[famicomblog]

Author here.

Yes, this is my point. The Wagner card, or Action Comics #1 or Atari 2600 Air Raid are all rare items on their own without their rarity having to be defined in an extraordinarily narrow way to establish that they are in fact rare.

With SMB on the other hand you have to define that copy as a "one of a kind copy of a thing there are millions of out there", which is different from the above examples.

The point that I was mainly going for in the post was that just a few years ago it didn't seem like the hobby was going to go down this route. Until recently everyone just assumed that a game like Air Raid (or the NES World Championship carts used in tournaments in the 1980s which are also extremely rare but also aren't well known outside collecting circles) would be the hobby's holy grail because that is what collectors were most fascinated by.

Then WHAMMO, copies of SMB started going berzerk and completely obliterating the records set a few years ago for those rarer games, which I think has caught everyone in the retro gaming collecting community off guard since it is such a common game. Which I thought was worth writing something about, using Air Raid and examples from other hobbies as comparisons.