Two Brothers, a Lifetime of Yard Sales: A Nintendo Haul From Creagerstown

Some collections arrive by appointment after three weeks of emails. This one came from five miles down the road, because a man drove past our sign.

The sign earned its keep again

We put a sign by the road in Thurmont for exactly this reason, and it keeps paying for itself. This time the call came from Creagerstown — close enough that the whole pickup, start to finish, took less time than the drive to most of them.

That is the argument for buying local, and it is not really about gas money. A seller who lives five miles away can stand in the room while we go through the boxes. He can tell us what a thing is, where it came from and why he kept it. None of that survives a shipping label.

Two brothers, and a lot of Saturday mornings

This collection belonged to two brothers. One of them died years ago.

They were yard salers — the real kind, out early, every weekend, for decades. Almost nothing on this table was bought new at retail. It was found: a dollar here, a quarter there, a sealed Mario keychain game somebody's kid never opened, a Nintendo lunch box on a card table in somebody's driveway. Thirty years of Saturday mornings, stacked in a basement.

And they played it. He told us the two of them put serious hours into Call of Duty and Gran Turismo together, and both are still in the lot — a Gran Turismo 2 Greatest Hits disc, and the Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition box. He did not point them out as valuable. He pointed them out as theirs.

The money from this sale is going toward a benefit for family. We did not press him on the details and we are not going to publish any. It is going somewhere good, and that is the part worth saying.

We buy a lot of collections. The ones that stay with us are the ones where the person selling can tell you what they remember.

What was in it

The short version, before the close-ups:

• Sealed blister-pack Nintendo toys — Mini Classics keychain games, Super Mario figures still domed on the card, a sealed Halo 3: ODST figure, a Smashin' Cranky Kong, a Ms. Pac-Man plug-and-play TV game.
• Nintendo cards — a counter display box of Nintendo Game Packs scratch-off cards with packs still in it, and a stack of sealed Super Mario Galaxy trading card Fun Paks.
• Nintendo nostalgia — a late-1980s Super Mario Bros. lunch box with its matching Aladdin thermos, an ASCIIWARE Game Boy Portable Carry-All, a boxed Super Mario Kart telephone, DK and Mario plushes with their hang tags, a Super Mario Galaxy backpack, Nintendo Power #258 with the mailing label still on it.
• Sealed Mario and Zelda DVDs — Toys "R" Us price stickers, still on.
• PlayStation demo discs — Grind Session, PlayStation Underground, an Interactive CD Sampler, a Sly 3 Not For Resale disc.
• The Ocarina of Time soundtrack box.
• Games and hardware — PlayStation, PS2, PS3, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, DS and Switch. Two PS1 consoles, a silver PS2 slim, a Wii, an Xbox 360 Elite box, a PSP, boxed PowerA Zelda and Super Mario Bros. 3 Switch controllers, and a bin of controllers, memory cards and cables.
• Strategy guides — Vice City, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Medal of Honor: Frontline.

That is the variety that makes a lot like this worth buying whole. No single piece carries it. The table carries it.

Sealed Nintendo Mini Classics, still on the card

Nintendo Mini Classics are the little keychain LCD games — a Game Boy shrunk to the size of a key fob, one game inside, a clip on top. They were made to be clipped to a backpack and lost. These were not.

Donkey Kong Junior, Super Mario Bros. and Mario's Cement Factory, all three still sealed on the card, card corners sharp. The plastic has yellowed a shade on one, which is what thirty-year-old blister packaging does and is not a defect so much as a date stamp.

Sealed toys are their own category of find. The item was cheap when it was new, it was bought to be opened, and the ones that survived unopened did so by accident — somebody put it in a closet and forgot. That accident is the entire reason it is worth anything now. We write about what we look for in sealed toys and figures if you want the longer version.

A Tiger Electronics Mega Man 3, never opened

Not Nintendo, and we took it anyway.

Tiger's LCD handhelds were the consolation prize of the early nineties — the thing you got instead of the Game Boy. Mega Man 3, one screen, two buttons, a sound chip with opinions. Most of them were played to death in the back of a station wagon and thrown out.

This one is in the blister, unopened, with the insert card intact behind it.

