racketboy.com

I've been a collector/gamer for about 5 years now, and while when i was starting out, i could pick up most games at a bargain, and overtime ive seen "retro games" go into the mainstream (or evenmoreso) and the prices of games skyrocket, some to the point of ridiculousness

it saddens me that kids who are getting into retrogames have to pay these prices, so the way i give back to the community is to inform people, link them to Racketboy or lnk them to ads of the games they want which are reasonably priced

for example, a friend is getting into collecting, and he wanted to have Super Star Wars for the SNES, i told him that ill lookout for it, alas, the next day he came to me and he bought it at Nedgame (big chain of gameshops in the Netherlands) for €30 loose, i went to Marktplaats (dutch craigslist) and linked him a few ads which sold that EXACT game for half if not less of the price he had paid, i also linked him to a few games he had on his wishlist, which were really cheap compared to the price most merchants/gameshops handle.

So fellow people, how do YOU give back to the comunity?

So yeah.....any opinions on this?

I'm not often in this forum so I just saw this now.

"Giving back to the community" is definitely pretty broad. I'd say I usually do it by passing along dupes that I come across for cost or less. Now that's not to say I get rid of a lot of games ever, I'm actually pretty good about not getting tons of dupes, but as anyone who buys lots knows, you will get them occasionally. Just 2 days ago I had a friend come over with his girlfriend and her son to play some of my old NES games. He's got a working NES, but I have almost 200 games so it's a much wider selection. While the son's playing the games, I wander over to my dupe box, fish out all my NES dupes and hand them to him. He ended up taking 6 of the 8, 2 he already had. Figure when I got them, I got them with other games I wanted, and honestly probably paid a reasonable price just for the games I wanted and those half dozen came along for free, so why not hook a buddy up?

Another co-worker was talking about wanting to get his hands on an Atari. I pull one of my 3 extras out, throw in a couple controllers and the games I think will be interesting out of my stack of dupes and bring it in to work. Tell him "Keep it for a month or two, if you like it, give me whatever you feel like giving me for it" -- He ended up giving me a flashed 360 because he had 3 360's somehow or another.

Now granted, with me it's kinda a "Pay it forward" thing. Damn near everyone I know KNOWS that I'm crazy into retro games. More than 1 friend has handed me systems or games, either saying "Pay me what you want" (a buddy with a stack of SNES games including Captain Novolin) or outright refusing cash (another friend who handed me a box of SNES RPGs worth at least $300; a friend who gave me his Saturn and a couple games; a friend who modded his old Intellivision for Composite, then gave it and a stack of games/manuals to me), so I try to do the same.

Edit: I also try to hook people up for very reasonable prices on here, under the same "I got this as part of a lot, so whatever" theory, but freebies are obviously pretty difficult considering I have to pay for shipping and all.