The Indiana Pedigree
By Mark Haspel
In any collectible field, there are a handful of sources of material that are of unusually high, outstanding quality. The quality of these items generally exceed the remainder of available material to such a degree that examples from these sources are elevated within said collectible.
Just as any other collectible, video games also have collections that surface periodically and that demand a special status within the hobby. Coins have the Elaisberg collection, Comics have the Edgar Church (Mile High) collection…and now video games have the Indiana Pedigree.
The Indiana Collection is the first such collection of video games to surface since Wata certification has existed.
The Indiana Collection consists of over 2,200 sealed games that were never sold, primarily consisting of NES games but also including SNES and Sega Genesis games. A private chain of two video rental stores in rural Indiana closed their doors around 1998—the doors were locked and the contents were never sold off. 20 years later the family contacted a video game dealer and agreed to sell all the NES and SNES games right off the shelves they had been sitting on for 20 years.
The experts at Wata flew out to the dealer’s store to view these games and were very impressed by the size, and more importantly the quality of the collection. It is rare enough to find 10, 20, or even 50 sealed games of this vintage, but 2,000 games is a sight to behold. Most of the games are in exceptionally high grade, and having been effectively abandoned in a building for 20 years has resulted in the find of a lifetime!
Wata denotes all games from the Indiana Pedigree on their front label, which will read “The Indiana Collection” on the top line in the Exception field. We hope you win a game from this recognized Pedigree and that you enjoy it half as much as the graders at Wata did when seeing the Indiana Collection for the first time.
