We were reading our neighborhood newsletter last night and realized that this weekend was one of the twice-a-year neighborhood-wide garage sale periods. So, at 10pm last night we decided to run around the house and assembled a massive pile of crap that we either forgot we had or hadn't touched in years. Chief among the pile was nearly my entire videogame collection.
The first guy by our house this morning asked how much the games were selling for. I told him, most were $10 each, some less, some more. It depends. He then asks me how much for everything.
Whoa.
Everything? I wasn't prepared to sell everything. Never even thought about it. Suddenly I had a flashback to when I sold all of my NES games to my possibly-a-pedophile-uncle and the regret I felt years later. I guessed that I had about 200 games in the boxes, so I told him $2500.
He tried to talk me down, and I said the lowest I would go is $2200. Maybe. His friend owns a used-game store and he would call him and maybe be by later. As soon as he left I went through the entire collection and removed any games that I knew I would really, really miss. I took out 3 games -- two of which I hadn't played yet. No love lost for the last generation of gaming, I'm afraid.
I then counted and after my subtractions, there were 199 games left in the boxes. You know what? I would let them go for $1800. I really would. And I wouldn't feel any guilt or shame or regret.
He never came back.
But a lot of other people did come by and I ended up selling a total of 40 games. Combined with the games I sold on messaage boards earlier this year, my colleciton is over 100 games lighter than it was in the winter. And so far so good. No regret. I actually feel unburdened. If anythin, I was actually starting to feel guilty for having such a ridiculously large collection of games. And I found that selling them actually has it rewards too in addition to the money.
As I was cleaning up after the sale today I heard an unmistakable sound emanating from my neighbor's window. It was that of high-performance racing car in the game, Forza Motorsport for Xbox. He bought it earlier from me for $10 and was already giving it more use than it had seen from me in months. Maybe even a year. And that was cool. The $10 won't even buy me two beers at the Seahawks game tomorrow, but the game is being used. And presumably enjoyed.
The more gamers the better.
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