Yeah, it was called Smash my Xbox dot com. Turned into a whole thing where people buy a new and popular game console just to smash it. Why? It gets attention, it gets them hits. They can monetize it in some cases and make more money than they spent on the item they destroyed. There used to be a whole channel called "will it blend?" where they just put anything you could think of in a blender. It was a popular show.
So yeah, people will definitely destroy vintage games and merchandise. I've seen it done before. On a recent episode of AVGN, James Rolfe actually destroyed an Amiga CD-32 console, which is considered a very rare classic game console, with an actual flame thrower.