This article is from the archive of our partner .

A French video game collector sold a collection of about 7,000 video games on eBay for €999,999.99 ($1.2 million) and that great rustling sound you're hearing is a million former gamers digging through their attics to see what their old copies of Sonic the Hedgehog. Unfortunately, the old games are probably not worth much. Not by themselves, and sullied with actual use, anyway.

The seller, who was only identified as Andre, comes from South France, and told the Los Angeles Times' Salvador Rodriguez that his collection fetched that much money because it was comprised of full sets of every game made for 22 gaming systems, including most Nintendo consoles and every Sega console. Andre said that in the course of building his collection, he sometimes challenged himself by gathering only factory sealed copies of a certain console's games. As Rodriguez writes:

"Any good video game store could sell instantly a 20,000 games stock, and it wouldn’t approach such price," Andre said, complete with a winking emoticon.

Andre still hasn't gotten paid, but hey, we'd be winking, too, if our years of hoarding had a chance of bringing us that big a pay-off.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.