Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 128: The Collectors' Bubble

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

High-grade game collectors Chris Kohler and Steve Lin drop by to discuss the wild ride that is the rapid inflation of classic games in the collector's aftermarket. Pine for the days when a Super Mario cartridge cost 25¢ instead of $25!

This week at Retronauts, tiny bubbles in my video game champagne. Everyone, welcome to this exciting episode of Retronauts. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this exciting episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. I'm hosting this week. And we have a motley rabble of people per usual, including the unexpected. Unexpected. Unexpected. The unexpected. I have to be here. No, that's your totally expected.

Court order. I have to be here. That's true. You have shared custody of the podcast with me. I do. It's my weekend, Jeremy. All right. And next to you. Hi, it's me. Chris Kohler, features editor at Kotaku. And finally. Steve Lynn, part of the Video Game History Foundation and VP of Ops at Discord.

Nice. So I've called everyone here together today to talk about the video game collector's bubble if such a thing exists. So called. So called bubble. Totally exists. And the reason I have summoned this particular group

is because Chris and Steve are both pretty, I would say, die-hard collectors or have been die-hard collectors, have been very active collectors of video games. And have many things. things to talk about with us. Steve, you're a recovering collector of video games. Yeah, yeah.

I'm pulling myself out of the depths and doing good with my collection or trying to. What do you mean exactly by doing good? Well, I originally started collecting because I wanted to hold on everything. I wanted to have everything. But then I realized it was more for preservation. And then now I'm in the process of actually giving it all away to different projects like libraries and museums. That's awesome. So you are deflating the bubble in your tiny way, very modest way.

I don't know. Maybe I'm inflating in some ways by giving exposure to certain things that people didn't know existed. Yeah. Maybe. And also, you're taking supply off of the market. I mean, if you have rare video games and you were to sell them, you'd put another one on the market, right? But instead, you're giving it to a museum where it's never going to get sold. That's true.

So then the price of the next one that comes up is going to be higher. It's really damned if you do, damned if you don't. Yeah, pretty much. We need a ring of video game museum thieves, artfully dressed. I'd only work at night. It's like Persona 5. I'm recruiting. All right.

So each of us, I think, has sort of a different relationship with the idea of collecting. Steve, you kind of talked a little bit. But can you, I don't know, maybe explain just how vast your collection has been? Like, when did you get into collecting and how adamant were you about it? So I never got rid of anything I had when I was a kid. So I guess you could say that started the collection. But then in high school, I worked at a used video game store. And this is during the transition between NES and Super Nintendo.

So it also gives you an idea of my age. But at that time, you know, I had, there weren't really lists of games that you could find really anywhere because there was no Internet. But we had our buy list of every game that existed that we knew about for the NES. And so I started using that as a checklist. And prior to that, I had collected things like comics and baseball cards. So this was sort of the natural progression. I love video games. I have this list.

Let me start filling in this list. And that pretty much just continued on. You know, I started going to the things like the world of Atari and the first classic gaming expos, trading things on Usenet back in the day. So I started a long time ago, and I focused very early on complete inbox because we would throw away boxes. at the store. So that made it easier for me to build a collection that was pretty close. And then the last...

You were taking the boxes home. Yeah, I was taking the boxes and manuals home. So that made it super easy. But then, you know, so to finish for me was relatively easy. Well, that's a misnomer. But anyway, like, you found out that there were the games that weren't on our list that are super obscure. So I built up at one time a complete Atari 2,600 collection or almost. I mean, I was missing kind of the ones where there's only air raid or something.

I did have an air raid, but it was loose. So I didn't have the box. Is the game actually boxed? I've never even seen the box for that. There are two boxes. Like photographs. Yeah. Two.

Yeah. Like two different boxes or two total in the world? I think two total in the world, if I'm not mistaken. I think that's approximately. I think you're allowed not to have that game boxed. And there's one manual. Yeah, yeah. You know, I got a video life at that classic gaming expo, so, but then it completed NES, Super Nintendo, N-64, Saturn, Turbographics, Vectrix, I think Virtual Boy, things like that.

Some of those systems, I kind of lost track. And that, you know, I sort of built that up, and then I had to find something new. So the new thing was ephemera, which we talked about in a different episode. and then I decided to stop. So how long ago did you decide to stop? Was that a couple of years? Yeah, it was a couple of years ago. I was still buying things here or there,

but I think Chris kind of recognized when I stopped buying sort of large lots. He was able to buy stuff? Well, what I would do, I think, maybe up to about 10 years ago, I would buy out collections. So when someone wanted to get out, I would just like pull up in a truck and then take everything they had. And then I stopped doing that. And then I, you know, stopped searching on eBay and killed a bunch of my saved searches. And then I realized, well, I pretty much have everything I want and I don't want anymore.

So really the only thing I'm looking for are the things that I feel need to be preserved because there's only a couple of them or I want to make sure it goes to a museum, not into my collection. So that does kind of raise the question. like, what is the end game of being a collector? Like, at what point do you say, okay, well, that's all right. What happens after that? I think that a lot of people have these dreams and not just in video game collecting, but in all kinds of collecting, you know, ever since, I mean, just, you know, hundreds, a thousand years ago when people were collecting antiquities and things like that, right?

Of, oh, I'll open a museum or I'm going to pass it all down to my children, or I'm going to sell it all, then I'm going to retire off the collection, or, you know, everybody has some sort of an end goal, but it's always very, when you start poking at that end goal, it becomes clear that, like, the person is not actually working towards that end goal yet, or that the things that they're doing are actively stopping them from maybe with that end goal, because it's like, oh, I'll sell it all one day. It's like, okay, sell me one thing out of your collection now. Oh, no. No, I couldn't do that, you know, when people hold on to doubles and doubles. levels of things. And so there is like, with any collection, there is, there's always that moment of reckoning of, okay, well, what do I really want to do with this?

And, you know, I mean, it kind of, as it turns out, as you start to find out, like, for a lot of people, it is just like selling it really cheaply because they want the weight or the burden off of them. It's nice now that there are museums to donate things to. I actually just donated my whole collection of fanzines. all the black and white video game fanzines that I used to make and trade with people and stuff like that. That's all at the strong now. They really wanted it in their library as this archive of 1990s amateur video game criticism and culture.

And so that actually, that was the first, like, big thing that I'd been carrying around that I gave away. And it's like, oh, it feels really good. It feels really good to not have to worry about it anymore. and also that it is now somewhere where it's totally accessible for everybody. So now it makes it a little bit easier to contemplate donating other things, especially when those things are like very rare. But in answer to the question of what is what are people want to do with their collections, nobody really thinks about that in a really serious way. And then you have, that's when you have the crash. That's when you have, as prices start to come down, everybody just starts to just furiously dump it if they were planning on like retiring.

and that sends the prices even further into a spiral and then, you know, bad things happen. Yeah, Mike Micah and I were talking a while ago about at some point we were collecting because nobody else was or there were very few people collecting. And we thought someone should preserve this because we've seen where we've lost a lot of artifacts because no one cared about it at the time. But then as collecting became much more popular and I think we're going to talk about this later over the years, we realize like, oh, it's not my receipts. responsibility anymore. I don't need to do that. So I don't care about PlayStation 1 or 2 or 3 or having every game for the Xbox because I know someone else is doing that work. And if I want to play any of those games, there's plenty of ways that I can do that. Yeah, and I guess for my own, my own perspective, I've kind of gotten to that point where I actually am, like I do my collecting for a specific purpose, which is, you know, the, you know, the, the, you know, the, the, the videos that I've been doing, actually, and the books that go along with them, finding all the NES games, Game Boy games, other platforms, and, you know, photographing those, scanning

the manuals and everything like that, and, you know, giving as detailed a backstory on the games as I possibly can, and, you know, putting together video and then text that goes along with it to explain it. Like, I don't actually want to own these things. When I'm done with them, then I like, here you go. You're doing catch and release. Here you go. Yeah, yeah, absolutely am.

And, you know, I'm happy to borrow when I can. But it's still fun. Both of you have been nice about lending stuff, which I appreciate. I'm collecting because it's fun to learn all about the video games that are released on certain platforms, you know, see what the list is, find out what the rare ones are, okay, what do they go for, what's a bargain? And then to go out and find them and get a good deal on them and to learn about them is fun and informative and entertaining. And so kind of that's why I'm doing it. And you get to, you know, I'm sure you get the same sensation of, oh, I finally got this game I wanted for Game Boy Works, but, you know, you're going to, you know, you know, it's going to go back, you know, out into the wild. Yeah, I mean, it's not so much like a thrill of the acquisition at this point.

It's more just like, oh, well, it's a relief to know that I, you know, I finally found this. Like, there's still a few little things that I'm struggling to find, and it will be nice if I can ever actually find those things. Right. But for the most part, it's, it's more just like, you know, this. the satisfaction of being able to, you know, to cover it, to, to scan it or whatever. Yeah, when you're building that expertise, when you have game after game after game passing through your hands, I mean, you're going to be very good, you know, I mean, you're probably excellent now, quite frankly, and will be wonderful when this is all over it, like identifying fakes, like in a few years, like... You know, I haven't really dealt with fakes. See, you haven't dealt with fakes, but you know what's real. And once you've handled enough games, like, you will.

like a fake will fall in your hands be like, this is not right. I've handled every Game Boy game and this is just not right. Yeah, but I mean, for my own personal collection, I want to own cartridges of games that I really like or that I think are notable or interesting.

But I don't really need to own complete inbox games. I don't need a complete collection of any platform. I don't, like, none of that is necessary for me. I want to be able to, you know, just pop in a game I love and play it, but that's really as far as need to take it.

Yeah, and as someone who has completed collections, I can't say that completing collections is far less satisfying than you think it's going to be. Yeah, I think a lot of it is the thrill of the chase, the, like, you know, the hunt and the acquisition of it, you know, the materialistic drive that capitalism is instilled in all of us. So, yeah, like, I was, you know, I did think, you know, for a while, like, it would be really great to be a serious collector, but that quickly became. priced out of my reach and I said, you know, all I really need are games that I can't play

in any other way. You also moved across the country a couple of times. Yeah, I've been ping ponging back and forth and had other realities to deal with. So that also has a big impact. And, yeah, like, owning a little stuff is nice. Owning a lot of stuff is a burden. Yeah. I think I got a lot of satisfaction out of being able to provide you with stuff for NES and Gameboy works.

