We have heard in the past about how certain old games havereached incredible price tags of hundreds of thousands of dollarsdue to a combination of factors like age, rarity, demand, and more. While not every title reaches this height of fame due to obvious reasons, many games still occupy a special place in the heart of their owners, and it simply cannot be assigned a monetary value. Now, a person in the U.S. is mourning the loss of hundreds of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games after reporting them stolen in a case of theft.
Fox 13 Seattle reportsthat a home in Pierce County, Washington, was broken into, and the thief (or thieves) stole over $50,000 worth of games stored in a shelf. The home owner Roger Holler says that over 850 games were stolen in total.
Holler has been collecting NES games for the past few decades, since the age of 11. The collector had been traveling to various store locations and game conventions to complete his NES collection and was reportedly just three titles shy of completing his mission.
Holler's family is understandably shaken by the theft, with the collector quoted as saying:
That was going to be my grandkids' inheritance or college tuition, and now I don’t have anything to give them. [...] They’ve been in our home. They know our home layout. They’ve been in our master bathroom. They took my wife’s tennis bracelet.
Holler has reported the incident to the Pierce County Sheriff Office, and it's likely that a full investigation is underway. Early reports indicate that the door of the home was smashed in, and while that and the stolen games and other items constitute a major financial loss already, Holler's family has also emphasized the loss of a piece of history that had been accumulated over a period of several decades.