It's not worth selling imo. The last one sold on ebay for $15. Just buy it and open it.

Apart from any obvious wear signs or missing contents, I don't know how you could possibly tell its been resealed. Anybody with a shrink wrap machine could have resealed it. Many retail shops will have such machines and you can even buy them online for <$500.

Try manual sniffing, if the manual still smells like it has just been printed it's good, if the manual has no smell the box has been resealed. 😁

So you can't tell if it's factory sealed, except by opening and sniffing?

That's like trying someone for witchcraft by trying to drown them ...you're not guilty, but you're dead.

The guy that made 8088 Corruption did a nice video on shrink wrap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhwpm3Eu7H4

n1mr0d wrote:

The guy that made 8088 Corruption did a nice video on shrink wrap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhwpm3Eu7H4

You can call him Trixter here, we all know who you mean. 😁

Compare it to one that is known to be factory sealed. But who can still do that? Those resealers are common and Sim games are popular enough to have someone consider it.

I can see why someone would do this on a rare expensive game, but not on something as common as Simcity.

It's tough to say (definitively) if it's factory sealed due to the prevalence of shrinkwrap machines, as folks have pointed out (and note that some thriftstores/used stuff dealers actually own such machines and will shrink-wrap many items before putting them out on the shelf just as a convenience (keeps everything together) - if many other items in this store are shrink'd, that may be what has happened). The manual or other paperwork would be the most obvious way to determine if it's original - if it has all of the original paperwork, and none of it is rumpled, damaged, discolored, etc that's a good sign. You can also check if the disc looks brand new - any scratches, fingerprints, etc are a bad sign.

But in general I'd say get it and open it and enjoy it - like Auzner poined out, Sim games are fairly common, so you aren't likely to be cashing in on big bucks here even if it is brand new sealed.

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

We're wanting to open it up and play it on our MS-DOS computers over serial connection

You do realize that the Network Edition is Windows-only, right? Also, while it used to be quite impossible to get it running in Windows XP, someone finally came up with a patch for that recently. (It might even run in Windows 7.)

Jorpho wrote:

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

We're wanting to open it up and play it on our MS-DOS computers over serial connection

You do realize that the Network Edition is Windows-only, right? Also, while it used to be quite impossible to get it running in Windows XP, someone finally came up with a patch for that recently. (It might even run in Windows 7.)

Dang, I thought it was only for DOS. Not a problem for me, I have Windows 95 on my Cyrix 6x86 PC.

DonutKing wrote:

Apart from any obvious wear signs or missing contents, I don't know how you could possibly tell its been resealed. Anybody with a shrink wrap machine could have resealed it. Many retail shops will have such machines and you can even buy them online for <$500.

Yes. I remember back in the 80's, Electronics Boutique used to have a shrink wrap machine in the back room for resealing returns. This is back before rampant piracy forced stores to implement a no returns if opened policy. You'd have to do some serious CSI type analysis on the shrinkwrap to determine if it is original to the package or was added later and the time and expense wouldn't be worth it.

Well, the obvious test would be to find a copy of the game that is known not to be resealed, since there are numerous different means of shrink-wrapping a box and a different kind of seal would be a pretty good indication of a re-seal. But finding a copy of the game that is 100% known not to be resealed at this point might be quite a challenge, and even if it was sealed in the same way, that wouldn't necessarily mean it wasn't re-sealed.

I collect sealed Mattel Intellivision games and those for a couple of other consoles. It's not too difficult to identify factory shrinkwrap for these titles because of tell-tale signs. However, I don't think I would ever venture into collecting sealed PC games because of how often retailers resealed them. Customers wouldn't even have to return a game for it to be resealed. The podcast You Don't Know Flack has an episode on the host's father's software store back in the 80s. IIRC, Flack says they would routinely open software, copy it for their own use, then reseal it and sell it as new. I'm sure they weren't the only retailers doing this. I'd only feel confident in a seal if the shrinkwrap bore some kind of factory-applied sticker (not price).

Jim Leonard has some interesting insights on this with one of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhwpm3Eu7H4

There's a couple followup videos on this too if you check out the rest of his videos. ;)

Back in my C64/C128/Amiga days, I worked for a local mail order company that would by huge lots of software, not just games but pretty much every type of software.

Sometimes the shrink wrap would come torn but the box was in fine shape.

We had a couple of Heat Shrink stations along with the industrial type heat guns to properly repackage the software.

Since we also developed and published our own software too this is the main reason we had the equipment in place.

sliderider wrote on 2014-07-29, 15:14:

DonutKing wrote:

Apart from any obvious wear signs or missing contents, I don't know how you could possibly tell its been resealed. Anybody with a shrink wrap machine could have resealed it. Many retail shops will have such machines and you can even buy them online for <$500.

Yes. I remember back in the 80's, Electronics Boutique used to have a shrink wrap machine in the back room for resealing returns. This is back before rampant piracy forced stores to implement a no returns if opened policy. You'd have to do some serious CSI type analysis on the shrinkwrap to determine if it is original to the package or was added later and the time and expense wouldn't be worth it.

I saw your reply here and had a question (hopefully you’re still on here)…I just got this today…I understand that this game would originally have come in a bigger box, but I’m wondering if the jewel case itself has ever been opened? Is that an EB Games anti piracy sticker? This was from EB Games at some point, the yellow sticker that you see on top is an EB Games price sticker. Just unsure if these stickers were exclusive to used software stores or if there’s any chance that this could still be a factory sticker…??? Hope to hear from you! Thanks in advance for the help!

I don't remember ever seeing any factory stickers like that. Was most likely put on there by the store.

Every time I bought a game from 1993 onward, it was never shrink wrapped at the store. They all had the clear stickers over the top and bottom flap only.