the creator of earthworm jim was on twitter being an asshat today, so i thought hey maybe i can give him a mediocre burn by sending him a pic of a smashed up copy of his game. decided to check ebay for prices first just in case and holy fucking shit the sega cd version is going for over $150 what in the fuck. i mean i picked it up at a used game store for like $3 back in the day what the fuck are collectors doing jesus christ
Feels like at this point, everything from two generations back and further is "rare." Prices get jacked the hell up on just about everything. It's almost as if someone just decided one day in the late 2000s that suddenly everything should be super-expensive and everyone else immediately raised the prices up. But hey, I can't complain-- I've been able to sell stuff I paid a few bucks for for as high as $300-$400. Funded my desktop PC purchase last year by selling a handful of titles.
I worked at a used/import game store from 1996-2005 and so much of the stuff that goes for high amounts was always in stock, for decent or low prices. Fast forward a few years after that and suddenly games that nobody gave two shits about and never bought, like Hagane on SNES, are crazy high-priced. The local Best Buy used to have stacks of unsold copies of Earthbound for $10, for YEARS, sitting there. I remember picking up Snatcher for $9 used in the late 90s and even some NeoGeo stuff wasn't as insane as it became until collectors deemed everything for it super-rare and prices skyrocketed.
yeah i bought tons of stuff in the late 90s and early 00s especially bc everything was dirt cheap. you'd go to a flea market or garage sale and you were guaranteed to run across someone's old game collection, just like everyone had an old record collection or whatever. stuff started getting really cutthroat after awhile tho, especially after craiglist. i knew a guy who'd flip stuff for a living and he'd always talk about how ruthless people would get regarding videogames, even calling up people that advertised games at upcoming garage sales and bugging them until the person would allow them to check out the games early. it wouldn't surprise me if a ton of old games are now mostly in the hands of resellers; that's the only way charging $50 for a common loose nes game would make sense to me.
this and the news about the $2 million Wu Tang album guy made me look up two games that are actually rare
from what I can tell, nobody seems to be selling a copy of Thrill Kill of which I think there's only review copies in the wild? but i've seen them before and they were up around $300+
one guy is trying to sell the GameStop shelf preorder case for NBA Elite 11 for $250, 11 are watching this item on ebay
another guy is trying to sell the case for the actual game for $3000, and the disc for $3600, 88* are watching the disc
iirc, there are only three verified retail copies of Elite 11 in the wild; and the one guy who posted a bunch of youtube videos of the game posted on another forum and said he'd never sell it when another forum member offered him $500 immediately
guy i talked to from EA years ago said he thought they got all the review copies back and/or they were just digital...so theoretically i guess there could be a 360 out there sitting in a closet at Game Informer or somebody with a press version on the hard drive
*pewdiepie fans confirmed