hoard worth 5+ digits I expect some distant relative would be happy to claim their estate. By far, the most interesting item was one I didn't buy:

What you see here is two NES Advantage controllers modded into a dual stick PlayStation controller. I assume this was done to play a favorite flight or tank game. I suppose it could have been made for accessibility purposes, I think my first impression is more likely. I performed a couple searches to see if this mod was documented anywhere and found nothing.

I have no use or space for this controller. I debated whether it was worth spending $40 to satisfy my curiosity. I don't have any games that would benefit from this setup but would like to try it all the same. Maybe I should have bought it if only to donate to the Midwest Gaming Classic's game room. Whatever, finding this will make someone else's day.

I sort of felt obligated to buy something so I went with this Atari 2600 game I didn't own, also because I'm a fan of Imagic box art:

Ever since getting the Atari 7800+ I've been playing so many 2600/7800 games that don't appear on the roughly 800,000,000 collections of Atari games and Flashback systems. Trying a "new to me game" is a great way to spend a 5 minute break during the day.

This is from a trip to 2nd & Charles:

Is this even a rare game? It was a launch title (or near launch) and later had a reprint. I seem to recall it appearing in the Genesis Does commercials. Sports games on the Genesis rarely appreciate though. It was a $60 game in 1990, I get that. It was also $1 in used game bins everywhere for a while.

Here are some mid games from an estate sale on 50% off everything day:

I should have gone on the first day because I suspect they had a better selection and if $4 was the average price they would have gone quickly. Oh well. I couldn't remember if I owned Cool Boarders 2 but figured for $2 it was worth the risk. It turns out I did not own it and my memories were from the PlayStation Classic which it was included on. They had a bunch of other games that I passed on, even at $2. As for these three... I already know I'll play Cool Boarders 2 since I apparently already did. I'll buy pretty much any PlayStation Portable game for $2. I hope the folks at Analogue figure that system out some day. And Billiards is something I'll try at least once. It was $1.50 so whatever.

On the topic of buying just about any PlayStation Portable game for $21:

This was on clearance at Half Price Books, presumably because it is region 2 and the staff doesn't know the system is region-free. I will play at least $1 worth of this.

Let's check in on Half Price Books since I was (obviously) just there:

I had to take a picture of this since it's the second (technically third) NES Advantage sighting of 2026. $25 is a little high but not completely outrageous.

This price seems reasonable, I don't think boxed 5200 games are all that common:

I've never owned a 5200 and unless the current company called Atari makes a clone system I'm not collecting the games.

This next one is definitely way too high I think:

Diddy Kong Racing is extremely fun. I prefer it over Mario Kart. I bought the Japanese version a long time ago for something like $10. That is playable on a US Nintendo 64 using a Game Shark as a pass-through cartridge convertor. I understand a couple minutes with the Dremel will work too. The Analogue 3D is a great option too but the previous two suggestions are much cheaper.

For spring break I went on a little road trip with my wife. We usually stop at any antique store we see along the way and this trip was no exception. In the back corner of one very large store there was a video game section. Although the selection was very picked over:

I get it. People don't want old sports games. I keep a few old favorites but I'm not interested in collecting any more.

They had games for many systems. I would argue the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 aren't "antique" but concede that systems from the 1970s-1980s qualify. The selection for all these systems though was, well...

They had some common boxed Intellivision games for not terrible prices:

The NES games there were consistent with the rest of the selections:

Here's the rest of what they had:

I did not buy any games there.

A couple days later I stopped by an estate sale with some crusty Atari 2600 games:

These are all duplicates for me with the exception of the mystery cart which I assumed was another common game. Maybe I missed out on buying an ultra-rare game, I doubt it though.

At a completely different estate sale, I spotted this in the basement:

I understand that $500 for a working Space Invaders cocktail table is a great deal. This was not plugged in and I don't think that was an accident. This machine needed some work.

For sure the enamel needed to be replaced or whatever one does to fix up something badly scratched:

This machine clearly had a lot of use:

It was very tempting to buy this but I passed. I don't know how to maintain a machine like this, and also don't know how to restore it. I could learn both of those things and have a sweet Space Invaders cocktail table, also a hernia.

It's been a while since I found something at Goodwill:

This was maybe $2.09 more than it's worth but I'm not complaining.