This depressing thread is for stories of how you got unlucky: games that arrived broken or not at all, terrific one of a kind deals that you missed by a hair, finding out that your super mint & complete game you paid top dollar for turned out to be in terrible conditions or incomplete, opened a parcel with a paper cutter and cut the outer game box in the process, your game shelf broke down and ruined half of your well kept collection, bought a rarity and received a shitty russian repro - all of your collecting mishaps that made your heart sank.
One of my most memorable ones happened some years ago. My mom is a regular flea market goer and knows I'm a game nut so she casually looks after my main console interests. So after she attended one of the bigger ones in my area she told me of this guy who had a couple of loose SNES carts and one of them had a price tag of 10€, looked like I might be into it: Demon's Crest. She did not know that this one was one of my most desired games and a loose cart of the PAL version already sold for more than ten times on ebay easily, so you can see I was more than a little excited. Fortunately the flea market continued on the following day, there was hope the guy would still be there, and so of course I went together with her.
Long story short: We did find the guy again (
), he happened to still have the game (
) so I asked him about the price with sweating palms, hardly able to contain myself.
Guy: "Oh you know, this one really is super super rare, you should check out ebay, it sells for like 200€. I can sell this one to you for 120€. What do you think?"
Me:
->
->
->
"No, thanks..."
Turns out, the guy apparantly got the great idea to look up what he's actually selling
just the day before and found out that Demon's Crest was way more worth than just 10€. I could have kicked myself that I did not went there earlier! My mom kind of felt bad about it but I told her it's no big deal, shit happens, etc.. However deep down I felt heartbroken, haha.
Besides, who tries to sell a fucking loose cart for 120€ on a flea market of all places anyway? Moron...