In November 1999, Jerry Greiner, better known as classic video game dealer Jerry G, announced he was going out of business after many years. In February 2000, shortly before the official announcement that he had sold his business, I caught up with Mr. Greiner to get the details of why he’d both gotten into and then gotten out of the classic video game sales business.
Greiner, 58, began collecting classic video games around 1989, although he’d “always been a collector of something.” He and his wife enjoyed going to garage sales. Mr. Greiner said, “I kept seeing the Atari stuff, and I remembered back when my kids were younger having the Atari and playing the games. Kept thinking, ‘well one of these days I ought to pick one of these up so I can show the grandkids what their parents played with.’ We stopped at a garage sale and a guy had a box full of games and a game system. Probably had 50 games, a bunch of controllers, and stuff. Sold it to me for 15 bucks. Then, unfortunately at the next garage sale, a guy had a box full of games about the same size. He offered it to me for 5 bucks. I said, ‘Geez, I’ve got to average my cost here,’ so I bought that one.”
Greiner continued, “Then I got to thinking, ‘well, I wonder how many different games are out there.’ So I just started buying them by the titles.” That part probably sounds very familiar to most collectors. He remembered setting a limit on what he would pay: 10 cents a game. However, if it had “some weird, neat label on it,” he’d go up to 25 cents. – Read the rest of the article here from Classic Gamer Magazine (courtesy of Old School Gamer)!
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