It's, you know, that's really one of the reasons I was collecting was like, oh, this, you know, you got to use it, you did something awesome with it, and you can share that with other people. And that's probably, that was actually more satisfying than, I think, completing some of the things. That's awesome. I'm glad that, you know, people like you exist who have these things and are, you know, not jealous about them. They're like, you know, I have this. It is a resource. Please make use of it because you'll put it to get use. Like everyone at the Video Game History Foundation, like that entire organization that you've put together is amazing. And I can't wait to make more use of the resources you guys are putting together. Yeah, by all means. It's very exciting. And then, Bob, you've been pretty quiet because I know you're not like a super avid collector. Well, you're all sick, number one. You all make me sick. Right, right, right.

Yeah, well, here's a thing. We can get into that. I feel like collecting is sort of like an economic luxury in many cases, though. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad, but I had collected things. I had a nice collection of books, a nice collection of, you know, some rare games. I was never a completeist. I was like, oh, it's kind of nice to have a library of things. So you can, like, oh, look at all the things that reflect my identity.

and if I want to pull this book off the shelf or pull this game off the shelf, I can do that. That was fine until I got out of grad school and had to become a real adult. And that was in 2009 when the economic collapse was at its worst. And between 2009 and 2011, I moved five times.

I had to move all my stuff five times and just chasing a living wage across the country. I ended up here at one up. I was not paid a living wage, but it was close enough. But as I moved over and over again, I kept shedding more and more things,

the point where now it's just like, I don't want to hold on to anything unless I know I can't experience it again because it is just another thing that I'll have to carry with me because as someone in this industry, as someone who is an independent person now that works off of Patreon, I have no job security. So more having stuff is a liability because you need to pay someone to move that stuff. You need space for that stuff. So that is my relationship with collecting. And I still like to collect things, but I think it's more like sentimental things. Like, I still kept my original boxed day one copy of Earthbound with all the stuff inside. I have, like, a signed copy of Maniac Mansion for Ron Gilbert and Tim Schaefer for the NES version.

Like, a little, little Choshkies like that. Like, I have a pigment two standee that I pilfer from one upsold office, lots of little, like, collectible things that are, that would either be hard to find. It just mean a lot to me. So I feel like that is really how I feel. And again, I feel that if I want to experience something and it exists, at some point, I will be able to find it. again, either downloading it illegally or finding it in a store or something like that, nothing at this point I think

will be removed from our history. I don't think. You guys can disagree with me if you want. No, I mean, that's pretty similar to where I am. Like I said, I'm acquiring the CIB stuff just because I want to document it and have, you know, books where it's not just, I

took some screenshots from an emulator. Right, right. Like, here's what the box looked like. Here's how it all fit together. Like, that to me, I think, is valuable. And so I'm chasing after that. But I'm really happy to, you know, put those things up for auction when I'm done with them. For me, I don't need the – they take up a ton of space. Right.

This is all therapy for all of us, by the way, I think. But for me, I just – I hate stuff so much where we're doing an episode on Mario Sunshine. It's just like, well, I have my GameCube. I don't know why. And I have a copy of this game. I don't know why. But it's like it would take me five minutes to download Dolphin and search for super Mario Sunshine.

And I did that. And that was much easier than having to go to my closet, look at all the things I still have. Be burdened with that anxiety. think about, like, am I ever going to get rid of this GameCube? Will I ever get rid of these GameCube games and then be, like, upset about that? But it was much easier to be like, I'll just steal it because I already own it. That's just sort of my relationship with stuff.

Yeah, the process that I've gone through with trying to get GameCube, like, recording setup. Yeah. Makes me kind of hate video games a little bit. I finally got it set up and I can record RGB quality video in progressive mode, blah, blah, blah. But, God, there's a lot of money, a lot of effort. I went through four GameCubes until I could, find one that actually worked correctly for me. Yeah. And I, this is going on too long with my own story, but I think you guys, this is

not judgmental, I think you guys are more invested in the more authentic experience than me, and that's cool. And if I had more room, I would definitely want to get a CRT TV and hook up all the concerts I still own. But at this point, just having the experience itself, however altered it may be, is enough for me to not have to burden myself with, you know, extra stuff. Again, it's the stuff equation that makes me upset. And I think that's where we're going here with this collector level, right? that I'm sure it's going to lead into what is good enough and how much do people actually want the physical artifact. Right, right.

I definitely, I mean, I do like the physical artifact. There's stuff I'm collecting now. I might as well to say it. There was something, it was funny because there's this collection that I've been doing where I don't want to talk about it because I don't want somebody else to also try to collect it. But honestly, it's been going on, it's almost going on a year now that I've been looking for certain things. They don't even come up on Yahoo! is Japan. So at this point, it's like, whatever.

I've been collecting Squares PC games that they did before the Famicom. And I've got all but two of them, basically. And they're not documented. Like, nobody's done, like, high-res scans of the boxes or the manuals or anything like that. And there's a lot of cool stuff in there that adds to the experience of the game that you don't get if you literally just get the ROM off abandonware, which you can just do if you want to and you can emulate it. But like going out and actually buying that stuff and getting it and looking through it,

it really expands my knowledge of that particular area of history in a way that just looking at the ROMs really would not. And then also there is that preservation aspect of the whole thing because Japanese collectors they don't put stuff online. They don't dump ROMs. They don't scan things. and they keep stuff to themselves, and they don't even, I mean, you know, Steve, you know a little bit more about this than I do even because you've kind of done some looking into that situation. But like Japanese prototype collectors, they dump the ROM and they share it amongst themselves in the inner circle, and that's about it, right?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. A lot of stuff stays within small groups, and part of this is cultural, right? There's kind of, we've talked to developers who were maybe contracted to produce a game and they get all the material. from the parent company, and then they send it back, right? Because they're supposed to send it back. And that way a lot of it just never gets out. And, yeah, you see there actually are a couple preservation groups in Japan. And there's people really driving to change that culturally.

But I think traditionally we didn't see a lot of that. And so it is kind of scary, especially for the stuff that's older. Right. We're going to be able to be. So, yeah, I mean, there is something to getting the actual physical artifacts. Although I was reading this, I read a book on collecting. It was an academic psychological book on collecting. And it really makes a central point that the sort of fundamental, like, mental sickness that's going on here is belief in the mystical nature of objects, that the objects possess mana.

You know what I mean? that by possessing the object, it confers its magic onto you and makes you a better or more interesting person. And I read that, and I'm like, yeah, that sounds about right. Because, like, look, I mean, look, I'm online. I'm always talking about old video games. Everybody's like, oh, Chris Kohler, he knows about the old video games. And so when you have, that's why you see YouTube man

with shelf of old video games behind it. Because the more old video games are behind YouTube, man, it confer. And it really does. Like, people look at that and they're like, oh, you must know a lot. You must be special because you have all these video games. And so that's the sort of like, that's the thing I think that's going on with collections. Again, not just video games, but anybody who used to collect religious artifacts, things like that.

Yeah, vinyl collectors, that's something that has kind of gone through the same sort of crazy price increases as music. And maybe even more so because you get into vinyl and it really does become mystical. People are like, oh, well, you have to look for the hot pressers. You have to look for the perfect pressing that has the ultimate sound fidelity. It was made at this one plant during this one month. And if you can find the etching that has the correct code on the inner ring of the vinyl, then you've got the hot presser and it's worth thousands of dollars for an album that normally would sell for like 20 bucks. Yeah, there's that book at what, do you not sell at any price?

Yes. That talks very specifically about like this niche. part of vinyl collecting, and you realize, like, oh, this is the people that collect sealed in ES games, right? There's a good parallel there. Yeah, I mean, like, can you even listen to those records because you're causing physical wear on them by listening to them? You're degrading the value of it.

So you own this totem, basically, that, you know, it's almost like Schrodinger, you know, their Schrodinger is vinyl. Like, if you listen to it, then you appreciate it, but you destroy it for the future. Is that worth doing? I think you're, you guys are uncovering a side of this that I don't think any of you are guilty of, but the elitism of collecting, I think, is part of it where it's like, no, I have the pure version of this. I'm enjoying it in the right way. Right. Where, you know, anything else would be an adult an adulterated version of that experience. Yeah. I mean, when I do the, the NES works and Game Boy work stuff, I'm totally fine getting a kind of beaten up copy because it's like, you know,

the Velveteen rabbit. Like someone owned this game and they played it. Yeah. And, And it has some marking on the manual, and that's great because it means this game was loved, it was played. It's an artifact of that reality. Like, this was a part of someone's life. And to me, that speaks actually really highly of a game. If you find a game that is in perfect condition. And some of them are full of scarlet chimers. You can find out of fire.

Some of them need to be burned. But, I mean, you can buy like a perfectly pristine copy of chessmaster for Super NES. Why? Because how many people really played that game and loved it? Not that many. But, you know, you find a beaten-to-hell Earthbox with the manual all dog-eared. Like, that is because someone really got into that game and was just, like, in love with it. And that's awesome.

Yeah, going to the maybe collector bubble piece of this, I think that's one of the things that we're starting to see in the game collecting world that has been part of comics and baseball cards and everything like that for a long time. It's the difference in condition, right? But you still people talk very broadly about this cartridge is worth this amount of money. And it's almost regardless of what the label looks like or what the box looks like. It's like I will pay that much for that game. But then you start, what we're going to probably see is this separation to where if I'm a collector, say, 20 years from now, I want to get the complete one because I'm part of this niche hobby. I want the one that's in the best condition. and you'll start seeing a huge separation in price for the same item just because one will be in better condition, right?

I think people – there's a lot of people right now that's like grabbing things. I want to play this game. Here's the cartridge. I kind of don't care what it looks like. Right. But I think that from a value perspective, I think broadly speaking, you'll start seeing like I want the one that's slabbed or I want the one that's in mint condition and I will pay a huge price premium and everything that isn't. You know, it's got a torn label or it's not a shiny or whatever, you'll probably see, you know, two, three, four hundred percent differences in price. Yeah, I mean, it's already that way in Japan where, you know, they go to a shop and there's the A, B, C grades, and they won't even sell something that's a C.

Oh, my God. What are you even thinking? Like, why would you buy that? They almost throw in that junk file. Trash. Yeah. Yeah. I can't get into that.

Like, I actually make people angry by opening up sealed. Yeah, that's right. Sometimes old games, like, that's the only way I can find them. Yeah. And sometimes, like, there's not really that big a price difference. Like, I opened up a sealed Metroid for Famicom Disc System last year. Right. And the price difference between complete and complete sealed is $5.

They dumped, and I think it was in 2003, when Nintendo in Japan finally said, we're not going to repair disk systems anymore if you bring them to us. Suddenly, I walked into a store in Osaka. into, what's it, GameConteadon. And I walk in there and look, oh, a whole buttload of sealed Famicom Disc System games.

How did these get here? Yeah. So there's a lot of those. Because people, a ton hit the market in 2003, everybody bought them and kept them. And it meant that I could play a copy of Metroid that I know was not going to have errors. Yeah, that's right.

You know, like it was in perfect condition. No one had ever touched the exposed disc part. So that's great. I mean, you know, for something that Jim, genuinely is, like, rare. Like, there is only one sealed copy of this game in existence. I wouldn't open that. That's, like, you know, leave it as is, you know, let it go in a museum or something.

But for the most part, I'm like, I don't know, like, condition really doesn't matter too much. The ironic thing is the museum would probably open it. Because they're not fetishists about having the original shrink wrap on, and they want to have access to all the parts inside of it. Yeah. So, also, shrink wrap can damage boxes, depending on what kind of string wrap. shrink wrap is. At each acid and stuff like that. Yep.

Yep. So some kind of, a lot of that shrink wrapper is going to come off. On the on the subject of the quote-un-un-quote bubble that we keep talking about, I would put forth that, yes, prices for collectible video games are going into the stratosphere right now on a lot of things, and it's happened very quickly. But we may not be in a bubble, as it's typically understood economically, because the idea behind a bubble is that it gets big, big, big, big, and then it pops, right? That may not happen with the collectible video games right now.

I think what may happen is that it may hit a peek and then slowly start to come back down again. It's more of a souffle. I'm described it as a foam, actually. Because it's a lot of little bubbles, right? And some of them get bigger than others and some pop. But you'll kind of see like slight deflation. It's like the loose carts, right? We saw this with Atari 2,600.

Yeah. Even loose cards were just shooting up in the 90s. And then all the, like, that bubble popped, right? So it's like, oh, okay, nobody really wants these cards. And now they're back to a dollar or $2. I mean, video game collecting used to be called chasing the chuck wagon. Like, that's what they called it. Like, and that's when, because the rarest video.

game in the whole world was Chase the Chuck Wagon for Atari 2,600. And if you found a Chase the Chuck Wagon that made your day, because that was this really super rare, super expensive video game. How many thousands of copies are there of that game? Tons, tons of copies of that game. And now you can get one. I'm not saying it's worth a nickel, but it's like 50 bucks, you know, versus where just a loose cartridge would have been multiple hundreds of dollars, you know, at the peak of Atari

collecting. But there was never a point at which Atari collecting went. It just sort of slowly ate away at itself until now you look at Atari and it's like, oh, nothing's worth anything anymore. You know, games like Power Lords for Odyssey. That was like the hardest Odyssey 2 game to find. And now you can get it again. It's like, what, 150 bucks for the whole thing.

It's like, which is, it's basically nothing. Now, air raid, if another air raid comes up and it's complete in the box, that will sell for a record price if it comes up. Because the only people you have left, as Steve was saying, are the people who are going for the absolute, absolute rarest of the rarest of the rare. But then when those people start dying and there's nobody who gives a crap about Atari anymore to come up and buy from them, that'll start coming down too. Like Golden Age comics, Golden Age comics that don't have Superman in them.

Golden Age comics that don't have recognizable characters today that are really popular. Golden Age comics are starting to come down. Even as comic collecting in that era keeps going up, it's like they're just starting to come down because the people who actually cared about those are dying and the people who collect comics now don't care about your super rare edition of whatever, the Yellow Kid. Can't wait until people who care about NES start dying off. Yeah.

I have an anecdote. I have an anecdote about that, actually, Jeremy. When I started going to anime conventions, I don't go to them anymore, people. When I started going to anime conventions in 2001. They don't want you there, Bob. No, no, I'm too old. It's creepy. But when I started going in 2001, there was this guy, I mean, you dress up or whatever.

There's this guy who basically made an entire. suit out of Super Mario Brothers cartridges. If you're out there, hello. I'm sure you listen to this. But he did that because at a GameStop or at an E.B. or Funkoland, they would be like maybe a quarter, maybe like a nickel. They're just like, get these out of here.

Cheap, cheap, cheap. Yeah. But I went on to GameStop's website. Probably not the best authority on video game prices, a vintage video game prices. It's $20. For Mario, Mario 1 is $20. That's about what it's selling for now. That's roughly accurate. To me, like... Complete inbox is like 60.

In 17, 16 years, it went from a nickel to $20 and inexplicably more expensive than Mario 3, which I assume there are less copies of in the world. Well, I mean, when I went to the first classic gaming expo, I was the weird kid buying all the NES games, right? And they were like, $1.5. And they're like, that's all junk. Like the Intellivision, Kaleikovision at 2600, that's worth that. And I'm like, fine, you keep collecting that. I'm going to keep grabbing these. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I kind of do collect on that note is not for a complete collection, just like, I will play this one day and it might be hard to find, is DS and PSP games, because whenever I go to a class and gaming convention, nobody wants them.

Even the rare ones are pretty cheap. Like, I got Dragon Quest 6 for, like, $18, and buying the Metal Gear Acid games because those aren't available digitally. Like, those are the things that I am picking up just because they're going to be hard to find. And I don't know if there will be a bubble for those, but there probably will be a small one at least. I mean, everything kind of goes, like N-64 has just started. to inflate in price over the past, like, a year or two. See, the thing that happened with N64 and Sega Saturn and, like, 3DO is that, I think, kind of bandwagoning on to the fact that, like, NES and Super Nintendo collecting started taking off,

people started branching out a little bit earlier than they ordinarily would have and started collecting things that were a little bit later than they would ordinarily be nostalgic for. And so, like, N64 shouldn't be going up as much as it is right now, but it is because people are collecting insiniscating. They're like, yeah, we'll collect other things too. Yeah, I mean, when I started Game Boy Works, I started buying in 64 games from the beginning, thinking I'm going to do this series, and I should get on this now while these are still affordable. And already, like, the prices have gone way up, Mario 64.

I think I paid like 30 bucks complete for it. Now you're going to pay twice that for Mario 64 complete. So, yeah, like these things happen, and it's terrifying. Yeah, well, you see people, I think we talked about this on a previous episode where, you know, NES or Super Nintendo seems impenetrable. So people are like, well, I'll start collecting something obscure that's cheaper

or seems attainable. And so that's, you know, when you saw TurboGraphics, like, TurboGraphics 16, I had one. I loved it. That's the reason I collected for it. But I don't know. Yeah, the rest. I don't know what's wrong with the rest of you. I mean, well, I had one. I had one.

A lot of it is like reading video game, reading electronic gaming monthly in the early 90s and seeing all these games that you just, you couldn't buy. Right. It's like you could not just, There were so many video game consoles, and they had so many really cool-looking games. But, like, you can actually justify getting all those consoles if you were a kid.

And so to go back and get them now and to kind of experience that stuff is fun. But, like, Sega Saturn is really doing well right now as far as its prices. But there's Saturn games out there, these weird, obscure garbage Sega Saturn games that are getting into the hundreds of dollars. Like, it's not just Panzer Dragoon saga. Like, there's a whole bunch of trash that's going up really high. I noticed on, I think it was Kotaku Chris. that had a story about the guy who collected every Wii game. And, like, the rarest Wii games are things you've never heard of.

They never want to play. Some Hello Kitty racing game or something. And there's, like, these two packs. Oh, no, there's a Hello Kitty racing game for Wii U. That's like a hundred bucks. But that's, people are just, people are dumb. People are dumb. People are dumb because they're spending too much money on things where, like, the printing

presses are still on. And this is how people collect, I mean, you know, they collected tons of copies of, like, oh, I have all these sealed copies of, Rez for PS2. They did another print run. And it was like, and then they all went down to 20 bucks. Yeah, when Devil's Third came out for a week year, it was underprinted.

So people were like, I'm going to buy three of these. Right. And then another pressing came out. Yeah. Those games are worth nothing, though. Right. No, Devil's Third is still worth like real price. Okay, but they only made so many.

Well, they didn't lose money. Right. Okay. Yeah. But like, but true. But, but it, absolutely. Like, if you're spending hundreds of dollars on Hello Kitty Garbage Racing for Wii, like, understand that like, like, GameStop knows.

that people are paying 100 bucks for this, so they could always arrange for another printing to be made and then everything goes down to the pooper. Yeah, there's that company in Canada. Video Game Quest Direct or something like that. Yeah, something like that. And they've had repressings of like Shinemagame Tensei games. Yeah, like PS2 stuff in the past couple of years.

The Yakuza PS2 games were just recently, but just this year or last year. And it's like, again, if the printing press is still on, do not spend $100 for that game. game. Yeah, it's one thing with cartridges. They could reprint rule of rows tomorrow, folks. Like they could do it.

It's possible. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think, yeah, speculation is always, it's going to blow up in people's faces and maybe deservedly so. I think there's some naivete there and people don't necessarily... If you bought stadium events for $800 10 years ago, it did not blow up on your face. No.

But there are exceptions. If you put that $800 into an IRA, 10 years ago will be a lot more now. So who is the greater fool yet? I've been trying to encourage people to, you know, there's only certain areas of video game collecting right now where the prices are spiraling up. And it's just like the hot things that everybody wants. And it's like try to think of something that you might want to collect

and get the enjoyment of collecting out of that it's in the video game space that not everybody else is collecting right now. and you may have a better time and spend less money at doing that. Like, I started collecting the issues of electronic games magazine, the first video game magazine, and that was, you know, it wasn't that bad at all. I mean, there was just plenty of stuff out there, and, you know, nobody else was really competing with me for it. Yeah. I mean, I found a lot of joy, I guess, in trying to find things like for the MSX, right?

And this was a console I never played as a kid, but I realized it was the Genesis for a lot of different series, and there was a lot of interesting people who had worked on MSX games. So I started looking for that. And, I mean, you're not going to a game convention here in the U.S. and you're going to find tons of MSX. No. But even in Japan, there's few stores. Yeah, I've only just started to see MSX games, like cartridges appear pretty commonly in Japan.

You know, and I think that that is because the stores in Japan or in Tokyo especially are running out of stock to put in their stores. and they're expanding now. And, like, even Super Potato, like, just opened up a big PC game corner. Sudu Gaya was just opened up as a big PC game section. You're starting to see it more and more. And I think they're branching out because they can't get as much volume as they have in the past because people keep buying it and it keeps leaving Japan.

So, Steve, you said you stopped being, like, a serious collector around 10 years ago. I'd say, I mean, yeah, I guess so. So you kind of got out before the bubble started to really expand in a lot of ways. Yeah. The interesting thing is that Chris and I, we did a retro game road show and we were doing prices on different games. And as I realized I started getting worse at it because I wasn't following prices as regularly. And then still, you know, we'll be sitting and talking about something. And Chris will say like, oh, this is worth this much money.

