Selling Nintendo World Championships Gray Cart
So in 1990 there was a video game tournament called the Nintendo World Championships. It was held in 30 cities across the US with the winners from each city flown to California for the finals. The game played in the tournament was a special mish-mash of Super Maro Brothers, Rad Racer, and Tetris all packaged into one neat little cartridge. Sure, for the finalists there were other prizes, but unbeknownst to us the biggest prize would be received unannounced in the mail later: a copy of the tournament cartridge.
I say us because I am one of those finalists.
I was the winner of the Kansas City tournament for the 11 and under category (there were 3 age categories, so 90 finalists total). I got the flight to Hollywood along with sundry other goodies, but I had no idea the cartridge I got in the mail after the tournament would be more valuable than all of the other stuff piled on us combined.
Around 10 years ago I was sitting a coffee shop when a friend of mine, Chris, mentioned seeing an article about the cartridge from the NWC being a rare collectible. He said someone had sold theirs for over $500. I was stunned anyone would pay so much for the game, and shortly after someone actually even offered me that much for it. I even accepted, but never got around to finalizing the deal and the buyer who had tracked me down never followed up (no, he didn't send me any money). I completely forgot about the offer until recently when I was browsing some old e-mails. Now I'm glad, as the price of the game has done nothing but climbed since. Every year or so I hear or read about another cart sold. $1,000. $2,000. $4,000. The most I've seen one go for is $11,500, though that was for a charity auction. The most I've heard of not involving other extras bundled with the cart was Heather Martin's for $8,500.
So last year I was approached by someone who wanted me to part with the cartridge for $4,000. While not a terrible offer the average price for the cart at that point has risen to at least $6000, so I told him I was not interested. Then a couple of weeks ago he returned with an offer of $6,000. This one gave me pause. Do I sell this cartridge, which represents probably my fondest childhood memories, for $6,000?
I'm not desperate for cash. Unlike many, I haven't really been touched by the recession. In fact I've pretty much flourished during it. So while the money would be nice, I don't NEED it, which is actually the best time to sell in my opinion. I don't have desperation clouding my judgement, just good old fashioned greed. But at the same time I feel I could get more for it. Yet I'm also impressed by this guy's ability to track down one of the finalists on the off chance I still have my cartridge, though not so impressed I'm willing to give up my cart that easily. So I made him a deal.
The deal is I have until 5/23 to find a better offer. If no better offer is presented, he gets the cart for $6,000. I chose that date because I wanted to have one last hurrah with the cart with a local game development group before I part with it, and they meet on the 4th Tuesday of every month.
So there it is. This is my call to anyone interested in the cart. I'll be linking this post on whatever game collector forums I can find and advertise it as far as free will take me. If you're interested in buying (serious offers above $6,000 only, please) just drop me an e-mail or post in the comments here. I do have spam problems with this blog, so comments are moderated and it may take some time for your comment to be approved as I usually only check this about once a day(ish).
I will post some proof of ownership soon (pictures of me with the cart) but for some sketchy proof just look at my name. Now go look up the Nintendo World Championships on wikipedia and look a the finalist list. No, I'm not the only Randy Napier out there, but let's call that my proof down payment until I can get some pictures up.
My e-mail address is just my name with a period between first and last at gmail dot com. I'll also be happy to answer any questions anyone has about the cart, the tournament, or anything else nerdy you think I might know the answer to.
Edit: Ok, trying to embed the video of me and the cart but I've never tried this before, so you might just see a bunch of edits for a while.
Baby!
So we here at All Messed Up Games (which, let's not forget, is actually just one person who likes to refer to himself as if he were a larger organization) are pleased to announce the birth of our new son, Malcolm! See, that sentence gets all weird with the verbs since AMUG gets plural as an organization even though it's only one person. But I digress...
So what does this mean for you? Well, it means I'm on vacation for two weeks (one of which is almost burned through already) so I'll actually have some time for game development. Yay!
Record month of Toddler Tantrum sales. Sort of.
So I have no idea why, but last month was the best month of sales for Toddler Tantrum in nine months. This encompass all of the sales during the "long tail" life cycle of the game. The long tail is the time frame after the game is no longer on any new release or top selling lists. Only two months have higher sales than March 2012, and that's the first two months the game was on sale (March and April of 2011). I'm not sure if this is due to the new dashboard making it easier to find the game, if it's a recommended game off of something popular, or if Oprah mentioned it on her show. Everyone look under your seat. It's a code for Toddler Tantrum! Okay, maybe not.
Update: Also the most recent day of sales data (4/2) shows the most sales in a single day since 3/28/2011, which is the last day the game was on the new release list. This number is also at least double the single day high since 7/25/2011. I don't know what's going on, but I like it.
Blender
Just so you know, if you search on Amazon.com for "Blender" it does not give search results for books on the 3D modeling program. It gives results for blenders.