Nintendo cards: scratch-offs and Mario paks

The Game Packs display box is the one that made us stop.

It is a counter box — the kind that sat next to a register — printed with Mario, Link, Peach and Daisy, promising scratch-off game cards, stickers and "TOP SECRET TIPS!" It still has packs in it. Somebody signed the front in marker a long time ago, which collectors can take or leave, but we are not going to pretend it is not there.

Alongside it: a run of sealed Super Mario Galaxy trading card Fun Paks, two-pack blisters with the collector's guide and mini-poster still attached. Nintendo-licensed trading cards sit in an odd spot — never scarce when new, never saved, and now quietly hard to find sealed.

The Ocarina of Time soundtrack box

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in the box that shipped with the Original Soundtrack CD — the banner is printed right across the top and "CD included" sits on the front corner.

The game is not rare. The game is one of the best-selling Nintendo 64 releases there is. The box with the soundtrack bundled in is a different object, and the CD inside it is the part that goes missing, because a disc in a cardboard sleeve is the easiest thing in any collection to separate from its packaging.

If you are selling an older game and there was a disc, a map, a poster or a registration card in the box, find it before you sell. It is not a rounding error. See what your retro games are actually worth for where that value actually sits.

Sealed Mario and Zelda DVDs, with the Toys "R" Us sticker still on

The Legend of Zelda: Ganon's Evil Tower. The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: The Trouble With…. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. All sealed, in protective sleeves, each wearing a Toys "R" Us price sticker at $5.99 with the original SKU and description line printed on it.

The sticker is doing as much work here as the disc. It dates the object, it places it in a store that no longer exists in most of America, and it tells you nobody ever took this home and watched it. Two brothers bought cartoons about Mario, put them on a shelf, and left them there.

Demo discs nobody was supposed to keep

Grind Session, "DEMO CD — NOT FOR SALE", sitting in the fold-out mailer it shipped in: a photo of a man in sunglasses in a swimming pool with a phone, captioned "What a waste… of a perfectly good pool." That was the advertisement. It is better than most advertisements now.

Also here: a PlayStation Underground disc in its sleeve, an Interactive CD Sampler, and a Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves disc marked NOT FOR RESALE with a Rating Pending ESRB box — a pre-release press and retail disc, printed before the rating came back.

Promotional discs are the first thing thrown out and the last thing anybody sets out to collect, which is exactly why they get scarce. We buy them every single time. If you have a drawer of unlabeled PlayStation CDs, do not throw it out before someone looks.

Call of Duty and Gran Turismo

Here is the part that is not about scarcity.

Two of the most ordinary things in this collection are a Gran Turismo 2 Greatest Hits disc and a Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition box. Neither one is hard to find. Both were everywhere. We will price them like what they are.

They are also the two games the brothers played together, and the two the seller mentioned first — before the sealed toys, before the lunch box, before anything with a number attached to it.

A collection is not a spreadsheet of comps. It is a record of what somebody did with their time, and who they did it with. We will research every item in this lot properly and list it honestly, and we will also remember that the two cheapest discs on the table were the point.

Nothing from this lot is listed yet

Everything here is still being sorted, researched, photographed and entered. Nothing from this collection is in our inventory yet and nothing is on eBay yet.

When it goes up, it goes up a piece at a time over the next several weeks. If you collect sealed Nintendo toys, keychain games or promotional discs, it is worth checking back.

If this sounds like your basement

Three things this pickup should tell you about whatever is in your own storage:

1. Sealed beats mint. A cheap toy nobody opened outperforms an expensive one somebody did. Do not open it to check what is inside.
2. The packaging is the value. Boxes, inserts, bundled CDs, hang tags, price stickers. Keep the ugly cardboard. It is frequently worth more than the item it held.
3. Nothing needs sorting first. We would rather see the bin as it sits. Sorting a collection before selling it is the single most common way people accidentally separate a set.

Chrono Collectibles buys and consigns video games, Nintendo collectibles, sealed toys and trading cards across Thurmont, Creagerstown, Emmitsburg, Lewistown, Frederick, Hagerstown, Taneytown and Westminster. We come to you, we go through it with you, and we explain how we got to the number.

Send us photos of your collection.