Nintendo Powerfest '94 (Credit: JJ Hendricks)When it comes to collecting video games, JJ Hendricks knows his stuff.

Earlier this week, he completed a two-year quest to obtain one of the rarest of Nintendo cartridges in existence, shelling out over $12,000 to do so. But the story of how he finally got the collectible is even more fascinating than object itself.

At stake was a Nintendo PowerFest '94 cartridge for the Super Nintendo, which was created specifically for a video game competition Nintendo held in the mid-90s across the U.S. and Canada. The cartridge contains tournament versions of three SNES games -- Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Kart and Ken Griffey, Jr. Baseball. A mere 32 were made, and while they were all supposed to be recycled after the tournament, it didn't work out that way.

Diablo III (Credit: Blizzard)The years of anticipation for Diablo III have brought about a number of marathon play sessions since its release on May 15, but one fan's obsession with the game has proven fatal.

An 18-year old Diablo III player in Taiwan was found dead recently after a 40-hour marathon session with the game, reports the Australian Associated Press.

The player, who has only been identified as Chuang, reportedly booked a room at his local Internet café before diving into the game, not stopping for sleep or food the entire time. An employee of the café found him passed out on a table Sunday.

In the early 2000s, Apple was already hard at work on the slate that would change the world

By Mike Wehner, Tecca

The first retail version of the Apple iPad hit stores in April of 2010, and in just over two years, the device has seen a pair of hardware changes and countless software improvements. But Apple didn't think up its top-selling slate overnight -- the company had been working on the design of a consumer-focused tablet computer for many, many years prior. The photos you see here -- which were discovered within the endless pages of legalese of the current Apple/Samsung legal proceedings by Network World -- are the very first known photos of Apple's earliest iPad prototype.

Smells like Mega Man (Credit: Epic-Scents)Forget Coco de Chanel. The heck with Calvin Klein's Obsession.

The next big thing in cologne? Eau de Mario.

Epic-Scents, a Connecticut-based fragrance company, is attempting to create the signature smells of the video game industry. We're going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not going for that "Day Four of QuakeCon" odor.

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIAs big as video game are today, they're about to get a whole lot bigger.

New analyst research from DFC Intelligence predicts the global market for video games will hit $82 billion by 2017 — a 22 percent increase over this year's expected $67 billion. That's news that's likely to be a relief to those who have eyed the past seven months of sales data (all of which have shown significant declines).

By Tarmo Virki, Reuters

HELSINKI (Reuters) - The first non-Angry Birds game in more than two years from Rovio Entertainment hit No. 1 on download charts on Thursday, showing the Finnish startup behind the world-famous gaming franchise was more than a one-hit wonder.

Amazing Alex (Credit: Rovio)Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds games - in which players use a slingshot to attack pigs who steal the birds' eggs - has been valued by analysts at $6 billion to $9 billion, roughly on par with struggling cross-town phone maker Nokia.

Rovio's new puzzle game, Amazing Alex, became the No 1 paid app on the key United States app store shortly after the launch. Amazing Alex is a physics-based game that features challenges that curious boy Alex has to solve.

Think you're good at games? Sure you do. Who doesn't? The only thing gamers love more than playing is bragging about their skills.

If you can brag about beating all 10 of these terrors, however, you're in a league of your own.

It's one thing to be able to bust out a decent score at Bejeweled or dominate a Call of Duty match, but quite another to finish this set of video gaming's most challenging releases. Some are new, some are old, and some are somewhere in between. But they have one thing in common: they're all so hard they'll make your thumbs bleed. Grab a box of Band-Aids, and read on.

Sangokushi VIII (Credit: Tecmo Koei)Successfully launching a video game is no easy task. There are a million details that publishers have to check off the list to get a game out the door, on to shelves, and into your hands.

Over at Tecmo Koei, though, they missed a rather big one: They shipped the wrong game.