Inevitably, the disparity between demand and supply has lured counterfeiters. The demand is increasing, and the prices with it.” (There are fewer than ten cartridges in existence.) “People who grew up hearing about the Neo Geo are now grown up and earning enough to chase their childhood dream,” Puttirungsriwong said. “Because of my wife, it is better to forget.” Puttirungsriwong completed his collection last April with a European copy of Kizuna Encounter, a fighting game, which he bought from a friend in Italy for thirty thousand euros. “I don’t know the exact figure,” he told me. One of them, Mahesak Puttirungsriwong, a forty-year-old mathematics tutor from Thailand, estimates that he has spent around two hundred thousand dollars on Neo Geo games in the past twenty-six years. “And they look great when they’re lined up on a bookshelf.” Still, despite a vibrant collecting scene, no more than five people in the world own a full collection. “There is obviously something special about playing those games on the original systems,” Yasuyuki Oda, a veteran game designer at SNK, told me. Digital distribution has freed video games from their physical hosts, just as it did with music, films, and books, but the craving for tangibility remains. This new ubiquity, however, has had no apparent effect on the collectors’ market. The majority of the Neo Geo game library is freely (if unofficially) available to play online, and SNK has ported many of the best-known and most expensive titles to modern consoles, offering them for a fraction of their original price. “The Neo Geo attracts collectors because, compared with coins, stamps, and comics, you can go years and not find what you’re looking for,” he said. Last spring, McCleskey sold three cartridges to a buyer in South Korea for forty-five thousand dollars. They saw it as no better than buying magic beans.” In recent years, his stock portfolio has dwindled, but, the Web site and online store he runs, has become steadily more profitable. “My friends and family saw me pouring my inheritance into video games. “At the time, I was living in my mom’s basement,” he said. He invested half of the money in the stock market and spent the rest on Neo Geo cartridges and Magic: The Gathering cards. When McCleskey was nineteen, he inherited a few hundred thousand dollars from his father. (The launch of the final official title, Samurai Spirits Zero, took place in 2003, though third-party developers continue to release new games for the system today.) As a result, the market was limited, and many of the games were produced in small numbers-perhaps as few as a hundred. The chunky cartridges came in fat plastic cases and cost an average of two hundred and fifty dollars. Unlike rival consoles of the time, which presented watered-down versions of contemporary arcade hits, the Neo Geo was true to its origins, right down to its circuitry. Launched in 1991 at a shelf price of six hundred and fifty dollars-more than eleven hundred dollars in today’s money-the console was a kind of generous afterthought on the part of its Osaka-based manufacturer, SNK, whose primary focus was its thriving arcade business. But the Neo Geo has proved an exception, probably because its games possess the collector’s trifecta: quality, rarity, and expense. Most video games, like most of everything else, depreciate in monetary value the longer they’re in the world. “It was as if the deal was for a bag of diamonds,” McCleskey told me recently. As a condition of the sale, he agreed to keep Wolf’s identity private. Satisfied with each game’s condition and authenticity, Wolf opened his briefcase, which had been specially designed to house the foot-long cartridges, and locked them inside. The two men met in the crowded arrivals hall and, after a brief stop at a local Chinese restaurant, proceeded to McCleskey’s house, where Wolf inspected the merchandise-a pair of video games released in 1996 for the Neo Geo, a Japanese-made console. A man calling himself Wolf wired McCleskey fifty-five thousand dollars, then showed up a few days later at Memphis International Airport carrying a metallic briefcase. Seven years ago, Shawn McCleskey, a dealer of rare video games, trading cards, and vintage machine guns in Memphis, Tennessee, made one of the biggest sales of his career.
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