Jolt Country

Now I know how Robb feels every time he spots a picture of his Polybius machine on the Internet. MSN has an article on video games as investments, and used a picture of my old game room for the article!

http://money.msn.com/investing/dollar20 ... video-game

Background: In 2004, an AP reporter was working on a story about retro games making a comeback. They contacted me for a brief interview and then sent a photographer out to the house and shot some pictures. That led to this story, from 2004.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5270099/ns/ ... JKDgcU0V8E

I guess people can recycle AP stuff, because here's a story from 2008 on CNN quoting me. CNN did not interview me.

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-16/tech ... _s=PM:TECH

The picture MSN used this morning was recycled from the AP photo shoot in 2004.

How long was the photographer over at your place for?

2 hours, tops. Maybe 90 minutes.

The funny thing was, the article was about retro video game consoles making a comeback, stuff like Atari and the NES and such. So when the lady came over to photograph my collection she was kind of like ... is that it? I had probably 30 consoles hooked up and a thousand cartridges on shelves, but I guess to someone not into it it must not have looked like very much stuff. So she shot pictures of it for 10 minutes and then after she asked if that was it I was like well I do have 30 arcade games in my backyard. So then we went out there and she shot pictures out there for about an hour. The picture of me out in the arcade came from that shoot. And the funny thing is I don't think the article really talks about arcade cabinets at all.

Also I learned that most AP people are stringers (think freelance) and they sell their work to the AP. So the lady that took the picture of my stuff probably made some money when it ran last week. I made zilch.