![]() But what commercially released titles for Nintendo's 8-bit masterstroke are being exchanged for big money today? Out of reach unless you're rich and stupid, the last one sold this January for a cool $99, 902 - the lucky collector netting himself a bad game with no label. Yeah, that Nintendo World Championships competition cartridge, we all know the story. ![]() That finding these often-lesser western equivalents in semi-decent condition is a mission unto itself, values have gone through the roof.Īll told if you're interested in beginning a collection of rare and desirable games, you've come at a really bad time. In recent years interest in buying back PAL and US versions of classic games has increased exponentially, despite often being plagued with dreadful packaging, censorship, and in the case of Europe, poor 50hz ports. This mass software expatriation has sent Japan's domestic prices skyrocketing, reducing it from the shopping mecca it once was to a cluster of boutiques best kept at arms length. Of course anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to eBay knows that it's a hive of scum and villainy, ably positioned sellers sucking everything out of Japan's Akihabara and Yahoo Auctions and demanding huge profit margins in resale to western pundits. In October 2014 a beaten up copy with no manual ended for £240 in an eBay auction, while complete copies - like mine once was - have reached £500 even in sat-on condition. ![]() Indeed, in the early 90s I picked up a copy of Whirlo for Super Nintendo, finished it and promptly trading it in for something else, such were the budgetary constraints of a 12-year-old. And I don't mean because impending war and dwindling resources has likely influenced people's perceptions of what constitutes a valuable commodity - clean water and tinned spam suddenly more desirable than say, a Sega Saturn CD - but because the video game collector market is a volatile wellspring of peaks and troughs, where what's worthless today is gold tomorrow, and vice versa. If you end up stumbling on this piece half a decade post publication, the world on a possible precipice of nuclear holocaust thanks to a calamitous Republican tailspin, the information in this article will probably be grossly out of date. Only twenty-five years ago we were still jamming fiddly cartridges into front-loading Nintendo Systems and impatiently tearing packaging and manuals asunder - embellishments that now constitute the vast majority of a game's worth. One could argue it took comic books a lot longer than it's taken video games to go from throwaway kids product to desirable collector's item. We've since updated the list with more formats and amended some of the details. Editor's note: This article was originally published last year under the title Super Bank Breakers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |