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Week #2 - One Sale, 500+ Games.

May 21, 2003 By Glenn Turner

Back in the day when Chicago didn't resemble the arctic tundra, unitdaisy and I were so inspired by drunkgamers.com's garagesaling adventures that we went out about Chicago, scrounging for games. Often we returned home empty handed to post our experiences in the Drunkgamer's Message Forum.

Oh, and for those unfamiliar with the term garagesaling it's simple: you wake up far too early in the morning on the weekend and go out to garage sales looking for something (preferably videogame related) while wishing you were still in bed. You can picture for yourself what drunksaling is. Or just see below.

The following events occurred on May 17th, 2003.

peccaui: This was almost the week that got away. Due to an unusual amount of activity this past week, I told unitdaisy 'There's no way in hell I'm leaving this bed' when time came to wake up.

unitdaisy: He may have been thinking that but no actual words escaped his mouth, all got in response to a "Time to go drunksaling!" was peccaui shoving pillows over his ears. And when I removed said pillows he retreated under his covers - mind you he bitches when we don't go out so I was only doing what he asked, plus we were hunting down only the second ad we have found in all this time that actually mentioned video games, but I could only put up with his poutyness and groaning for so long, so I left his apartment to go by myself.

peccaui: I had a valid excuse. Damn 3am dj slots.

unitdaisy: Whine, whine... Two buses later I was at the corner of Canal and Cermack, I was looking for 500 W Cermack and as Canal is indeed 500 W I though I was homefree, until I looked around, nothing but a gravel pit and an overpass, not a video game in sight.

unitdaisy: I took some pictures of my defeat and walked around a bit, (it was a nice moring), when luck took me over a bridge only to find...

unitdaisy: Inside was the motherload, the storage space of a collector with more time and money than I have ever had. Gold!

peccaui: About an hour later my phone wouldn't stop ringing, despite my attempt to feed it to my cats and when that failed, to flush it down the toilet. I finally answered it after the sixth consecutive call and unitdaisy told me to get my ass down to Chinatown, or else there would be hell to pay. I complied by lazily smoking a cigarette, checking out some websites, replied to some emails, played with my cats and then walked out the door.

unitdaisy: I should have just taken pictures and let him sleep and then let him weep and curse the laziness that caused him to lose out on our biggest find ever, but I was willing to risk dealing with the grumpy, nasty morning peccaui because I didn't want him to live with that regret. I'm so nice.

peccaui: The sale was being wrangled by a husband and wife team that owned a small bookstore. Apparently, the wife was forcing her husband to get rid of loads of books, cds, records, political paraphanalia, and video games that he had accumulated in storage spaces around the building.

unitdaisy: She was great - too bad she wasn't doing the pricing because from the way she talked she probably would have paid us to cart it all out.

peccaui: The amount of games and video game related objects there were absolutely staggering. There must have been at least 500 Atari games alone. It took us two hours to sift through every box and as a result, this was the only sale we managed to go to. However, if I had to pick only one sale to go to within the last year, it would be this one. Take a look and commence drooling:

unitdaisy: Note: I was supposed to graduate that afternoon, hours of sifting through boxes was not exactly in the plan.

peccaui: But you told me on the phone that this sale was more important than graduating!


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peccaui: Arr, there be treasures to be plundered here!

unitdaisy: I was overwhelmed - if peccaui hadn't shown up I would have just walked out the door with Strawberry Shortcake and called it a day.

peccaui: Oddly enough, that Strawberry Shortcake cartridge is pretty damn hard to find. Let's send it to Gabe & Tycho.

unitdaisy: Um... no. I'd like to keep my Strawberry Shortcake memories intact, thank you.

peccaui: I wonder if they have a guide for Photoshop in there.


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peccaui: Not one, not two - not even three, but four copies of Keystone Kapers. And we found two more in the stacks later on. Keystone Mania!

unitdaisy: I think we now also own Dig Dug for every console it was produced on.

peccaui: Due the the sheer amount of obsolete entertainment available, we had to leave some stuff behind. Here's a stack of Commodore 64 keyboards. Underneathe them was an older Atari computer and a Texas Instruments computer. Wowza.

peccaui: And some hardware we intentionally left behind. Don't worry little CD-I box - someone will love you someday.


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peccaui: Yes, that's a giant stack of Colecovision machines. The owner called it an art project that never reached fruition. I call it a goldmine of heroic proportions.

unitdaisy: He was involved in reprograming and programing new games for the 2600 - so his project might have actually been interesting - too bad his other collecting habits kept him from finishing it.

peccaui: I've never even heard of a Supercharger for the 2600. And it requires a cassette player?


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peccaui: Real old-school, and semi old-school memories just strewn across the floor. Now they're strewn across my floor! Thanks suckers!

unitdaisy: Thank goodness it's not my floor.

peccaui: You can't even see your floor right now, much less put a 7800 down there.

peccaui: Need a controller or adapter? It's in there. Somewhere.

unitdaisy: I still regret levaing without the second Atari sticker!

peccaui: You can see it in one of the box pictures that you took. Oh how you missed out.

peccaui: So we ended up hauling two large boxes crammed full of games out the door.

unitdaisy: All the way to my graduation - wasn't that fun...

peccaui: Just take a look:


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(Click for high-resolution pic)

peccaui: Best. Sale. Ever.

Find of the Week: It's hard to say, but the biggest fuss was made over the 7800. Although I'm extremely pleased to have a copy of Ikari Warriors in my hands again.

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