Vectrex is where the money is!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There is a con called "Eurocon" each year, and this year, a Vectrex game called Joust: Evolution was auctioned off. Here is Martijn Wenting's account of how it shook down:

When the auction was nearing its end there was only one item left: The Joust Evolution set.

This set was offered for charity auction and contained 2 Joust evolution carts (one with label for display and one which was a bit less fragile for using), 5 different overlays that were used during development and all the rights to the game.

The set started at 50 euros, but the price quickly went up. I pitched in a few bids but i was quickly outbid as the price went quickly upwards to 250. It was then that frenzy collector Mat Allen started to wake up and caused the price to go up to around 500. At this point everybody was sure that Mat was going to grab this cart, as he did with the special Spike's Circus edition last year.

But then, out of the blue, long-time Vectrex scener Pepijn shocked the room with his bid of 700 euros. The bidding-war between Pepijn and Mat had started!

Bids went upwards in small amounts and heavy discussions started, were they able to split up the cartridges or not, but they couldn't come to an arrangement. The Pepijn threw in his final bid of a stunning 1000 euros!!!

Mat quickly topped his bid with a 1025. Pepijn realising that Mat wasn't going to let this one go, he sadly had to have mat win this one. Everybody was a bit in shock of what happened but we were all very excited to see the charity been funded well!

I just crunched the numbers, and a thousand twenty-five euros equals one million US dollars, practically. No, seriously, that's a lot of money for charity for something Vec related and pretty neat to see.

Here is Martijn's full article.

My take, based on something I read on Usenet, and not real fact, is that the rights to Joust: Evolution were included in this auction because Alex Nicholson (the developer) did not want to manufacture it because Joust is still intellectual property owned by a company out there. Which makes sense, as someone is working on a Joust movie. That being said, I very selfishly hope that the guy who won the auction makes the thing available somehow.

(I also interviewed Alex last year, when he released the fucking excellent Logo cart for the Vec.)