Collection perfectly preserved for 23 years causes a stir by revealing its potential value at auction.
By Kyle Melnick
The Washington Post
In the summer of 1998, Mark Odorisio, the former owner of Game Street in Omaha, was faced with a decision – whether to organize a sale of the leftover video games from his failed business or to store them for the future. Ultimately, he chose to store them, a move that has now proven to be immensely lucrative.
Odorisio packed over 300 sealed video games into boxes and moved them to a warehouse in Omaha. As 23 years passed, he lost track of their worth and intended to pass them on to his nieces and nephews, but fate had other plans in store.
In 2021, Odorisio’s older brother, Tim, discovered the collection of games in storage and took them to a video game store in Omaha for guidance. Employees at the store were surprised at the exceptional condition of the games, including titles like Chrono Trigger and Mortal Kombat.
After getting the games appraised, the Odorisio family discovered that about 170 of them were rare and in good condition. They enlisted the help of Gameroom, the store that had initially helped them, to sell the collection, which they recently posted online.
The potential value of the collection is astounding, with the family expecting to fetch almost a million dollars for the games, a much higher figure than initially anticipated. At 62 years old, Mark told The Washington Post, “I didn’t think they would be worth anything in my lifetime.”
Chris Thompson, the owner of Gameroom, recorded a video of the games in November 2021, which garnered significant attention when uploaded to YouTube in February 2022. The collection has attracted a lot of interest from potential buyers, many of whom offered to buy the entire collection, sparking discussions on how to proceed with the sale.
Odorisio recently took about 15 boxes of games to a sorting company’s headquarters in California. Among the most valuable games in the collection is Chrono Trigger, a Japanese role-playing game that could sell for more than $50,000. Wata, the grading company, determined that several games scored 9.0 or higher, including flagship games such as Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.
While an auction house has offered $500,000 for the collection, the Odorisios hope to secure at least $700,000 and are also considering waiting to sell the games in anticipation of their value increasing.
Throughout the past two decades, Mark Odorisio has dreamt of living in a house on a Midwestern lake. If he sells the games soon, he plans to make that dream come true. “I’ve started to fantasize about it a little bit,” he said.
The team at Gameroom wishes to sell the games to raise awareness of their store and continue to deliberate on their options while the collection garners attention in the gaming community.