Some dents, some mileage, some Torvalds and as many hell-spawn demons as you can handle. Plus a sweater.
You can buy anything on eBay, it seems, from fake game cartridges to dodgy perfume to locks of famous starlet's hair. And, from the buyer's description on
this eBay auction, "The Black On Black NSX Of Doom". According to the seller:
"I am selling it because I am coming up on my 40th birthday and my testosterone is now low enough to make me feel guilty that someone packing more isn't enjoying it. Obviously, it's up to the winning bidder what you'd like to do with it, but I suspect it would make a really cool first car / Christmas gift / early graduation gift for a man coming of age. You could spend this kind of money on a new and probably dorky car, but studies have clearly shown that teenagers forced to drive dorky vehicles feel a kind of mortified that mere adults can no longer comprehend."OK, so it's mildly impressive that a sports car owner can admit that they're perhaps no longer as testosterone-fuelled as they once were, and no longer need the car. Although it does fly in the face of about 90% of the sports car owning fraternity, who tend to be pushing fifty if our observations are any guide.
But does that qualify it as the NSX Of Doom? Well, possibly not, were it not for the fact that this particular car is not just the NSX Of Doom, but the NSX Of id Software's Doom. The seller is
David Taylor, an ex-id software programmer responsible for a lot of the functional, rather than attractive code in Doom and Quake -- everything from status bars to mapping to network code. He's also responsible for Doom and Quake ports to everything from AIX, Solaris and even the Atari Jaguar. And he states that the 1995 NSX he's flogging off was purchased with his share of the proceeds from sales of Doom in the mid-1990s.
Now, eBay auctions can of course be faked, but this has an additional level of veracity as far as we can ascertain; not only is the seller throwing in a worn Doom developer's T-Shirt, a custom jumper and a framed copy of the game, but it's also linked to from
Dave Taylor's own Blog. And he's in one of the pictures holding the framed copy of Doom. Or in other words, if it's a fake, it's an incredibly elaborate one.
If you wanted a bit of extra geek kudos to go with your 1995 sportscar (with 102,000 miles on the clock), it's also worth noting that after Taylor left id (but kept the NSX), he worked at processor company Transmeta. You know, the wacky bunch that kept Linus Torvalds in cookies for six years between 1997 and 2003. And while it might be a stretch to suggest Torvalds sat in the NSX in question, it's worth noting that Taylor's description includes this line:
"The passenger seat has a tear from a very fat, legendary programmer who sat in it once."Then again, two lines later, he also notes that he's also responsible for
"stuffing the passenger seat with two exotic dancers" at one time. Presumably not on the aforementioned legendary programmer's lap, but anything is possible. At the time of writing the auction was up to US$4,150 plus shipping, which we'd suggest might be a touch more if you wanted to get it to Australia. PayPal is not accepted, which probably annoys someone at eBay a whole lot.