I’m going to level with you: This is going to be a boring installment of Weekend Thrifting.
It’s not my fault, I swear. These pictures represent the sum total of everything I was able to dig up over a whole month of trawling the thrift stores. Why has the supply dried up? Have I indeed just been writing too damn many of these articles, thus causing everybody else in San Francisco to go out and buy stuff before I do? If so, stop that! But it might just be that people are hibernating for the rainy winter and don’t feel like doing any spring cleaning.
Anyway, here are the meager scrapings that I have found.
I wouldn’t have bought that whole stack of NES games, but they were all in a plastic bag together for $5.50. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a copy of Snake’s Revenge, the ersatz sequel to Metal Gear that was only released outside Japan. Digital Press says it’s worth $4.
In addition, we’ve got Captain Skyhawk ($2), Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars ($5), The Chessmaster ($8) and Baseball Stars ($10). Would never have guessed which ones were worth the most in that pile, not that anything here would even be considered uncommon.
To the right, three PlayStation 1 puzzle games that were marked $1.50 but rang up at a mere 50 cents each: Puzzle Star Sweep, Super Bubble Pop and Tall: Infinity. These, too, are not rare, listing for $5, $10 and $7 respectively.
And now we get a bit more obscure. Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve had this experience in a thrift store: I see something out of the corner of my eye, and I think to myself, “That couldn’t possibly be a…”
“…Odyssey voice cartridge?” Sure, they came in blue cardboard boxes, but no way the blank edge of a blue cardboard box I was staring at was a lone Odyssey2 game in the wild. But it was. The color indicated that it works with The Voice, an add-on module that added voice synthesis to Magnavox’s ill-fated game machine. It was kind of like the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player of its day.
And talk about your killer apps: Type and Tell! let you type things, which the system would then say back to you. I’d pay about $1 for that, which is what this cost. It’s actually in great condition, which is not always the case for boxed Odyssey2 games: The fold-out cardboard boxes are fragile and usually get beat up, but this one is great. Unfortunately, since approximately no one likes the Odyssey2, it’s still not worth anything. Digital Press says the loose cart is worth $4; a complete copy just sold on eBay for $2. No, I did not accidentally transpose those numbers.