GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's eBay fire sale—meant to scrape together funds for a $56 billion takeover bid—has been outed as a raid on the Game Informer vault, the archival trove left behind after the magazine's 2024 shutdown.

Sealed NES rarities like Dracula, Yoshi’s Cookie, and F1 Pole Position popped up on Cohen's listings starting May 6, their telltale vault stickers and casings confirmed by former staff. A onetime employee recalled treating the collection like a library: "never opened and too afraid to break the seal despite being allowed to." These aren't store stock; they're pieces of gaming history GameStop retained even after Gunzilla Games revived Game Informer as a print title in 2025.

The backlash was swift. MinnMax founder Ben Hanson, ex-GI video producer, blasted: “Game Informer’s history belongs in a museum, not some schmuck’s eBay listings." Video Game History Foundation's Frank Cifaldi called it the vault "being strip-mined for memes." Cohen sweetened the pots with signed "Letter[s] to eBay," but irony peaked when eBay suspended his account late May 7 for "activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk."

GameStop stonewalled comment requests, leaving the optics of liquidating cultural artifacts for a meme acquisition bid to speak volumes. When your pivot from brick-and-mortar to hostile takeovers includes hocking sealed 80s carts, the strategy reads like desperation dressed as disruption.