Why We Started Cart-A-Vision

I grew up on the N64. Mine before I understood what "mine" meant with money I didn't have yet. Super Mario 64 on Saturday mornings, volume down. GoldenEye split-screen matches that ended in real arguments.

That collection followed me through a few moves, and then it didn't. Rent mattered more than a shelf of plastic somewhere in my twenties, so I sold it. A stack here, a console there, whatever anyone would give me. It was fine for about a decade.

Then Sierra put a Sega Genesis Model 2 in my hands.

We were browsing a toy and comic show at the mall, just seeing if anything from my childhood would jump out at me. Our kid took off down a ramp and I went after them. By the time I got back, she was already holding a box out to me, complete in box, and she hadn't asked me first. She'd seen it, remembered I'd mentioned wanting one months earlier in some comment I didn't think she'd even registered, and bought it before I could talk her out of the price. I stood there holding that box and felt something I hadn't let myself feel in years. Not nostalgia exactly. More like proof that the part of me that cared about this stuff hadn't actually gone anywhere. It had just been waiting on a shelf I couldn't afford to keep.

I plugged it in that night. The Sega chime hit different live than it ever had in a video. I tracked down a CIB Sonic the Hedgehog within the week.

That was the spark. What came after was the education: a market that had gone sour while I wasn't looking. Lowball offers dressed up as fair ones, "CIB" listings padded with the wrong box, scalpers working it like a spreadsheet. Not the hobby I remembered.

Somewhere in that research I went down a rabbit hole on obscure Atari 2600 publishers, the tiny outfits that put out a cartridge or two in the early eighties and vanished. That's where I found Men-A-Vision, and Air Raid.

Air Raid is about as rare as an Atari 2600 game gets. A handful of known copies, a blue T-handle cartridge shell, box art of storm clouds and fighter jets over a city under attack, and a publisher so obscure that basic facts about it are still argued over. Every serious sale comes down to one question: can you actually prove this is real. Cart-A-Vision is a quiet nod to Men-A-Vision, and to that same instinct: do the work, don't take the listing at face value.

The number we offer isn't a mood, it's a formula. Games pay 55% cash / 75% credit. Cards pay 75% cash / 85% credit. Same math for the person selling a $12 loose cartridge and the person selling a graded card worth four figures. No manual overrides because someone haggled well.

I'm not building this for resellers looking for the next flip. I'm building it for the person standing exactly where I was: holding a piece of a childhood they thought they'd already let go of, hoping whoever's on the other side of the counter actually knows what they're looking at and isn't going to take advantage of the fact that it means something to them.

Sierra still has the receipt from that Genesis, by the way. I checked.