The great video game heist... Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist. The porn trilogy for Nintendos. Atari games from the 1980s. Pristine nostalgia, potentially worth millions, gone in a night.

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A placard above the employee gate by the desk reads NINTENDO REPAIR AVAILABLE HERE. The AS SEEN ON YOUTUBE sign he’d taken down. He’d had a kind of philanthropic hubris as an owner and collector, someone who never gave a second thought to keeping his legendary game collection a secret. He’d gladly let YouTubers film in the back; he would even open the safe back there and show them, item by item, his Louvre. Other collectors had rare games, sure, but in the back room of his store, and especially in the safe, he was proud to own 10,000 of what he described as “cherry” copies—his preferred term for virgin condition. The cardboard on his Super Nintendo games was still crispy, as collectors like to say. His Sega Genesis and Master System games were as pristine in their clamshells as if they had been hanging from the racks at KB Toys.

Nothing about the store’s appearance alluded to the miracle of his collection. It was just a single-story former laundromat with a workaday sign. He’d had the idea to paint Mario and Luigi so big, anyone could see them from the main road beyond the parking lot in an antiquated strip mall, the Dye Hard Salon on one side and Murphy’s GOOD EATS Diner on the other. Trade-N-Games, this pixelated utopia in a suburb of St. Louis, had turned out exactly how he’d imagined it more than 20 years ago. The exception to his vision took the form of the scarred tracks of dolly wheels leading from the back of the store across the blue carpet, crushed into permanence by a 700-pound safe dragged out the door in the middle of the night.

And he knew it’d be the newer games, he could feel it, straight through three consecutive red lights, barely easing off the pedal. It’d be the games arranged on the most prominent rows inside the store. They’d take the PlayStation 4s, and the used Nintendo Switch consoles, and popular games like Skyrim (dragons versus glitches, 2016), like Breath of the Wild (Link of Zelda fame versus his own sense of curiosity, 2017) and Mario Kart 8 (go-karts versus go-karts, 2014). Who would want to take anything else?


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