More Comments on eBay

I recently acquired a lot of used equipment for The Personal Computer Museum and in there were some great software gems. I've mentioned this before, that this software in the box is just the only way! Well, I went through a lot of it and discovered that I had doubles of quite a few of them. Doubles are GOOD in my books because I can sell the duplicate on eBay, make some cash, and put that towards obtaining different equipment that I don't have for the musuem. I mention this to donors and they have all agreed that's a good thing.

So one of the games I had two of was "Loom" from Lucasarts. This might be the actual first game I ever played through to completion back in the 80's and it really captivated me. It was an adventure game and you caused certain actions to occur by playing musical notes on the staff. For example, you could learn the "notes" to turn straw into gold, and then use that gold to buy something else you needed to progress in the game. Later, when you are faced with a scary and daunting Dragon, you appear to be stuck with nowhere to go. If you figured out (as I eventually did) that playing that previous little diddy backwards would turn gold into straw, you would find that the precious gold the dragon was guarding was suddenly dry straw and his mere breath set it all on fire, causing him to flee the cave and allowed you to continue on. Sounds a little silly now, but it was pure genius at the time.

So I throw this copy (complete with the audio cassette covering the backstory) onto eBay and yep, it's already gotten a bid. I imagine I'll get $5-$10 for it (because that's all it's worth). I take a quick look at some other auctions. Wow. Loom for the PC, on CD-ROM (with voices) and the PAL edition to boot sold yesterday for over $170 US. Is this just me, or is this NUTS? And then to top it all off, I check the history for previous copies of Loom being sold and discover that the FM-Towns edition (autographed by the author mind you) went for over $650 US!!!!!!! For a game over 15 years old. See the comments from my last post to understand where this comes from.

Yet, other times I list things and can't get $0.99 for them. It's all about the right person(s) at the right time....which I guess is true in real-life too!