And I'll just kind of do a double take. Like, are you serious? Like, that is insanity. And maybe that makes it harder for me, or it makes it easier for me to sell the things that I know I'm not going to donate because it's like, that's a ridiculous price for whatever the, you know, some of the stuff is. You know, I got a lot of my stuff for way cheaper. I can see why someone would pay certain amounts money. And obviously when I was when I was looking for specific MSX titles or like FM towns or something like that, I think, oh, well, this is what the going rate is. and I'll pay it.

But it has been fascinating to, in a weird way, like sit back and watch this happen and observe it from a point where, okay, I'm not competing against anybody here so I can just see how everyone's reacting to the price is rising. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I try not to pay retail ever. I really try to. I mean, one of the best things to do is to, yeah, I mean, as Steve kind of talking about, like, buy somebody's collection, keep the stuff you want, sell the stuff you don't. But, like, even I'll just, I'm very patient.

There's very little besides, like, the, you know, as I was saying, the square PC games that I don't have, you know. Besides those, there's really nothing right now where I'm like, oh, I got to have it. I got to have it. I'm super patient. I'll just sit back and wait for the really good deal to come along. And even then, it's like, it's still that mentality of like, oh, I saved a bunch of money. It's like, no, you spent a bunch of money. and now you have a video game to show for us.

I'm really saving money. But, like, I really don't feel like the pressure of the high prices at this point because there's nothing I'm really, like, lusting after I have all the games that I really care about. And, yeah, I mean, there's just a few things where every now, and once you've been collecting for a while, you have that saved eBay search or two or three that you never get a hit on, ever, ever, ever. and that's how you learn what's really truly rare. That's how you learn what's just like,

it's not just expensive. It's like people like, oh, chrono trigger, it's rare. It's like, no, they made a lot of chrono triggers. They made a lot of Earthbound. They made a lot of Final Fantasy 3s. Like, there's tons of those. But what was one thing? Street Fighter for the IBM PC.

The original version that was published by Capcom and the artwork on it is the same artwork that was on like that prototype box for Street Fighter for the NES. It was like red-haired, you, you know, like, real, like, original Capcom art. And it looks beautiful. And it's really

the only version of, like, the game Street Fighter released with that, like, nice original Capcom art and that logo, and it was this PC game. And I had a save search on eBay for, I think, two years. And when one came up, I'm like, I'm winning this auction. Because this is, it's so

rare. But those are, like, really rare instances where I'm just like, I'm going to pay what this costs because I want to get it. Yeah, I mean, I You see a lot of people that act like collecting as a race. Like, how fast can I get these things? And this is, I've seen this countless times. The people who build their collections the fastest are the first people out.

Yep. Because I'm going to build an NES collection in a year. I have the bankroll to do it. Like, great. You're not going to have the same sort of, you just don't have the time into it, right? And, you know, I've been collecting for a very long time. So, like, yeah, some of the stuff means stuff to me. and I can see the value.

I've been tracking. There's that thrill of the hunt. But if you're kind of coming back victorious from a hunt every day or week or whatever, then it starts to lose that effect. So one more question before we take a break. We haven't really talked about, like, why have the prices ballooned like they have over the past 10 years? Like, what happened? YouTube.

Yeah, everybody says YouTube. And there is something to that. I mean, you know, okay, look. So prices are set by supply and demand, right? So if the supply of old games is not going down, which it really isn't appreciably, right, then it's demand. And so that means that demand for old video games has spiked. This is the right time for it to happen because it's people who grew up in the mid-1980s, turning 30, getting more disposable income. They will start collecting things from their childhood.

But okay, well, why haven't prices of He-Man figures exploded? You know, why haven't prices of, I don't know, other stuff like, you know, baseball cards? Because everybody saved those because everybody went out and bought, not so much in the early 80s, but like by the late 80s, early 90s, people were going out and buying every action figure that was on the pegs because they'd already seen this happen with Barbies and G.I. Joe's, the prices had gone up. They go out, they buy them, they put them away, mint in the package, and they save them. and then everybody saved them so they're worthless, right? But video games, people threw away. Video games, nobody looked at those and said, oh, these are going to be collectible someday.

Kids would get a video game, get Donkey Kong Jr. Math, rip the box in half, throw the box away, flip through the manual, lose the manual, play the game, and then the game would go in a landfill. And because nobody was actually going, nobody was saving them. And then when they hit yard sales, the first time these games hit yard sales,

like when NES games would hit yard sales, 90s and mid-90s, people still didn't think they'd be collectible, you know? And so there was no sense that that was the collectible of tomorrow. And so the supply went down, you know, considerably in that amount of time. And so that's what we're dealing with here. And everybody wants mint and box. Well, that was the stuff that got thrown away. And it's also just this emblematic collectible of that era.

And so it's just this perfect storm right now where all this stuff is going up. But then other stuff starts to go up. and then people start collecting other things that aren't going up in price because they're cheaper, and then the next thing you know, they're not cheaper anymore. I mean, Japanese games is the latest example of that. Everybody was like, oh, you know what? Super Famicom games, see, their boxes, they look so much nicer than Super Nintendo boxes. And Super Nintendo boxes are so expensive.

So I'm going to collect Japanese games. Well, you and your brother and your maiden Aunt Tilly all decided the exact same thing, and now all the Super Famicom boxes are jumping up, too. And now, like, Super Famicom Hagané, which used to be a $10 game, is now a $200 game because of the American collectors, you know, American, European worldwide collectors market coming in. So that's where we're at. Yay. And I admit I'm responsible for some of that in my own tiny way. Like, I recognized, oh, these games are impossibly expensive in the American versions, but I would like to own it.

So, yes, I'll hunt down Seyred Insetsu Lickl, the Japanese version of Little Sampson, and pay. I think $100 for it as opposed to $1,500. Or Captain Saver, the Japanese version of Powerblade 2, which I got for like $35. And now, that's not complete in box, but just the cartridge. But still, that cartridge now sells for more than 100. Yep.

So, yeah, I think I was just part of a wave writing the crest of people saying, I'm going to get one up on everyone else and all of a sudden everyone's one up. And now more people have decided that they want to do that. Yeah, my last trip to Japan, you know, I was there for about a month and a half. And it was just shocking to see how much some, like, magical chase on PC Engine. I always, that was a relatively high-priced game. Yeah, that was like $100,000. Yeah, 80, 100, 60 years ago.

Right. And now, you know, it's like four, five, $600, like, what? Like, in just a matter of a couple of years. But, I mean, you can see, you can see the demand everywhere you go. You can go to the Reddit, you know, the game collecting Reddit, and it's like, oh, there's 50,000 members. You know, you can look at all the various forms. and see how many members there are of places to discuss video games online. And it's just orders of magnitude higher than it used to be, right?

And so, like, Portland Retro Gaming Expo, that's kind of the big Retro Gaming Expo now. They just passed 10,000 attendees last year. And, I mean, literally when that show opens, and it's just this massive rush of thousands of people and the show floor is a total feeding frenzy, people buying stuff. And the funny thing is, I mean, the more you observe this, I mean, Bob, you kind of touched on this. But, like, there are a lot of people who seem economically insecure who also collect high-end video games. Wow. And it's like, I bought this.

It's $500. And then the next day, it's like, need to make rent selling this for $400. And it's like, there's a lot of stuff going on out there that's like, should you be doing this? You know? Yeah. But they get very excited about the exact same games and people really want to, like, they really want to own that $1,000 video game. And then it even becomes, because a lot of it is like, oh, well, this game is really expensive because it's the last game you need for the set, because stadium events, it's the last game you need. But then there's people who will buy stadium events and they don't have any of the other games.

You know, it just becomes, it becomes desirable because it's desirable, it comes valuable because it's valuable. It's very strange. You have to protect yourself. You have to make sure you're not spending money that's where it's going to actually get you in trouble. Please collect responsibly is what Chris is saying. Yeah, I really am. I don't want to see anybody, like, you know, lose the house because they got too into collecting video games. Yeah, to Chris's point, at a lot of these expos, you'll just see people, you know, they'll be stressing about the amount of cash that they're spending.

It's like, don't spend that money. Keep it in your pocket. I mean, it'll be fine. There's plenty of ways to play these games. But the other thing, a lot of people, I think a lot of people think the collecting market is a lot smaller than it is because you have people who are just like, oh, this game wouldn't be so expensive if not for all the eBay. sellers and scalpers and resellers and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And it's just like, the collecting market is so huge right now. And it's like when you, it's not just like the people at this convention or the number

of people on YouTube with big video game collections. There's so many, even back in the day, there were off the grid collectors. There were people who, they do not participate online. They just buy stuff. And like, they're this whole big invisible part of the market that you don't see. Are they Adam Smith's invisible hand? They are, yeah, yes, they are. And, like, I remember it's just somebody like at a, this is a few years ago now, at a Pax convention, and this guy was on this panel about video game collecting.

He's like, yes, I'm one of only 36 people in the world who are attempting to build a complete NES set. It's just like, what? 36, I mean 36,000? Yeah, exactly. It's like the market is gigantic. And this, you know, if I sell stuff, I'll go to an expo and sell things. It's like I see a lot of people from the game industry. You know what I mean?

I see people all the time that I know who come and just buy one game or two games. And it's like that network effect of all those people buying a few games here and there. And they wouldn't consider themselves collectors, but they've got massive piles of games. Yeah, there's just – but then everybody all at the same time is going to want to get out. And that's what's going to want to happen. It's going to kind of go in waves. Yeah. They just got to hold out until then.

What everybody should do is hold on to all your video games until the prices are the highest, the day before the prices go down and then sell them all on that day. That's a really easy thing to do. Yeah, totally. Well, the problem is that's what everybody thinks they're going to do. If you start questioning people, like, that's what they think is going to happen. And it's like, but do you see how that's not possible? Do you see how if everybody all decides this is the day to sell, then you lose a bunch of money because you can't sell it as fast? as you can.

Also, if you're just a buyer, there's a lot of people like, oh, I don't buy it. I never sell my old games. It's like, well, you have no experience then in like, how do you sell things? Right. Where do you, where are your customers? How are you going to sell this stuff? And that's when you end up selling the whole collection for like a tiny fraction of its value because you have no other choice.

