p2pnet news | Games:- The story of how a Canadian father sold a video game online for more than $9,000 is making headlines around the world.

“After catching his 15-year-old son smoking marijuana, the father decided to sell out this video game as a punishment,” says ChinaView. “the sale took place after the father spent two weeks searching for the video game for the Nintendo Wii gameboard.”

He, “decided to punish his son by selling the popular and hard-to-find Guitar Hero III videogame he had bought him for Christmas for $90 on the auction site where an Australian buyer bid $9,100,” says Reuters India.

“An Australian has paid [A]$10,420 for a rare video game that was auctioned online by a Canadian after deciding that his dope-smoking son did not deserve it as a Christmas present,” says the Daily Telegraph in Australia.

This all happened on eBay and some of the observations from people who went for a look make interesting reading:

Says one:

after reading your auction and dying laughing i wanted to tell you that that is pretty harsh punishment. how old is he? My mom is a proud montessori elementary school teacher, and I am in my fourth year, of 6 at Penn State in order to receive my MBA. I love smokin bud. it is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, i’ve been to Amsterdam. I am writing this letter to you because you sound like the parents of my friends from highschool. They all played ‘games’ with their kids dealing with smoking pot. for instance, one parent would give her son drug tests. His performance as a starter on varsity basketball, and honors classes never diminished because of smoking. My friends parents blamed me for causing their kids to be bad. I laugh now because i am far ahead of them, they are either in the airforce, at a one year or two year school, or working at mcdonalds. so please, before you flip out on your son for doing something that is more safe than drinking, think twice

Says another:

As a younger (than you) person, i can tell you that if you’re not going to give him this present, dont tell him you bought it for him. If you want your kid to hate you, keep this up. If you want your kid to start selling pot, and buy his own videogames or whatever, keep it up. if he doesn’t deserve this gift, simple, return it to the store or sell it here. But dont rub it in his face. He has the decency to hide his vices when you’re not home, why should you rub the fact that you dont agree with his experimentation with drugs in his face by not giving him something you bought for him already, and telling him about it? Why dont you talk to your kid? unfortunatly, i’ve grown up with teachers my whole life, and elementary/highschool teachers often convince themselves that their first reaction to a situation is a reasonable one.

Says a third:

Hello sir, I’d just like to inform you that your parenting skills are amazing. My parents would most likely beat the crap out of me if they ever cause me smoking pot. All that would do is make a long awkward silence for everyone for a couple weeks. The same will happen if you sell your child’s game. I’m not going to say smoking pot is good for you but it’s not nearly as bad as other legal things “cigarettes, alcohol” that he could have been doing instead. I say you make him write a persuasive essay on why “smoking weed” is fun and why he does it. Maybe he’ll understand that it’s not that fun afterwards. But I think both you and me know for a fact once you sell that kids game he’s just gonna get mad and forget about it by smoking weed with his friends. Although the decision is yours I believe trying it my way would work a tad better… I am only 17 though who knows. Just my two cents on the subject.

Says the final of the 101 posts:

You are doing the right thing he did something illegal it could be much worse for him so buy taking away a game your are doing a good thing for him by teaching him a lesson you do bad things you pay the consequences only in the real world they get much much worse.

But it doesn’t end there There’s also a stack of posts on DIGG, ie:

Oh that’s just great! Now the kid is going to buy Heroin Hero to get back at his dad.

And:

Damned kid, I behave and I don’t get guitar hero…The dad should just give it to me..

And:

Just because he’s your father doesn’t make him intelligent.

And perhaps the most pertinent:

I remember this auction last year where a father was auctioning off an empty Wii box. He went into this story about how the year before, his kid had been such a brat all year but desperately wanted a Gamecube for Christmas. Apparently his wife was a big pushover and wanted to get him the Gamecube regardless. So the dad buys a Gamecube, shows it to his wife to appease her, takes the actual system out of the box and sells the system on Ebay (sans box). On Christmas morning, the kid got a weighted down, but otherwise empty Gamecube box and was devastated. Apparently the lesson worked so well, that the kid was on his best behavior for the next year, so the father bought him a Wii and was auctioning off the empty Wii box for any parent that may want to teach their kid the same lesson. I’m not sure how far Ebay archives their listings, but it was definitely here on digg last year (and the link went to the Ebay listing)..

So was this no more than an amazingly successful marketing scam?

Has the son, Isaac, seen the error of his ways?

Will the Aussie buyer pay up?

Stay tuned

Slashdot it!

Also See:
more than $9,000 – Wanna buy Guitar Hero III – for $9,100?, December 14, 2007

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 8:18 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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