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.
Author here. I'm not being obtuse, about half of the blog post is focused on how Mario is a household name as an explanatory factor. Its odd simply because other hobbies haven't historically cared as much about that name recognition thing (which admittedly probably says more about how odd they are than about how odd it is that SMB is valuable, but still).
Author here. Anybody can drop a copy of SMB in "a" toilet, but nobody can drop one in mine. No more can or will be produced.
Of course, nobody wants a copy of SMB that has been dropped in my toilet, but my point wasn't that people are going to suddenly start collecting toilet copies of SMB, but rather that nobody was particularly interested in something as arbitrarily defined as the "highest graded, sealed, hangtab version" of SMB either until someone created a narrative that convinced them it was worth something.
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.