It takes, unless you have some of the kind of networks I think that we have, it takes a long time to sell a collection. Yeah. I mean, I was fortunate that I did a lot of trading with other large collectors, right? And so that's a way to move a lot of games at the same time. But if you're trying to break up, like sell, for instance, a complete Saturn collection, that's really hard. And if you want to get, you know, what the quote quote, you know, market value is for every single thing. You're like, you have to, yeah, it's another level of commitment where it's like, okay, all right, my hobby for the next couple of years is going to be selling the.

this stuff off. Yeah. We see it. Sometimes people will post complete collections on eBay or whatever. It's like complete collection. And then you do the math and you're like, wait a minute, this is actually worth, you're asking more than the individual sum of its parts. I'm like, well, I put it in all this works. Like, no, no, no.

If you're selling it all at once, you're selling it at a discount because you're trying to unload everything. People don't understand that at all. Yeah. Let me tell you about Pete, who loved to play in the NHL, Pete played since he was playing in the NHL. Pete played since he was three and begged his mom to let him stay on the ice. Why, some nights, he even slept in his hockey skates. Pete practiced and practiced until one day.

When he was 47, Pete realized he just wasn't that good. So he threw his skates in the trash. But then he heard how Geico, proud partner of the NHL, could save him money on car insurance. So he switched and saved a bunch. So it all worked out. If there's one takeaway from this episode, it's that being a classic game collector gets insanely

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There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America. It was the next day that I found out from my parents when it happened. That my sister was killed. Each one is called a cold case. Sometimes you have to look really closely to find the evidence. Hey, I killed her. Damn it, I killed her. Cold case files, the podcast.

Garcia is walking into the home of a real monster. I was nervous. I realized what kind of person I was dealing with. It's a goosebumps moment. Download new episodes every Tuesday on the Podcast One app, or subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Podcasts or Podcasts.com. All right, and we're back, and I think it's time to go to the mailbag. Oh, yeah.

We get letters and letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now. All right, from John Michansky. Hi, Retronauts, as a younger, quote-unquote, 23-year-old person, just recently getting into the retro game scene, it's pretty challenging to get even the easy-to-find classics on a college budget. I mean, forget about getting a box copy of Little Samson. A loose Super Metroid can be a daunting purchase.

Thankfully, Virtual Console has alleviated some of these issues. I shouldn't have to tell you or your audience how different and special complete games are. Oh, well, at least I have this complete inbox copy of Yu-Gi-O, Dark Dual Stories for Game boy color that somebody practically forced on to me. Is that game like rare or valuable or something? No, I don't think so. I haven't followed Yu-Gi-O. So, John.

John, is it? You're 23. You have plenty of time left in your life as far as I know. I hope. Yeah. So take it slow. By the time, you know, it's quite frankly, by the time that you're in your 30s

and, you know, we're starting to build up what you earn and the amount of disposable income you can spend in old games. Like, it seems like a long time away from now, but, like, prices may be coming down, too. So, like, don't feel the need to build up that collection too fast right now. Just take it easy, take it slow. Wait for the good bargains to come to you, to enter into your life. Because they will.

There's tons of stuff out there. Like, you will get opportunities to buy things. Yeah, I mean, we didn't cover this in the first section, but just, like, ways of kind of finding methods of kind of mitigating the amount of money that you're spending or getting good deals and everything. But, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of hustle involved and, you know, getting lucky. But we've talked about this, don't rush, right? Just, you know, take it easy.

You don't need to own all these things. There's plenty of ways to play it, you know, with any, especially, you know, Super Metroid. We've got a SNS classic coming out. Yeah, and I would recommend people right now. I would say virtual console is a real kind of question mark. We don't know what Nintendo is going to be doing with classic games on Switch, maybe something good, maybe something completely forgettable and missing an opportunity.

But, you know, the possibility is there. I would say, I don't know, my kind of current mode of collecting for, you know, to keep not counting the stuff I'm doing for photography and archiving was basically to say, okay, these games are available on virtual console or some other service. I can play them anytime I want. I can buy them for a few dollars. That's fine. What I want to find is cartridges

for games that will never show up on there, like licensed games, something like GI Joe for NES, or something like Bionic Commando for NES, which for whatever reason, apparently Nintendo or Capcom has said that'll never come to a virtual console service. Uniracers. Yeah, Uniracers, which got killed by

Actually, I ended up buying all the Super FX and FX2 games on cartridge because none of them are really that expensive. And like until the Super Nies Classic, there was no way to get those. Yep. And, you know, I'm still not going to, they're not going to re-release. And you're not going to re-release Doom. Right. On, you know, the Super Nias version of Doom. So, like, those things are interesting to own.

But otherwise, you know, there's other ways to play stuff. And I also have to say that things like the NES Mini, which is extremely hackable and very easily hacked, if you can find one, to play almost any NES game. I don't think it supports like VRC6 games or some of the more advanced mappers. Like, that's one way to do it. It's not totally on the level, but... Who cares? Yeah, I mean... That's my philosophy.

Like, if you bootleg Little Samson, who are you hurting? they're not going to reissue that game. I think I would assume Square Inix owns the publishing rights to it because they absorb Taito. Right, right, right. They're not going to do anything with that. They don't care. They don't even know they own it. Yeah, and I will say, you don't even need to go as far as if you want to play a game and it's too expensive and it's out of print and the copyright is in who knows where and no one will profit from it.

There are so many great USB NES and SNS controllers to use just plug them into a PC. That's how I was playing Yoshi's Island for this weekend. I mean, it's a valid way to do it, I think. Yeah, another possibility for most 8-bit systems at this point is the analog NT Mini, which basically was designed to be hacked to be able to play a huge, it's like a dozen different systems. Some of them are pretty like Game King, really? I don't even know where you can find ROMs for that. But, you know, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear, like pretty much everything except links at this point.

That's on there and supported and very accurate, and you can do analog out to a CRT television, so you can get that kind of high fidelity classic experience. At some point, supposedly, they're going to be releasing cartridge adapters for other systems. That hasn't happened yet. I think the guy Keptris, Kevin Horton, kind of got distracted with other projects and has kind of put the 3D printing of those cartridge modules on hold. But that is something that will happen at some point. So if you want to do it authentically, you know, legitimately and actually own the cartridges,

that's one way to go about that. But it also supports games from ROMs off an SD card, which is a really handy way to do video capture for me. So, yeah, I don't want this episode to turn into like the Let's Go Pirate Games episode. But, I mean, I think, you know, it's pretty much moral gray area. Like, if you don't want to impoverish yourself to buy games that are out of print and that no one's profiting from except, you know, an eBay scalper, I'm not going to judge you for that. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of like serious discussion to be had about like the length of copyright, you know, especially when it was 20 years. Right, right, right. And he gets to the point where it's like, okay, this is never ever going to get legitimately published again.

But what does that mean? Yeah, I mean, I want, there's so much, there's so much you can do. Like, there's so much, so much has been learned about these old games by virtue of people delving into them and exploring them and, you know, millions of people getting to play them that say, that going out and saying, well, you can only, you can only play Little Samson if you want a cartridge. It's like, that's untenable. Like, that's kind of an untenable position. I want more people to be able to experience this kind of stuff, especially, you know. So, I mean, you know, game designers need to get inspired by this kind of stuff as well. So, here's another letter.

Hello, I'm Frankie Coleman. I have what I guess would be bragging to mix in with my woe and confusion. I started collecting older games around 2009, right before people they realized they could sell Demon's Crest for the price of an uninsured doctor's appointment, and I found it for $10 on Amazon. I somehow got an earthbound cartridge and both, Sega CD English Lunars for retail price around the same time. It made me think this stuff would be easy.

Then I started trying to find truly obscure things, specifically HyperIria for Super Famicom, based on my favorite anime Eria, which was in turn based on Zerum, and another called Majin-O, which I believe is called King of Demons in English. I've never even heard anyone talk about these games, but they cost Azuram's bounty and a Demon King's ransom,

respectively. I found a box copy of Hypereria once for $50 on eBay, and couldn't buy it until the next day, but by then it was gone. And I know whomever bought it is one of the four people trying to sell it themselves for hundreds. As for Maginot, I know it will never go down in price, so I just look at it every once in a while, wondering what it would be like to rule all demons. From RMS, I wanted to share my frustration with catching the collecting bug. My whole life, I've been building an NES collection.

I had about 200 NES games in the late 90s when Funco Land was literally giving NES stuff away. Yes, the employees gave me NES manuals and boxes for free. By 2010, I had around 400 NES games. I collected what I enjoyed playing and had a nice little display that I was proud of. Then somewhere around 2012, I noticed people were really starting to aggressively collect everything in terms of retro video games. This led me to meeting a lot of great friends and expanding my collecting goals and retro game obsession. The downside was that it started to get to a point where the value of the games and the deals I got became more important than the games themselves. A trophy game was a better purchase than something that might be more playable.

I think that is a discussion to be had, which is that. that the games that it cost a lot of money often are not the games that are worth a lot of money. It's... Right, because if the game was any good, they would have made more copies of it. Well, sometimes very good games are very expensive. Yeah. But sometimes very, very bad games are very expensive. Right.

But the very expensive, very good game is more of a rarity. You know, it's typically the stuff that's really expensive are real pieces of crap. I mean, you think about like Myriad 6 and 1, right, for NES. It's like you're paying for a sticker in a different box. And literally a piece of paper folded and fourths, right? Yeah, and it's important. What is Myriad 6 and 1 versus? It's Caltron 6 and 1.

Yeah. What is it? Oh, I see. Yeah, it literally is the Cal, you can see the Caltron, like, label underneath the Myriad label that's on top of it. And the thing is Myriad, they have serial numbers, and you want to have matching serial numbers between the cart and the box. Oh, my God. Yeah, you boot up the screen. It's this Caltron.

It's like, this is crazy. Why am I doing this? And I don't even know what a myriad goes for now. That's for Chris. I'm sure it's completely ridiculous. Thousands of dollars for, you know, if the serial number matches, whatever. Yeah. That's that myriad six and one will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

That is just completely ridiculous. Well, he mentions getting free instruction books and things from Funkoland. And I mean, that was for that whole company, that was part of the rules. Like if someone trades in a game, you only keep the cartridge. You don't keep the instruction manual. You don't keep the box. They would rarely have those things. But if they did, you would throw them away because they don't want those things on the shelves deteriorating.

They just want the cartridges. Yeah, I mean, so I worked at a chain called Video Game Exchange in Cleveland, Ohio, and that had pretty much the same thing. It's like, we didn't need the boxes at all. And stacks of them at all the different stores. So visit all the stores, give me all the boxes. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self, do not sell your games to Funco Land. You have gone to great pains to keep the boxes in good shape and keep the manuals, and they don't care. And what you are doing is stupid.

