Years and years ago I found a copy of "TT Racer" by Digital Integration on Amstrad CPC 464 cassette. I didn't have enough money so went to get some and when I came back it was gone! Never saw it again until emulators! The other would be when an arcade closed down and seemed to still have old games in it, including Namco's 3 screen "Driver's Eyes" (a version of Winning Run). I asked about if the owner wanted to sell anything, but said the whole lot had been sold on to someone else. I peered through the doors of the place a bit later and could see smashed up arcade games inside. A little while later the whole old arcade building burnt down, presumably taking the games with it. A shame.
Once I won a Egret II on ebay for about 600 euro in very good condition by accident but I couldn`t afford the price I placed my bid and anticipated the auction to end at a higher price. I hate that memory.
I won a PlayStation 1 Debugger and a Complete PlayStation 1 Development Kit, but decided not to get them. Doesn't matter. They were useless anyway because you can program for the system without them. They are collectors items. Nothing more, nothing less.
A few years ago (probably 2008) a big store had an original sealed Zelda a Link to the Past SNES cartridge, and it was costing about 120 R$ (Reais.... Brazillian money), it's around 60 dollars. At that time i hadn't noticed the increddible opportunity it was. When i came back there a few years later the cartridge where already sold and the ones that least on the internet cost hundreds of dollars =/
-$20 Virtual Boy in that official black case -$70 Steel Battalion Complete In Box The virtual boy I saw while buying other items, so I couldn't afford, but planned to return. Same story with Steel, same place in Hollywood too. Thing made no sense, they overprice on a lot of games, but not systems or accessories. Why Battalion was so cheap, I'll never know. Also, I wanted a VB so I could finally try it and feel the sickness.
Turned up buying several copies of Radiant Silvergun for £20 each when it was new because there was so many in the shop I assumed there was no hurry to pick it up, I eventually got it a few years later for a decent price but I have kicked myself for that one many times.
About 20 years ago, my friend and I saw a pac-man arcade machine in the garbage. We grab it and took it home. We couldn't get it to work. We opened and noticed a board missing. We drove back through the area and realized it was in front of a store that sells them. We went in and asked about the board. The guy said he had the machine out front and someone stole it. We told him we took it and thought it was thrown out. He told us he would sell us the board for $20. We could not come up with the money. We were only teens with no jobs. I should have asked my parents for the money. Could have had a fulling working arcade machine for $20.
Friend of a friend used to work at a now defunct game developer, when they shut down a while back they were just throwing out all their dev kits and he offered to sell them to my friend at £30 a kit. He turned them down because they couldn't play retail games and he had no idea that they could sell for 10 times that.
Back in 2001 the Dreamcast died and I wanted to get at least one console. I was in 8th grade so I did not have too much money. Found the best deal Buy it now $110 console two controllers and Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 and Power Stone 1 and 2 two vmu's. My grandfather said no I had to wait. We went to go see an old Orangina truck from the 40's. It turned out to be a replica. Horse shit. The auction was gone.
Was the game in brazil language or english ? I thought that maybe it's another language then they are cheaper... ( dunno but wondering )
atari jag for literally pocket change. didn't want to spend days waiting for hookups i had to buy online to arrive.
Clock Tower SFC on some sort of prototype cartridge a few weeks to month or so ago. I won the auction, auction had closed... But Yahoo Auctions Japan had taken another bid on it after it had closed with me winning it (I had even gotten the "You've won this item" message!) and then, my internet connection proceeded to die on me so I couldn't get it in the end. Same with probably the same cart appearing on eBay sometime. Needless to say, I'm still a little bit enraged about that. More-so since despite looking daily across YAJ/eBay/Taobao/Ruten... I never seem to really find any good items (marketing, promotional or two GFantasy issues from the 90s I'm after) to add to my collection so I can eventually document them for the site I'm working on currently.
Not a vg but a super mario gottlieb pinball a few miles away for 5K SEK...my father refused to help transport it (was 15 at the time and actually had the cash after a summerjob but couldn't get there on my own)
A huge lot of Xbox debug items for a very good price. Problem was it was pickup-only and I was over a thousand miles to far away. :sorrow: