I'm on Yahoo Auctions now and some jackass keeps bidding on an item that I'm high bidder on and extending the time by 10 minutes. I had a 10,000 yen cushion but he erased that by bidding 1,000 yen every 9 minutes. Each time he does that the auction get extended. He's a legit bidder. I've seen his name before. And the seller looks solid, also. He finally got up to just under my max bid, waited 9 minutes, then bid 2,000 yen to try to beat me. But I saw what he was doing so I bumped my bid another 10,000 yen before he was able to bid. Now we're back at the 10,000 yen spread and he's back to bidding 1,000 yen more every 9 minutes. Is there any practical benefit to waiting 9 minutes before each bid? Is he trying to create some kind of marathon auction hoping I'll fall asleep at my keyboard and won't bid again? He's added 17 separate bids now since the original auction time was suppsed to expire, each time waiting 5-9 minutes before posting. I'm thinking about trying to beat him just out of spite now.
So what you bidding on, be worth a look. I assume as it is 12:30 he might be assuming you'll give up and go to bed. I normally wait until 1 minute before the auction ends before bidding, you might be cheap and only want to bid a few hundred yen over the current price. One auction I had had over 200 bids....
Actually now me and this other guy are going back and forth....the first guy bowed out. I'm the high bidder, but it will probably be my max. I'm going to take a loss on the unit when I resell it but I want the pictures and the advertising for my website. But I think he'll probably overtake me before the end. I'm about 30,000 yen over my original bid and that's about as big of a loss as I'm willing to take. I'd rather not give out my Yahoo ID so I can't give you a link.
Yep, he just outbid me. 10 minutes left. I don't think I'm going to be able to go any higher.... Bummer.
Bollocks, he could be a member of here, you know. So you shouldn´t feel so sorry about it No I am not a member of Yahoo Japan. I was just thinking, if you follow me Sir.
So what was this really rare item that you were going to lose lots of money on? It could be a frozen bottle of Miyamotos sperm or a pair of Sonic the Hedgehog boxers as worn by Naoto Oushima for all we know.
It was an Atari 2600 that was released through Epoch in Japan. I went up to 75,000 yen and lost. Dang, I really wanted that....nice piece of history to document.
I thought the extension only happened if the highest bid changed. It's been a long time since I got into a pissing match.
Okay, so you were willing to spend over 75,000 yen on a boxed 1979 Atari 2600 imported by Epoch (and possibily modified) with the only thing to show it was imported was a tiny sticker and possibily a sheet of paper (the modulator is a given but you can't see that). The guy even states it's used, slight damage to the box and the best bit is the sold as is. At least Bandai rebranded everything they imported and even Nintendo made more of an effort when they imported the Magnavox Odyssey. Still the guy selling it is probably happy. :thumbsup:
Jamtex, your opinion of what I like and want to collect is completely irrelevant to the conversation and completely out of touch with the spirit of this site. I had reservations about telling you what I was after because I had a feeling that you'd do some snooping and add some cute comments, but I decided to give you more credit than that. Looks like that was a mistake on my part.
I'm no Atari "Expert" or anything, but isn't $700 a little extreme? But then again I've blown money on WD games for 1.5 their actual worth because of stupid bid wars myself. I kinda thought Atari consoles prices would go down, kinda like how brick calculators from the 1970's are considered garage sale junk rather than antiques, but whatever.
As a buyer, I hate these autoextend auctions - they get in the way of my sniping. ;-) Mind you, were I the seller, then my opinion would be probably be different. Amazon used(*) to have a similar feature on their auctions & I remember getting into a similar bid & wait war with somebody who eventually started sending me emails full of naughty words... As for the value of the item - remember folks, its always worth what someone is prepared to pay. I'm sure many of us have coughed up the proverbial arm+leg for something we just had to have? * they possibly still do - I haven't perused their auctions now for several years. so I'm no longer sure.
