Jennifer Thompson of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, decided to go thrifting at the Goodwill. As she was browsing through the $1 DVDs, she noticed something behind the counter. It was a video game that sparked a memory about a news article she had read about the rarest video games in the world. Jennifer drove across the street to McDonald’s so she could use the restaurant’s WiFi to make sure she wasn’t wrong. Then she drove back across to Goodwill and, with only $30 in her bank account, purchased the Stadium Events video game for $8. When she took the game to a used video game store in Charlotte to have the game appraised, the young man behind the counter was shocked. He offered Jennifer all the money he had in the cash register for the game, but she turned him down. Before the rare video game came into their lives, Jennifer and her husband Jeff were barely scraping by. They lived in a mobile home with a mouse problem and a buckling floor, so close to the Carolina Speedway that the sounds of engines from the dirt track kept them awake at night. Jeff had been laid off from his job with the electric company, and Jennifer was going to college and collecting coupons so they could get free deodorant and shampoo. The Stadium Events video game changed all that. Jennifer went on to sell the video game to a collector for $25,000. That’s not bad for an $8 investment.