It is not worth the pittance that you are getting in return for these games. But it's too late. It's been 25 years. I've made the mistakes. Yeah, the last time I ever, ever traded in like old car. You know, when you're a kid or teenager, it's like, oh, you mean this game I don't want anymore? I can trade it in and get money to buy a new game.

Well, great. And when I stopped doing that, I remember, I think the last time I ever did this was I was trading in like Kirby's Pinball End and something else for credit at Electronics Boutique. to get earthbound. And I was almost going to trade them like my mint copies of these games. Like, wait a minute. I'm not going to get any more money for this box and manual. So why don't I just trade them in the loose game, keep the box and manual for Kirby's pinball in?

And then later on down the line, I'll just probably find a loose cartridge somewhere, which I, of course, did. And so I actually got out of it that one time. But there were other times when I had traded in stuff and they just say, okay, okay. And they throw the box away. And it's like in front of me. And it's just like, oh, geez. Yeah, the last time I did a store trade in was when I bought Chrono Trigger brand new. I took in Complete Final Fantasy 3 and traded that in.

And they gave me, like that bumped the price of Chrono Trigger from $90 to $60. Yeah, wow. $30 trading. That's not bad. Well, yeah, but I was like, you know what? I need this game, so I'm going to let it happen this one time, but that's it. I am not doing this again. Right.

Eventually, it's like this doesn't make any sense. I thought of another great retail story where it's, I don't know. I don't know how many of you guys have worked actual, like, big, big box retail or, like, big company retail, but a common thing would be, it reminds me of the scene in the Grapes of Wrath where it's just like they're dumping all of the good oranges into the river because they can't sell them. And they can't give them the people, of course. They can't give away free food. Or it would be like, as an employee your job, would be like, here are the things you need to destroy today. You can't take home the strategy guide. You need to rip it up. You're too good for our garbage. So I remember breaking games, like breaking games with a hammer just because they couldn't sell them. Yeah. Thanks a lot of games. I stole so much from them. What's that? in the good games? I don't remember. I had to bring a lot of... I had to break a lot of stuff. I imagine some of them

would probably be collectible today. Yeah. Yeah. There are people... I mean, there's like dumpster diving videos you can watch today where people like go through GameStop's garbage and they're just like,

oh, I hate that they like, and they pull stuff out of the garbage and they're like, hey, that they destroy the disc before they throw this stuff in the trash. It's like, yeah, because they don't want you going through their dumpster and midnight. They don't want their employees taking home garbage. Yeah, they don't want you either.

Right, anybody. They, you know, and actually, that brings up something interesting, which is that right now, you know, GameStop for the last couple of years has been running its retro game trade-in program, which they expanded out from a pilot program. It's been a success. And so GameStop now takes in, you know, a lot of games off a lot of consoles. The thing is, I know a lot of people who've bought Sega Saturn games from GameStop, and I don't think I've ever heard a story of somebody getting a Sega Saturn game with the box in manual. Like, it's all been. Those fragile boxes. The thing is...

Oh, that case, man. I speculate, I think, that GameStop may be throwing away Saturn boxes and animals on mass because they don't want to deal with it because they're always broken. I can't... I can't tell that my GameStop actually sells games. When I walk in, it's like, oh, Funko Pops until I get to the back of the store. Both the local game stops near me, they just, I just walked into both of those recently, and they took out all the Wii. They took out all the Wii U. It's gone.

And they don't have Amiobos actually. anymore either. Those aren't even video games. But yeah, they're replacing it, as you said, with like a wall of fungo-pops. Yeah, I was actually cleaning out their Wii stuff because they're just getting rid of it. And I got like Opuna for $8 and Lost in Shadow for $10 just because they're like, we don't care, get these out of here. Yeah, I was waiting for the, I'm waiting for like the big sale when they start selling them for like absolutely nothing when it's like buy one get too free on the Wii games. But yeah, but that's the time to collect.

That's the time to collect when everything. Yeah, I mean, every platform, there is that, like, it bottoms out and then it comes back up. That's how we got the complete N-Gauge collection. Right. Like, 25 cents apiece. Like, sure, why not? And how many of those have you played? Not many.

So you got your money's worth, 25 cents, yeah. This isn't about playing video games. It's about collecting rare paper. I'm really sorry. I wasn't even paying attention to the topic. Yeah, so back to this letter, just to finish it off really quickly. It was about a year ago that I realized I had more games than I really need. I had stacks of games in the corner of my bedroom due to lack of shelf space, games that I started to realize I bought for the wrong reasons.

I wasn't collecting for myself anymore. I'm slowly starting to solve the collection that I accumulated in the past five years back down to a maintainable level for my liking. I know everyone is different in what they want to collect, but it's important to know that you are collecting for reasons that makes sense to you. You are still going to be the same person whether you have 2,000 complete-in-box games in your basement or an Everdrive cartridge. Although one of those options might leave your wallet a little thinner. But good more. I'm going to be able to be. from Brave 20, Braves 2005.

Hi, collecting for NeoGeo AES is fascinating to me. Man. The price tag for many of these games is so high, $1,000 plus that I'm incredibly interested in reading some profiles of the people actively collecting today. A recent New Yorker article briefly looked into this world, but it didn't quite state my curiosity about the people willing and able to amass AES collections. I got out of AES. And the reason I got, well, the price was just absurd for those games, but I think the biggest thing for me was the amount of bootlegging that was happening in the AES world. And this is, what, like, mid-2000s-ish, I think. We started seeing it in earnest, and it's like, I can't tell what's going on here.

And there are fakes that you, it's really hard to tell. Or, you know, you get to open up cartridges and things like that. It's like, I don't want to get to that level. So I pulled out and then switched to, like, matching cereal. MVS. But, yeah, the AES collectors I know, they obviously have financially are generally well off. You kind of need to be. And it's hypercompetitive, right? Especially for the rare titles. I mean, there's only a couple of them. And then there was the whole thing with NeoGeo Freak and all that other stuff. It just got crazy. Yeah. Even back when the NeoGeo was

kind of like a live console weren't people doing the thing where they like would take the MVS cartridge and sneak or they would like they would like you know because the two systems were basically the same thing but priced differently. They would like pull shenanigans

that way wouldn't they? Yeah yeah there was basically you can convert from one to the other and you were seeing a lot of that there was I mean famously I think Neo GeoFrag is probably the most notorious that that whole thing someone could probably probably write a book about that drama, just like, hey, we officially own the license, let's shred these things, and then print out new inserts with, like, NeoGeo freak on them, and these are the official, like, releases for the game. And it's like, is that true? Is that not? You know, Japanese, U.S., it's just madness.

So back to the letter. I also think NeoGeo collecting is interesting since we're living through an S&K Renaissance right now between the arcade archives releases, new King of Fighters, and S&K guest character or character guest appearances in other games. Will these widespread digital releases and the release of AES flashcards drive down the market and crush the value of these collections, or will broader exposure only increase demand? Personally, I think it will be the latter. I think I'll just keep picking up MVS carts while they're still somewhat affordable. I feel like AES is the bubble if there's a bubble. Like, I think that there's a great, I mean, the amount of money that is getting tossed around on these things is absolutely astonishing. And the number of people who really care, I mean, it's so small. all, like, it's such a, it's like to care about the NeoGio.

It's like the same 100 people cannibalizing one another over and over again. Yeah, and the second that a few of those people decide to get out and sell, they don't want to have all this stuff anymore. I mean, that could be a big bubble. But it's really not going to affect anybody because there's only like 10 people, you know, buying these games. I mean, I would say actually, the bigger bubble is MBS because just like this guy, you know, everybody's like AES is so ridiculous. I'm going to go to MBS. And now you're, you know, people are spending $100 for like Samurai Showdown 2 or something. I mean, that's probably, probably, about half of that.

Yeah, it is a good game, but I think that, you know, I used to buy milk crates of MVS cards from arcade operators, right? There's tons of them. What is MVS versus AVS, though? I actually don't know this. AES is the home console? Yeah, and MVS is the arcade? It's the arcade. And the arcade, I guess, at time of release, the arcade carts were more expensive, but because arcade operators, you know, that's like the game stopped making money, like this card's worth nothing anymore.

There are a lot more of those. And traditionally, they were way cheaper. Like, you could buy games for, like, $10, $15. Or, like, I would be buying just, like, buying out operators. Like, well, now I have a million copies of Art of Fighting. In fact, I literally just bought a huge box of MVS stuff because it was so cheap. I couldn't pass it up. And then I started giving away cards because, like, I don't care.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what happens to that. And this does happen to you now where it's like you're not actively, like, collecting random stuff. But, like, you know when a deal is so good that it's like, I guess I'll buy it. Right. It's like, yeah, you know, there's a couple of things in here that I know other people would want that I have.

And so, yeah, MVS right now, you're seeing inflation and prices, and I don't think they're justified. I mean, there's no way you should spend any amount of money on World Heroes won. But, yeah, we'll see what happens. from Ben Allmark. I totally feel for you about how expensive the market has become in past years. And what used to be a fun and inexpensive hobby has now fallen into the preview of wealthy collectors and obnoxious YouTube personalities. Lately, I've been getting back into the MSX scene and even the prices for some of the most common and unwanted games are almost totally unreasonable.

Don't even get me started on some of the better titles, which are now well within the triple digit range, even for loose copies. trying to find a Lestay Space Monbo or Metal Gear 2 for a decent price is almost literally impossible now. MSX computers, especially MSX2+, and TurboR systems, also sell for astronomical prices, making the system very difficult and costly to get into nowadays. Even though the MSX has always been a bit pricey to collect for, it was never this bad nearly 10 years ago when I bought my first MSX system. Back then, I bought a loose copy of Salamander for $14, and now it sells for almost triple that. it's such a shame considering how many great games are on the platform.

You were kind of getting into that a little bit. Yeah, I actually didn't mention that earlier in the episode. I mean, I thought MSX was cool. Right. You're seeing all these games and maybe the first versions or sort of the best version of the time. Yeah, I'd certainly rather play Metal Gear on MSX than on NES. Yeah, absolutely. See, if you've been collecting for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you remember the Golden Age when, you know, if you were just a video,

video game collector, well, amassing every single Super Nintendo game was totally within your reach. That was a very easy thing to do. And now you look at it and it's like you're thinking back to the old reality, but this is the new reality. But people who enter collecting now, they're like, oh, well, obviously I'm never going to get every Super Nintendo game. Like they were already resigned to that reality. And so their happiness, how much do I have to spend and how much do I have to get for that

money to be happy is going to be different than yours because it's operating on a relative scale. And so, yeah, if you've been in it for a long time, the prices seem completely ridiculous. But if you're just getting into collecting now, it's not as nuts because you don't feel like you, you, like, deserve to own a copy of such and such a game. Right. And people will buy the Metal Gear's because it's Metal Gear, right? They might not even own an MSX system.

