Philip Fibiger

I’ve been occasionally keeping my eye on the ebay marketing for 2nd generation 8-bit Nintendos for the past couple years. Released around the time the Super Nintendo came out, they redesigned the unit to get rid of the problems original NESes developed with age. They’d begin to have difficulty reading cartridges, and eventually no amount of blowing, cleaning, or sticking 2nd cartridges on top of the first to wedge it down would get the game to play. Anyway, a top-loading NES didn’t suffer from these problems, and they didn’t make too many of them, so they were a hot commodity on ebay. It wasn’t unusual to see them go for over a hundred bucks with a game and a controller.

Christian and I were talking about them again, and we went to check prices on ebay. Where buy-it-now prices were always over a hundred dollars, I saw a ton of listings at $29-39. Looking closer, it turns out they’re not official Nintendo consoles, but one of a few new NES top loading clones that have hit the market. I found a mixed review of one of the units, it sounds like they work well but aren’t perfect.

The question is, do I buy one of these and give it a try, or hope that the flood of clones will drop the ebay value of the original units? Will they hang around, or will Nintendo crack down on the clone units like they did with the Controllers with built in games?

UPDATE: Turns out the clones are legal, as Nintendo’s patents on the original hardware have expired. Here’s another post on the history of the NES Clones