For real, or just for a little pump and dump action by some bad actor again?
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
84 points (88.2% liked)
Technology
85420 readers
3502 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Was it the founder of Wata selling to another founder of Wata who is buying the game as a group purchase with the other founding members of Wata - again?
I thought all of this speculative market around preserved game boxes was dead, but I see it isn't. I hope we get past this, let it die, and just keep being dead.
It never will be.
This asset can be used as collateral for leverage. So now the owner has it, they can use it to put up maybe around $30,000,000 if they have a good enough relationship with a broker.
Because of the way America is right now too, they can give trump a 10m cut if he slides a particular stock one way or another.
President gets 10m, punter gets got knows how much, and nobody is any the wiser.
It's the same with art, but with art, it's a lot more speculative, which is why you have so many god awful contemporary pieces, because again they'll pay an appraiser to say it's worth 100m when it's a handful of beans on a canvas, and then use that as collateral.
These are just infinite money glitches for the rich.
In all seriousness, there's nothing stopping you and your friends and their families from doing the same thing, but because it's not the system they designed they're going to be skeptical of it and not want to do that.
If it is Heritage Auctions and WATA then it is corruption. This game is never worth that amount and no one has actually bought it for that amount it is just an ongoing scam and any "publication" reporting on this trash as if it were anything else should also be considered compliant of this obvious market manipulation bullshit.
Fuck WATA for trending this bullshit. Like sure, it might've been a thing that was already going, but when WATA got into the picture, they amped it up. So now we've been seeing these people run around just securing their collections in little cases, getting little stickers and they're going around artificially inflating the value as to what to sell games by.
When, WATA has been shown to be operated by a bunch of hedgefund cronies that are definitely running money laundering schemes and are in court over things.
If you're an aspiring collector and you buy one of these kinds of games, you're the fool.
why
Money laundering? 🤷♂️
Yeah, probably some form of wash trading.
Pricing of "collectibles" never makes any sense...
People like collecting things.
And it still plays exactly the same as any other copy. You'll need to blow into the cartridge just like everyone else
Its sealed so would be funny if was defective and didn't even play at all.
Of course, no one would ever know because this thing will probably never be opened and even less likely to be played
Kinda sad, poor little cartridge :-(.
I suppose a cartridge of just SMB1 is somewhat rare; anyone I knew who had an NES had the Super Mario / Duck Hunt multicart, or very occasionally Super Mario / Duck Hunt / Track & Field triple game cartridge from the bundle that included the Power Pad.
Seems rare-ish, very skeptical about $3 million rare but I guess the selling point is more about that particular cartridge being distributed with the Nintendo sticker seal vs the plastic shrinkwrap most cartridges had later on?
anyone I knew who had an NES had the Super Mario / Duck Hunt multicart, or very occasionally Super Mario / Duck Hunt / Track & Field triple game cartridge from the bundle that included the Power Pad.
You got me thinking about that, you're probably talking about what Nintendo called the Action Set bundle, or the Power Set after that, when they were including those dual/triple game paks.
My own was the earlier bundle, what Nintendo called the Deluxe Set, that one came with two separate games (Duck Hunt and Gyromite). We had to buy SMB separately.. definitely don't remember if it had a sticker vs shrinkwrap.
Wikipedia mentions the different NES bundles back then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Bundles_and_redesigns
Why can't I just randomly find something like that in my attic?
Because your house is probably shit like mine
I'm more likely to find expired meth which a dung Beatle rolled in
Does Meth even expire? Never thought about that
I don’t believe these boxes actually have the game till they are opened. Secondly, back in April, Yaamava Casino claimed to be giving away as a prize, a unopened copy of Mario Bros. The thing that pissed me off was in all the advertising (including television), they would never say the name of the game. They just showed a image of the box and referred to it as a “cartridge classic”. IF YOU WON’T SAY THE FUCKING GOD DAMN NAME THEN I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE YOU ACTUALLY HAVE THAT GAME!
I don’t believe these boxes actually have the game till they are opened.
Schrödinger's cartridge.
There's always x-rays
Well, of course it's going to be there if you scan the inside.