I don't want the game, right? Yeah, I bought Metal Gear Solid Snake for like $170 because it's like, oh, this is the only the actual, you know, this is the version of this game, and it was a good deal, and I kind of wanted to have it. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a game that has been in the showcase that do not ask about this showcase at Super Potato in

Okra for years. There's been like an unprice copy just sitting in there. That's what they have to do now, if they want to maintain a showcase full of really cool stuff, is they can't sell it, because they used to just be able to market really high and nobody would buy it, but then people started coming in and buying

it. Why, yes, I would like to pay $6,000. $1,000 for Gold Punch Out. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to put it on eBay and sell it for $8,000 to somebody in, you know, Europe who has way more, you know, money than cents. Yeah. So now they have to just have a not-for-sale cabinet with all that stuff in it. Yeah.

And, you know, MSX is cool. So give it a chance. Play it on an emulator. I mean, it's a PC anyway or a computer anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I have a lot. I have a lot. I have a couple few cool Japanese PC games because they're awesome.

They're in this, you know, they're in these. massive boxes with really nice artwork on them and it's like I have Strider for the X68,000 I have the Castlevania for the X68,000 I have those boxes are awesome because they're big snake yeah because they're huge they're big

plastic boxes and they're like those VHS cassette like the clamshell cases yeah yeah they're massive yeah they're so and like Street Fighter Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition for the X68 000 like it's just it's the most gorgeous version of Street Fighter 2 you've ever seen in your life big

a huge format box, big artwork. It's a plastic clamshell box. I'm not going to, I don't need the computer to pop the disc in and play it. I mean, I can always just download it in an emulator

and that's what I would do anyway. But I mean, there's just something really cool about like this gorgeous version of this game. It does get it back into that like mystical token thing. Yeah.

Yeah. There is something, you know, like I could have, I mean, it's even like with music. Like you could own an album that has nice art

on CD, and you get like a little postage stamp-sized version of that art, or you could get the vinyl record and not even listen to it, but just appreciate the fact that, oh, it's so nicely packaged. Yeah, this gatefold, this opens up. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there is something to be said for, like, I don't know, experiencing something you love or that you admire in, like, it's optimal form.

And, you know, even like the scans and the books that I'm putting together, that's not the optimal form of these games, but I'm hoping that it's close enough that you get like a little bit of that magic transferring to you through the pages. I'll see you. From Clint Kean, let me start off by saying, from a collector's perspective, I'm glad I got back into retro gaming during the 2004-2008 era. That's not to say I don't still play classic games today. It's just that my method of collecting at thrift stores and secondhand shops and on the wasteland that is now Craigslist have utilized.

I have yielded almost zero classic game halls since then. I lived in Canada from 2009 to 2012, and when I got back to the States, it seemed like all the classic games in the wild were gone, and craft beers were everywhere. Hey, that sounds pretty good. It's like taco trucks on every corner. I don't know for it.

When I was collecting heavily, a strange curse seemed to follow me around. Let's call it the great case on the outside, disappointment on the inside curse. At Goodwill, I was elated once to see a shank, pristine copy of Snatcher for Sega CD. It was empty. Although in my frustration, I nearly caused a scene,

they let me keep the empty husk of my once-happy find. And because I am cheap, the case remains empty to this day. But, geez, that case is probably worth a whole lot of money. Oh, yeah. It's probably a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. At a flea market once, I found the following from the same vendor, Panzer Dragoon saga, with discs one and four.

And a Burning Ranger's case with a Shining Force three discs. Oh, no. I mean, that's bad, but it's... It's not. It's not bad. No. It's like, it's a different kind of blessing. Yeah.

Okay. So, yeah, I'm not feeling too bad for this game. Still great fines in retrospect for the mere pocket change that I paid. But very sweet, nevertheless. Thanks and keep up the great podcast over the years. It has accompanied me on the hunt for Minian Expedition. Man, I used to, when I first moved here back in 2004, I mean, Jeremy, you know. Like, back in 2004, 2005, 2006, I would get up on a Saturday morning.

Like, not even Saturday morning. I'd roll out of bed at like 10. I remember your thrifting stories. Yeah. I'd go and, you know, have breakfast. And then about 11, I'd head out. And I would just meticulously hit every Goodwill Salvation Army and other thrift store, literally in the city of San Francisco.

Like, I would go from, I lived out in the Richmond District, which is, I'd head over to the sort of second Chinatown area, down to Hayton, Ashbury, up to the mission, downtown, Japan town, and then back home. I'd get back. I'd probably have lunch. at McDonald's, and I maybe even have dinner at Tommy's joint, you know what I mean? And then, like, come all the way back at the end of the day with two bags full to the brim of video games, consoles, you know, incredible stuff. And I would never, if I were to try to do that today, it would be like a complete waste

of a Saturday. It would not make any sense to do it. And so what I try to tell people is, if you aren't turning things up via the user, methods. The stuff is still out there, but you have to use a different method to go and find it. Yeah. And actually, you doing that prevented me from doing it. I was like, oh, I guess I won't do that because Chris is out there already. But the thing is, I would only go once every couple of weeks, maybe, maybe once a month I do something huge like that. So, I mean, there was so much stuff out there that other people were getting too. But the thing is, it's like the stuff would

just sit there. It would sit there and sit there and sit there and nobody would buy it. And so I would go do my monthly sweep of everything and just pick everything up that had been out there that month. Talking about finding games inside of other games, I have a kind of cool story. I think it was like 97 or 98. My friend in high school wanted to play Chrono Trigger again.

And you couldn't find a new copy. I guess a new copy probably would be like 80 bucks retail. So we're at the flea market and we go to the table with all the S&ES games and he asked for Chrone Trigger. He's like, oh, I think I might have that. And it's a, it's an S&ES cart of Shadow Run, but he put like a little tiny white label that says

Krono Trigger on. He's like, Chrono Trigger is on this game, and I'll sell T you for like $15. You have to trust me. And he did, because, you know, it was much cheaper than buying new Chrono Trigger. And we took it home, and Krono Trigger was on that cart. I guess someone maybe rented Krono Trigger. And I'd much rather have Shadow Run. Yeah.

Someone out there. Someone out there. Shadow Run is good, but Kroner Trigger is. You can't compare to Krono Trigger. But that was a pretty good deal, I think. And he didn't lie to us. Chrono Trigger was on a shadow run cart. I don't know how they did it.

Probably simple taking out the ROM and putting it back in the car. You just swap out the board. They probably rented Shadow Run. That's it. Yeah. No, they rented Chrono Trigger. They rented Chrono Trigger. Yeah.

And they returned Chrono Trigger with Shadow Run board inside it. Right. Yeah. I would want both of those, though. Somewhere out there, there is a child who thinks that Chrono Trigger is the most amazing. Cyberpunk and been a really dystopia game. I can't believe Beam Software has made such a great JRP. I was going to say Shadow Run is the best Beam.

software game. Prove me wrong, kids. It is. It's no back to the future. A curatorialama has such range. All right. Joel van der Veen says, I had a small collection of Atari Nintendo and Sega games when I was in my teens and began seriously collecting again seven years ago. I'm glad I began

when I did because some of the titles I have would be beyond my reach if I were just starting now. Adding to the struggle is the fact that I now live in rural Saskatchewan in a small town of about 1,100 people. This hinders my ability to go hunting for good deals, me mostly to what I find online and

an occasional trips to the city. Let's see. Yeah, my collection is still growing at a slower pace, but gradually I've come to accept that there are some games and systems I will likely never own. Happily, I have most of the games I want and can still afford to invest in the occasional rarity with some exceptions.

Yeah, I mean, if you live in a place where there's not a lot of inventory, it's like whenever you take trips, like don't, like, spend time in the city doing the things you're supposed to do in that city. But then you can also like try to scope out is there a couple stores I can visit. Save up all your money and go to a video game convention. And then, you know, buy stuff there.

And then, especially on the last day, start dealing with the vendors. Right, right, right. From a friend of the show Kevin Bunch, who is on the Splatterhouse panel. Hi, folks, I've been collecting since I was a kid buying Atari games in the 90s and have some mixed feelings about the bubbles. On one hand, I love how many people are discovering older games and are interested in them enough to seek them out. On the other, if I didn't grab something cheap for NES on Up, back in the 90s,

or early 2000s, it was probably way more expensive than I'm willing to deal with now. I keep hoping the 8-bit bubble will deflate or at least destabilize a bit, but in the interim I've been able to at least refocus on earlier system libraries affordably. Yeah, Kevin has a I think now complete Atari 7800

collection he was telling me, or he had like one game to go. So that's a good approach, is to find something with a finite set of games. Like maybe not virtual voice, and some of those games are now like $1,200. Yeah. But Atari 2,800 100 is a few dozen games.

Links is like 72 games. Right. Some of these are actually reasonable. Yeah. Well, links is 72 games, but when you get down to the last like 10 games and you start paying like tons of money for them. Oh, really? Are there some really expensive links games?

Yeah. Like I think Ninja Guide won for links and there's some others, I think. How about game.com? I assume everyone just threw all those games away. So they're all rare. I buy them and I throw them away. You're doing the world of service, Chris. But, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, when it comes to, like, people like, oh, I mean, are, you know, is PlayStation collecting going to get big?

And it's like, man, there's, there's too many PS1 games. Oh, yeah. Like, there's too many PS2 games. Like, there's just, there's over a thousand, I think, of each. And it's just like, who, like, I don't know if somebody's going to want, at least with NES. It's like, okay, well, it's only like 600 something games that you need to collect to get all the licensed NES games. It's like with when you start, when it's like, okay, now double that and that's the PS2 collection. It's like, that's a lot of games to buy.

And I wonder if people are going to go nuts trying to collect complete PS2 collections. And I think what's going to happen is it's going to be more like. So many games that it becomes unwieldy. Yeah. And it's so much crap, too. So, I mean, it's like I think we're going to start seeing people do subsets within places. It's like comic collectors don't want every comic, right? They pick out certain things and they collect that.

So, I mean, I think we're going to start seeing that. We see that with PC games as well. Like, nobody is trying to collect a complete PC game collection. How do you even determine that? Right. There's no, yeah, there's no guideline. Just buy every game that's available. No, no, I need my Acala Beth in a plastic bag.

