Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Still in the Wrapping

Yesterday, we received a game ordered from eBay that was still in the wrapping. A common occurrence, right? Except this is an Intellivision game from 1982.


It's so nicely wrapped, and probably would be worth a pretty penny later on to some collector. And yet it's our job to test these games and prepare them to be used by our archive users. Because after all, games are meant to be played.

And yet it's so pretty in its unscuffed box. ...Could you open it?

2 comments:

karadoc said...

I've had to do similar in my work for the Software Preservation Society. It seems wrong somehow, but at the same time so necessary.

You might want to watch out though, we have had shrink wrapped games that have been found to have been modified. So either the distributors played the game before it was sent out, or people use shrink-wrapping machines on eBay. It is of course pretty obvious which is more likely. Sadly, it is hard to see from a picture, and pretty hard getting a refund if you've already opened it...

Unknown said...

A very good point. I guess at that point, the wrapping could simply serve as a way to preserve the box a little better, which would still make it sad for us to unwrap it.

Fortunately in this case, we ended up receiving multiple copies of the game, so we were able to add the other copy to the playable collection and leave this game in the wrapping for display purposes. But I know we won't always be so lucky.