Moving to Unity?
Last week I saw on twitter that Unity3D, a popular multi-platform game engine, was giving away free licenses for its android and iOS publishing capabilities. The way Unity works is you can download and use the basic version for free, which allows you to publish to the web or PC. However if you want to publish to Android or iOS it's $400 per system, or $800 total. On top of that there's a pro version of Unity for $1,500, and also pro andorid/iOS versions, meaning you could potentially spend $4,500 for it.
Anyway, Unity was giving away the $400 licenses so I snagged a couple and decided to reacquaint myself with it. I had played around with it a little before, but had never really done too much with it. This time around I'm actually learning the system and not just tinkering, and I have to say it's pretty damn awesome. In just a few hours I've managed to do in it what took me many many hours, nay days, to do in XNA. This is seriously making me consider taking the game I have in progress and writing it in unity instead of XNA. The only downside is I wouldn't be able to publish to the 360, but I'd have the android store, the iPhone app marketplace, and all of those options available. Of course I've never programmed for touch either, so I may hold off on those versions and just release on the PC first.
One MILLION, er, THOUSAND Toddler Tantrum Sales
Hooray! We've reached 1,000 sales of Toddler Tantrum! It's not a huge number, but frankly it's not a very good game either, so it works out. It was the number that secretly in my head as the number of sales I wanted to reach. Now on to bigger and better things!
Toddler Tantrum: Approaching 1K Sales
For anyone with an office pool on when Toddler Tantrum would hit 1K sales (because I know you're all keenly interested, right?) it's looking like this Sunday will be the day. Or not. I usually sell one copy a day, but that can vary between 0 and 3 pretty easily, and we're 6 sales away. Maybe when we hit 1K I'll buy my daughter a little cupcake or something.
Tooting my own horn
So I finally got a bit of free time recently that wasn't at 10 PM when I'm too tired/not in the mood to code. I finally broke open the Bounce project that I've been putting off working on due to my frustration with some of the collision detection. What did I discover? That I'm a much better programmer than I used to be. I'm not saying that before I was a bad programmer, but more of a sloppy programmer. My code worked, and it was usually even efficient, but it wasn't pretty and often cheated in some areas. Going back and looking on it now I can't believe I wrote something so sloppy.
I can actually give work some of the credit for my improved programming techniques. I finally got moved on to a decent project where I get to code most of the day instead of doing nothing but writing documentation. It's given me the perks of being able to look at more code others have written (and thus learn from it) and more chance and opportunity to actually code things. The best way to learn to code is to code, and I finally get to do that again.
Already I've made some major improvements to Bounce and am ready to seriously start the meat and potatoes of it. The engine is close to done, I just need to start designing levels. If only I had some art assets...
Dashboard Fixed!
So Microsoft finally listened and fixed the horrendous "Game Type" entry in the dashboard and just added an "Indie Games" section. Now the indie games channel has pretty close to the same level of visibility as the Arcade channel. This is kinda huge. Thanks for listening Microsoft! Between this and the recent raises to size limits of indie games I almost think you don't want the channel to die after all....
Developer Resources – XNA Freebies
So as I've mentioned I mostly deal with XNA development. This means I've bookmarked quite a few XNA specific tools, code samples, and articles that I reference from time to time. Why develop from scratch what is already freely available? Without further ado:
Cell Shading in XNA - Cell shading isn't the flavor of the month it used to be (can you say voxels? Good, I knew you could) but it is still a cool effect that can add some easy bling to your game. If you don't know what it is, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is a good example, as is Borderlands and Team Fortress 2. The former is a really heavy/intense example, whereas in the latter games the effect is more muted.
Farseer Physics Engine - The Farseer Physics Engine is actually pretty well known in the XNA community as one of the best free physics engines available on the platform. It has been used in many of the better XBLIG titles including Gerbil Physics and Toy Stunt Bike. It's not too hard to pick up, though the documentation could be a little more extensive in my opinion. Still, you can't beat free.
GLEE2D - Not really specific to XNA (except that the tool actually requires XNA to run) GLEE2D is a generic 2D level editor that saves out to XML. Basically you can import your sprites into it and create levels easily, and then save them out to the nice, neutral XML format to be imported into whatever game you're creating on whatever platform you desire. While it's not the most robust tool in the world, it's generally powerful enough to get you most of the way where you need to go.
Mercury Particle Engine - Ok, I have a confession to make with this link. I've never really played with this engine. It's in my bookmarks, but aside from looking at some demo videos I know very little about it. But man it looks sweet....
That's it for today kids. I have quite a few other bookmarks and resources I could share, but frankly none of the others really follow any nice theme, so there might be one more post of just me regurgitating miscellaneous links. After that I'll be done with my developer resource week.