Would you ever buy a video game for $500,000?

Neither would we.

But recently eBay saw one of the most expensive video games ever put up for auction. It wasn’t a copy of “Kizuna Encounter,” “Pepsi Invaders,” or even a “Nintendo World Championship” cart, but an Atari 2600 game that has never been known to exist.

On February 20, eBay user Phantom listed “Gamma Attack” by Gammation for a half million dollars. Gammation, a company that was thought to only produce Atari peripherals, was only ever rumored to have produced any video games. Over the course of the last thirty years, none of them had ever surfaced, until now.

The high cost of the cartridge wasn’t the only interesting thing about the listing. For example, the only delivery method offered was “pick-up only” and the picture of the actual cart was altered to not show the actual color of the label.

With such a unique and controversial listing, and a new piece of Atari history we tracked down the owner and decided to investigate further and conducted the following e-mail interview shortly after the auction began..

I put the listing at $99,999.00 briefly, but decided to jack it back up because the last thing I wanted to do was have some rich guy that had $100G’s to throw away come along deciding he wanted a “one of a kind” and do just that.

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If there is one thing to be said about features that the Wii has over its competitors it is that it is 100% backwards compatible with its predecessor. Every GameCube disc will play on your Wii, no questions asked, which, in my opinion, is awesome.

I was a latecomer to the GameCube, holding out until “Mario Kart: Double Dash” was released, but that’s when I dove in. Being the habitual video game collector that I am, I have been doing my best to fill out my GameCube library with the best the box had to offer. I feel that I’ve done a pretty good job of picking up most of the worthwhile titles. I focused mainly on the first party games since, for the most part, if a multiplatform game came out last generation, I picked it up on the PS2. The collector in me rears its head when it comes to some of the titles on the system that are hard to find. If it’s rare, I’ll do my best to get it.

My collection is nowhere near complete, and I’m not going to claim that it is. However, I think I have picked up most of the games that suit my taste, but I’m not sure where to stop. I was planning on holding out and waiting for “Radio Allergy” to be released, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen… ever.

Have I missed any important GameCube games?

This is where you come in. Please take a look at the list of titles in my GameCube collection and let me know if there are any more that I need to pick up. Am I missing your favorite? Are there any really hard to find games that are worth hunting down? Help me figure out where to stop before these games completely disappear from store shelves.

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I like to collect things. Lots of things. Video games are at the top of that list, and Achievement points are a solid second. However, for the past 21 weeks or so, that list has been a bit flip-flopped - clouded by my anticipation for “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” (which, coincidently, has a ton of things to collect in it).

This past week I collected another 1,415 achievement points, which, put me past my secondary target goal of 20,000 points before February 11 - “Smash Bros.’” second pre-delay release date. I’ve now collected a total of 20,595 points since mid-September, and am well on pace to hit 25,000 points by March 9. I’ve been furiously obsessing over Xbox 360 titles for almost six months now, but, as some of you readers have pointed out, at what cost to my other game systems?

Great games on other systems have come and gone since I started, and I have barely touched them. I’ve been too busy playing games like “Open Season,” “Cars,” and this week’s 1,000 point-getter “NHL 2K6.” I haven’t stopped collecting games, filling in my back catalog of titles that I missed when they were first released. In an attempt to demonstrate just how much I am actually missing out on, I now present a list of games that I have added to my collection since I started this quest back in September.

Atari 2600
“Spider-Man”

Famicom
“Kirby’s Adventure”
“Pac-Man 2″

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