Why High Retro-Game Prices Are Here To Stay.
An Unforseen Glitch.
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It’s almost impossible to predict what the value of any pop-cultural-artifact will be long after they’ve reached their prime. Some cultural fads like Beanie Babies might promise skyrocketing returns in future decades while others like Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering cards end up not only listed for outrageous prices more than twenty years after their release but are also responsible for retail stores having trouble keeping modern sets of cards on the shelves.
The prices of pop-cultural-zeniths ebb and flow as the years roll by…but the curious case of retro-game-prices is the latest piece in the pop-culture puzzle that has sent video-game-collectors scurrying to buy or sell their long-held-memories.
What used to be a niche-hobby enjoyed by both casual players and hardcore hobbyists has spiraled into a marketplace featuring prices that gamers could only dream of.
Imagine traveling back in time twenty years, going to your local game shop, and explaining to the sales clerk that walls of PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Dreamcast games were two decades away from doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling their price values.
Imagine going back even further to the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, or Sega Saturn, and explaining that certain cartridges would be worth three to five times more than the console itself…even if the box has been opened and thrown away. Even certain games on Nintendo handhelds — like the Gameboy line and its successors — have not been immune to the price-rocket of the past year and a half.
While a lot of game consoles and their libraries have enjoyed rising prices under a multi-decade-slow-cooker of nostalgia, lack of being re-released, and cult-status, we can attribute the rising prices of old game libraries to three major factors:
1. The advent of the Covid-19 Pandemic which had millions of people turning to indoor recreation.
2. The lack of availability regarding new consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, forcing gamers to continue playing current systems — or look to older ones out of curiosity.
3. The coalescence of a classic video game ‘canon’ containing games with cultural prestige, a novel experience that can’t be replicated with other games, or are simply hard to find given the context of their release.
What this means is that certain games considered to be of high quality but can only be (legally) accessed or played on their respective console are often susceptible to this phenomena more than others. This explains why games such as Hagane: The Final Conflict, Panzer Dragoon Saga, or The Misadventures of Tron Bonne have emerged from relative obscurity only to claim their place as sought-after collectors items worth hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars.
What is perhaps more interesting than the prices themselves are the fact that these prices don’t apply to every game released for older consoles; the vast majority of older games can still be bought for less than twenty dollars across the board. Like the above points mentioned, taking a scroll through a price guide or reselling websites reveal a pattern in brand and genre.
The Power of Brand and Story.
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In particular, two patterns have emerged:
1. A lot of games from established franchises (Super Mario, Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.) tend to fetch higher prices than their non-major-franchise counterparts. If the games haven’t been re-released in a format that is easily accessible to the current gaming generation, then those prices will usually be even higher.
2. Games that focus on telling an in-depth story or giving players a novel experience in terms of gameplay will also be priced higher. Role-Playing-Games and Survival Horror games tend to fall into this category more so than Puzzle, Shooter, or Racing games. If a game didn’t have a particularly successful launch in the United States and sold relatively few copies before being replaced, the prices of those games will climb even more.
At the time of this writing, a quick look at the prices for the entire Playstation One and Playstation 2 catalogue, the three major Sega systems, multiple Nintendo consoles (even the handhelds) also follow this pattern too, although a lot of the older systems from the 1980’s and 1990’s have higher values on the basis of some games simply not selling a lot of copies, having limited runs, or even being hard to find.
The author of this piece distinctly remembers using his Christmas money to buy a new-in-box Ice-Blue Nintendo 64 for $100. Today, simply having the console and the controller can net around $200 in value without the box; limited editions of other older consoles — like the GameCube — can fetch even more extravagant prices.
The Collective Gamers.
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There are a lot of links in this article to price charts that allow you to look at a game’s price history going all the way back to the late 2000’s.
What makes the charts interesting is that a lot of games already ,had a slow and steady rise throughout the past decade-and-a-half. If you check an older game’s price history, most remain even-keel around their respective market value. Sports games, puzzle games, racing games, and shooters not connected to noteworthy brands tend to depreciate the fastest.
Games related to 21st-Century movies, television shows, or brands unrelated to gaming also tend to remain cheap and unchanged. Games readily available on a multitude of modern consoles (or modern personal computers) are traditionally low-priced.
As the paragraphs above mentioned, high-price games tend to be related to brands or IP’s that are unique to the world of gaming specifically. They also tend to be ones that possess a roulette wheel of emotions, had limited releases in the Western Hemisphere, or are considered a high-quality-gaming-experience but due to a lack of re-releases, are only available on one console.
Survival Horror and Role-Playing-Games tend to fall into this category across a broad spectrum of consoles for Nintendo, Sony, and Sega. The occasional rare fighting game will also make its presence known if the market decides it belongs.
And what market decides what games deserve what value?
Usually, gamers themselves.
