We discovered a new variant of Super Mario Bros

Not at all, but's certainly faster at doing a web research about a topic im only interested in passing.

It goes without saying that if anybody has any deeper knowledge or wants to spend more time on research, I'd appreciate a more professional estimate.

If I had used ChatGPT in the way you described, I would have likely verified that the numbers sourced from search results it found were used correctly when it was "doing some numbers," since LLMs don't really do numbers at all. At that point, why not just search and do the numbers myself?

Answers to your questions below:

> After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth?

No, but admittedly I have a lot of experience selling rare collectibles of several different kinds myself. So I knew enough to know that the only remotely accurate way to estimate the value of something like this (rare, not previously known, possible collector base is very small but dedicated) is to put it up for auction. I recognize that not everyone may understand this, though.

If you browse auctions for collectibles, and dig up the rarest of the rare items, you'll notice that even if the auction house provides an "estimate," they are usually wildly off compared to the actual hammer price, despite coming from the presumable experts in that field. Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.

> Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?

Yeah, I quite possibly would have, and I likely would have responded with an answer similar to my answer to the previous question.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply! Yeah, I just wouldn’t speculate that much. If someone had put a gun to my head and asked me for an estimate of value, I’d probably give a huge range like $100k up to several million, and the grade also matters as only a handful of them got a perfect 10. I’d also give the caveat that video games are not really my specialty.

> That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.

Not sure, but yes it might even out on average! But that still doesn’t help you answer the question of the market value of one specific item.

One thing I didn’t mention is that there’s another factor at play in this specific case, which is that total the number of items (97) is likely as large or larger than the current number of collectors in existence who would actually buy them at current market prices. I’ve seen this before with other niche/high end collectibles. This means that if you put all of them on the market at once, you’re likely to crash the price of this item and possibly others related to it. So if you want to maintain the current price, you need to trickle the items out into the market slowly.

One thing that’s interesting is that the blog post just admits how many total items were found. This is information that collectors don’t always have in other situations like this, and simply knowing that there are 97 out there may be enough to keep the market price lower than it otherwise could have been. There are other items in this field (Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware and accessories, first-run pristine sealed copies of classic games like Mario and Zelda, etc) where the total items in existence are thought to be in the single digits.