Right, right, right. But that, of course, that's worth a buttload, right? Because some people, they'll do, you know, I want all the Sierra games. I want all the LucasArts games. I want all of the Ultima games and all that kind of stuff. Like, they'll do subsets essentially, but not like they won't try to get every PC game. And that may start happening more and more with, like, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2,

PS3, you know, Xbox, Xbox 360, trying to do subsets rather than to the whole thing. All right, I'm going to go do two more letters, and then we'll call it a show.

From friend of the show, Bill Mudron. I remember seeing loose NES games that used to go for literally two bucks at CD game exchange style shops just a decade ago. So when I started seeing those same loose games being marked up to 15 to 25 bucks online, I just thought it was the result of Internet Scalpers Gone Mad. At least until I visited the Portland Retro Gaming. Expo for the first time a few years ago and saw so many loose NES cartridges going for even more than 15 to

25 bucks with battered but boxed NES staples like Final Fantasy and Zelda 2 going for 50 to 80. Prices rose even higher at PGRE the next year, so I stopped looking and just, so I just stopped looking at buying old games altogether. Even back issues of Nintendo Power, which I found

at my first PGRE for 8 bucks a pop are now 20 to 35 on eBay, which man, that's just nuts. I feel bad for diehard collectors of this stuff, especially folks who may have only been partway through building a complete retro gaming collection when the AVGN style YouTube craze seem to tip retro gaming markets boat into an ocean of sad farts. If you've been collecting for a long time,

it's like, yeah, it's like, oh, I've been collecting for 10 years, 15 years, and now these prices are insane. But if you've really been collecting smartly that entire time, you probably have much more of a network, you know what I mean? You probably a little bit more comfortable, Well, like, I don't know, buying out somebody's collection or something like that. Like, you're just a lot smarter about it. So you're in a better position to get better deals, even though the prices have gone up

because you just have more opportunities and more places to get things and you understand how to get things and how to find deals and who to talk to. And so, I mean, it's, yeah, like, you know, it's kind of annoying that, like, you know, I kind of started collecting games and then everybody else decided to do the same thing. And then now it's like it's harder to get this stuff. But at the same time, I don't know. I just have more opportunities to buy things than somebody who decides today I'm going to start collecting games. All right.

Final letter from Matthew Means. I'll never forget hearing the stories from my friend who used to work at a regional video game store of the team of slavily creepozoids who would travel the state cleaning out every goodwill, thrift shop, and a state sale like clockwork, and finish their day by swaggering in to brag about their hall and the money they would make, marking it up on eBay. I suppose that's capitalism, but every time I wander into a second-hand shop, with the foolish notion that I might actually discover a magical copy of a long-sought NES title, I leave empty-handed and imagine those guys must have beat me to it again. Is that the faint odor of Doritos and Mountain Dew wafting in from the parking lot?

Somewhere Bubble Bobble 2 is locked in the clammy fist of a basement dwelling, neck-bearded man-child who is happy to wait as long as it takes, holding our collector's hearts hostage until we suck up our pride and pay the ransom. I say wait for the estate sale. They're going to die soon based on their diet. They don't sound healthy. Well, the thing is you can't, and I think a lot of people get this wrong, you cannot sell something for more than people are willing to pay for it. Like, it's not, if the four of us together decided to take all of Steve's money and invest it into every piece of Alf paraphernalia that we could possibly get our hands on.

I'm like, and probably get by Alf. To choke, to squeeze the Alf collectors for, it's like. like, oh, are you an Alf collector? Well, we just bought all of the Alf puppets. So now you have to pay us $1,000 each. It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work because they'd just be like, no. So you cannot like buy something and then raise the price of it by virtue of you owning it.

And so there's, yeah, I mean, basically like, it's, that's not it. It's the sheer demand for all this stuff. Although you say that, but there is that famous anecdote about someone like going in and buying up every copy of a game on eBay. Yeah, that's right. And just like taking the game entirely off the market and then inflating the price. And apparently, like, that's not an isolated incident.

So it was Rampart for the Game Boy. It was a Rampart cartridge for Game Boy. Yeah, the guy spiked the demand for the game. There was no demand. And then suddenly, every copy on eBay started selling. It's like, yeah, the demand went up. And so then if the guy bought it for $10, the next copy would get listed for $11, and then he would buy it.

Then you know what happened? Then he stopped buying him because he stopped his little experiment. And now he's stuck with a whole bunch of copies of Rampart for the Game Boy. Really good thought there. And now the prices come back down to five bucks because the demand was artificial and it's all gone now. So that's what happens. But, yeah, I mean, that's not an isolated incident. I know Hadrian Rea was, I've seen him talk about Little Samson.

I think it was Flintstones. It was Flintstones. Okay. That one had someone. speculating, I think they bought like 10 or 12 copies of it. But, yeah, I think, you know, some of these games are, are victim of

people who are trying to manipulate the market for their own ends. I don't know. You can try. Well, the problem is you can try to do it, but then as soon as you want to start selling, you have all this supply, and you're going to start reintroducing the supply, and you're not going to make back the money that you think you're going to, because the more copies you start putting it onto the market, the less and less money they're worth.

So it doesn't, nobody is bigger than the market. Like, you essentially can't. I know a lot of people disagree, but like you, you cannot manipulate the market in such a way. If you're debiers and you own all the diamond mines, well, sure. You can trickle out exactly as many diamonds as you want to. But then somebody comes in and breaks up your monopoly, first of all. And then, but you can't, unless you literally control all the supply, you can't. You can't do it.

And then once the price goes up, then that also introduces new sales. sellers, right, who have reached the threshold where I'm like, oh, okay, I'll sell it for that. Right. And so you're not just competing against yourself. You're competing against everybody else who decides to sell. Right. All right. Well, hopefully you have enjoyed this lesson in basic economics, if you will. But I do think that is all the time we have. So hopefully you will find this episode has been an interesting discussion. It's a lot more freeform than usual. but I don't know I've enjoyed having it

it's interesting to get different perspectives and I know this is something that you know just based on the volume of letters we got I didn't read all the letters by any means it's something that people think about a lot and are frustrated about a lot and you know it's hard to know what the future holds for

classic video game pricing some prices will probably keep going up maybe not all of them will it's impossible to say yet that's the magic of the future We don't know what's going to happen. But basically, I think the best thing to come out of this was Chris's advice that, you know, you have time. Unless you know, know that your life ends in a few weeks, in which case I'm very sorry you should be doing something other than collecting video games.

Otherwise, like, take it slowly. You know, video games, I realize that, you know, there is the appeal of acquisition and collecting and owning. But sometimes, you know, wanting is, what is this, the phrase, having a thing is not so desirable as wanting it or something like that. Sure. Yeah, the thrill of the chase, right? But build a relationship with these games. Like, if you, I don't know, do whatever you want. It's your money.

It's fine. I say give your money to us before you spend any money on lousy video games. I guess what I'm saying is exercise, good common sense. That's the Retronauts Two Bits for the Week. Anyway, guys, tell us about yourselves. Where can we find you on the Internet? I'm Stephen P. Lin on Twitter, and you can find me on there. And also the...

Oh, yeah, the Video Game History Foundation, GameHistory.org. We are still building up. In fact, Frank just posted a couple of pictures from our second trip to Game Informer. Oh, cool. You guys have been mining that place. Yeah. He has. Yeah, he has.

I mean, I don't have time, unfortunately, to follow him to Minnesota, but you know, these industrial devices that basically rip the contents of thousands, tens of thousands of CDs and disks. So tons of work is coming out. I realize it's sort of not the sexiest thing because a lot of it's, like, we need to process a lot of it. But thanks to everybody who's chipped in, it's really been helpful. And we're getting to these archives before they go away. Yeah, Frank is the Indiana Jones video games. But, you know, in the sense that 99% of Indiana Jones's life was, you know, working in dark university libraries, you know what I mean. And then he'd only go on, you know, tomb raiding adventures for like, you know, a week or two at a time, basically.

The rest of it was just drudgery. So Frank is deep, deep in the drudgery right now. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler. I'm the Marcus Brody of video games. The pen you see is mightier than the sword. Coboon Heat on Twitter, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T. Depending on when this episode comes out, my new book might actually be out by then because there's a long lead time on these Retronauts things.

But it's called Final Fantasy 5, and it's from Boss Fight Books, and it's about the game Final Fantasy 5, which you might know from Retronauts. The episode we did on Final Fantasy 5. Yeah, that episode. Or possibly you just might know about it because it's a really good video game. But it should be out in October, so please read it. If you like this podcast, you will like that book. Cool.

I will like the book, Chris. I'm waiting for it. I'm Bob Mackey, by the way. I just wanted to say before we leave, the things you own end up owning you. That's a quote from Toy Story, by the way. And remember, those toys did owns send in the end, so I think that's true. He got totally owned. He got owned completely. I thought you guys would laugh harder at then. I'm sorry. You can find me on Twitter

at Bob Servo. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons. You can find that every Wednesday at TalkingSimpsons.com and we have a Patreon. That's right. I've cut the shackles of modern employment. I'm now funded by all my listeners from Retronauts and Talking Simpsons. If you go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

You can find a ton of bonus content if you sign up. We're going to be doing, actually, by the time this comes out, we'll be doing Talking Critic, and that is a chronological exploration of the show The Critic, only on our Patreon. So that's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, Jeremy Parrish is me. And you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com, where I'm spending all my time these days. Retronauts itself, of course, you can find at Retronauts.com, which is a proper big boy website now. It's very exciting.

We're on iTunes or on Podcast One on the Podcast One app. Retronauts is also supported through Patreon, Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And germane to this episode, there's also my video project, which I don't really pimp that heavily, but that is what allows me to acquire a complete inbox games and document them and photograph them and scan them and make videos about them. And that is patreon.com slash games spite. Yes, that's right. Just like my Twitter handle. So if you want to contribute to that, you will be.

helping me to acquire these things and preserve them in some capacity, some token version of them for future generations. And we all care about future generations. So do it for the kids. Anyway, so

I hope you have enjoyed this episode. We'll be back with something probably not quite as heavy in a week. So please look forward to it. Thank you. Geico presents eyewitness interviews with inanimate objects. This is Brian Bruno live on the scene of a recent windstorm here to describe the event, a chest of drawers. There's a storm howling outside, so I thought I'd stay in and watch a rom-com.

Five minutes into the flick, a tree branch slams through the window. Were you hurt? I just got a scratch on my chest. Your chest of drawers can't help you in a windstorm, but the Geico Insurance Agency can help you get covered for personal property damage. Call Geico to see how affordable homeowners insurance can be. The Mueller Report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute.

President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.