The past three decades have developed a linked cultural consciousness surrounding video games that have helped determine what games are considered classics or must-plays. Go onto any gaming forum or website where gamers congregate and certain titles from certain eras keep popping up. Just as it is with books, film, and music, games are at the point now where they have their own War and Peace, Citizen Kane, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The difference with games is that there is usually a specific hardware required to play them. Due to the wonders of the modern printing press (and digital reading libraries) you can read the works of Dostoevsky almost anywhere in a multitude of languages…
…but playing older games may require you to jump through a few more hoops.
The Gaming Collectors.
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On the other hand, the sudden explosion of interest in old games might have less to do with a niche-cultural-consciousness gaining mainstream sentience as it does the simple factor of 1980’s and 1990’s pop-cultural-nostalgia becoming a mainstream sensibility. TV shows like Stranger Things (Netflix), The Goldbergs (ABC), The Americans (FX), and movies like Mid-90’s (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), and even the latest Transformers film Bumblebee (2018) have all exuded period detail for the respective decades they’re set in.
In 2009, a loose copy of Die Hard for the NES could be bought for around $7 to $24 depending on the month. In August of 2021, you can expect to pay around $200. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody woke up last year and realized that an almost thirty-year-old game was severely undervalued; the film Die Hard continuing to gain respect long after its 1988 release — as well as the coincidental nostalgia for 1980’s products — likely has a hand in making it an expensive item. By 2016, the game’s price had already breached $100 so the proverbial cat was already out of the bag regarding the game’s possible long-term-value. The game being halfway-decent probably helped matters as well.
This might explain why of some older games related to popular movies and cult-television shows end up rising exponentially as the decades roll by. For people who prefer to collect merchandise of a particular brand or era, the value a game has in terms of fun factor might be less important than the pop-cultural-cache a particular game might hold.
If Mario and Zelda’s brand recognition and promise of consistent quality is enough to launch some of their games beyond what they initially sold for, then the touchstones of a bygone era might promise a similar value to those who don’t necessarily care about the gameplay. What the game represents might be more important than how the game plays.
And speaking of playing….
An Inevitable Crash?
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Other collecting mainstays like stamps or sports cards may have lost their value due to market oversaturation or a general decline of public interest. Cards and merchandise autographed by famous players will still hold their value throughout the decades but a unique factor in video games is that they are interactive.
This is especially important for games (like the aforementioned Role-Playing-Games and Survival Horror) whose inherent value rests on having players experience emotions that don’t necessarily crop up in other interactive genres. These emotions are unique to the story and scenarios that are present in these games…and these can only be experienced firsthand if the game is in working condition.
Some may protest that you can go to YouTube and watch playthroughs of older games without having to buy them. The problem remains that not everybody plays scenario-driven games in the same way. For games that offer customization in terms of player-choice, inventory, skills to learn, character progression, or exploration, many scenario-driven experiences are unique to the player who crafts it. Even if games are uploaded on YouTube, it only illustrates one way to play the game.
If certain valuable game releases remain frozen in their respective time-periods, it puts an added burden on the hardware to be able to allow the player to experience them. Legal re-releases of older games for modern consoles (such as those available on the Nintendo E-Shop and Playstation Store) help to drive down prices but it still puts a burden on companies to continue to allow those games to be downloaded digitally — license agreements and availability notwithstanding.
Here’s an example: Valkyrie Profile might have been around $50 when it was released for the original Playstation but the option to buy a digital copy on the Playstation 3 store did little to prevent its meteoric rise throughout the years. Being taken off resulted in a peak price of nearly $400 in July of 2021…for a used game and case. (As of the time of this writing, it has since cooled off but still remains over $300).
Will Valkyrie profile still be valuable two more decades from now?
Will the condition of the case and game even matter?
What happens if a physical copy of Valkyrie Profile corrodes over time and can no longer be played?
What if the game is never digitally re-released and finding functional Playstation consoles (or the backwards-compatible Playstation 2 and Playstation 3) that are able to play the game also become harder to find as the decades roll on?
Will the game still be considered worthy of paying hundreds of dollars?
Is the item itself considered valuable or is the experience the game promises more valuable?
The PlayStation 5 is rumored to reach mass-availability sometime in 2022. Microsoft is trying to figure out how to get people to play the games they spent years developing. If the consoles become readily available for retailers and consumers to sell, will this take the financial heat off older consoles?
Possibly.
It’s also possible that since the market has decided that a sealed copy of the original Legend of Zelda is worth $870,000 the Box of used games Pandora had in her attic has already been opened. It might take a monumental change to the gaming landscape to invoke a market crash where almost nothing becomes valuable. Re-releases of older games on PC that were once proprietary with their respective systems would be a possible suspect. Gaming falling out of popularity with mainstream audiences could also be another — however unlikely this sounds now.
At the end of the day, the most interesting factor in all of this is the fact that video games have now reached a zenith where they’re considered noteworthy collectibles beyond a niche. As to whether or not they have staying power depends on the general public’s perception of certain titles as well as the general public’s ability to play those titles. Long-time-gamers can simply bask in the glory of seeing their hobby being admitted to a financial-respect once reserved for other pop-culture-elements.
For now — at least — the stormy prices of retro-gaming-madness are here to stay.
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