Usually extending the auctions is just a fact of life, but I've never had someone wait 9 minutes before each bid and keep doing it for over an hour. That was just tedious. All in all I think the auction got extended by a little over 2 hours. The Epoch Atari would have been one of the crown jewels of my site. People often ask what their definition of rare is and in my opinion if you can't even find a picture of it on the internet then it's pretty rare. The purpose of my site is to photograph and document consoles like this. I guess another way to put it is if you ask BuyAtari about an Atari product and he says, "Do you have a pic?" then it's pretty rare...heh. I would have photographed then sold it so I would have gotten a chunck of the money back and the rest would be considered an advertising expense for my site. But...at some point you have to bow out and wait until the next one shows up. Hopefully other sellers will see the price on Yahoo and maybe another one will pop up and I'll save some money on the next one if it comes along. It's just a bummer to have it right there in front of you and have to pass on buying it.
Everyone has their own ideas about what's valuable and what isn't. But anyway, I like the auto-extending feature of Yahoo Auctions because it discourages snipers. Extending the auction by 3-5 minutes would be more sensible, however. I too got into a little game of one-upmanship on Yahoo; some guy kept adding 500 yen to his max bid at the very last minute of the auction, when I had been the high bidder for 9 minutes each time before that. It was annoying, but in the end the seller ended the auction himself and I won the item. I guess he got pissed of at such dithering too (even though it would have been more profitable for him in the end.)
I probably could have phrased my responce a bit better, but if you showed the pictures of the said auction to anyone and said 'This is an Epoch Atari 2600', most people would probably look at it and say 'It doesn't look any different' mainly as it is an American Atari 2600 from 1979 (as the American looking Catalogue shown is from that period) and from the question / answer a Japanese instuction manual. You can't see anything on the box to indicate otherwise except a blurly small sticker on the box. If I showed you an Atari 2600 and said it was a Epoch Atari 2600 then it would be very hard to tell just by looking at it. I am willing to put money on the fact that the machine itself is no different visually and the only proof it is an Epoch imported machine would be the manuals, a warrenty card and a sticker, none of which are clearly visable in the picture. Still I hope another one does appear again and the win the next one without having to spend near Y70000 on it. Here is a Japanese version of Breakout for the just to show what an imported Atari 2600 game looked like. http://www.atarimania.com/detail_soft.php?MENU=2&VERSION_ID=8389
I have a couple of the games that have stickers on the back of the box but no instructions. I'm not sure if the console has any Epoch markings or not. I'm guessing that it doesn't except for the stickers on the box itself. It would be great if it had that, but to me it's not that important. The sticker on the outer box and Japanese instructions are enough proof that the console actually existed in Japan and that's enough for me. Supposedly Atari and Epoch had a couple of partnerships with the early Epoch models using Atari technology, then Epoch started to distribute the 2600 soon therafter. In 1977 Atari also had the Video Pinball console in Japan which was supposedly the sister console to the Epoch TV Block. I had the Atari a long time ago but that was before I really started to take notes. I've also read that Sega and Taito/Namco marketed the original Atari Pong but I haven't seen any physical evidence of that. It seems that Atari worked with quite a few Japanese companies and also released hardware on their own. Too bad they never worked with Nintendo. Anyway, I think it's an interesting part of video game history that very few people know about. One day it would be nice to have it all pieced together.
3-5 minutes a WAY better idea. The 10 minute extention can be painful. I like the idea of it only going up when the maximum bid is extended. Also acts as a deterrent for people to do what they did to you...1000 yen at a time. Makes them be a man and put a real bid in. This is indeed what happens. Call me a dick, but massive bidding wars bring out the sales. I put in bids for auctions for stuff I know I'm going to lose all the time... especially if it's a Rinkya or SMJ bid. More chances of another one popping up, and by the law of averages, it will go cheaper.
The reality of being the second or third seller is true anywhere whether you're on Yahoo or eBay. The price is always less. I just don't think there are many of these systems floating around so I'm not sure if there will be a second or third chance to buy it anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong, tho. Here's a free Yahoo tip for you.... If you're the high bidder you can lower your max bid by rebidding. For example, if you're the high bidder on an item at 2,000 yen and you have a 10,000 yen max bid, you can bid again at 3,000 yen and it will change your max to 3,000 yen. Yahoo doesn't allow Buyers to cancel their bids, tho, so you're stuck in first position at 2,000 yen until someone bids over you or unless you contact the Seller and ask him to cancel your bid entirely. I think I tried lowering the bid once to the current bid (2,000 yen in the above example) but it wouldn't let me, but my memory is fuzzy. I really don't change bids often.
