Damn Collectors

[Elusive]

pushing up prices.

Am I the only person ever to think collecting games is a waste of time and money?

Think about it. In these days of emulation, is the 'nostalgia' behind gaming systems really that important? Why bother dragging the Mega Drive out of the cupboard, hooking it up and blowing into the cart slot and the cartridge when you can press the power button on your laptop, plug in a Saturn USB pad, boot Kega Fusion (TV-out optional) and play a game that goes for £50+ on eBay?

Probector? Got ROM, played it. Snatcher? CD-R version, played it, loved it. Same goes for Megaman: The Wily Wars. The list goes on. What exactly are you missing out on by not having a few scraps of paper?

As some games were produced in limited quanitities for one reason or another, suddenly they're 'RARE', and as such, apparently worth paying big cash for. Because you can have something few other people can't have. One guy manages to sell his copy of Ristar for £20, suddenly all the others are leaping to £15 as 'REARE BOXED MINT' [sic].

And that's if you're playing them. What's even crazier is collecting sealed mint condition games. Why pay £60 for a copy of Radiant Silvergun when you can pay £75 for a sealed copy? Then, when your heart's stopped thudding at being the bidwar victor, you can look forward to the possibility of leaving it on a shelf in perfect condition. Where it's of use as an ornament, not a video game.

Ugh.

It's not even as if you can treat them as 'investments', the new collector buzzword. Video games are glorified toys. Would you buy an item on the offchance it might be worth more later on? You're running a great risk, if you do. How long is it magnetic data lasts for, again? Two, two-and-a-half decades? Bitrot, the collector's nightmare.

The words 'retro', 'rare' and 'mint' are all worthless now. People, in their craze to complete their boxed complete collection, have forgotten that games can occasionally be taken out of their packaging and enjoyed. Like the creators would have wanted.

Accept video games as that - video games. Not works of art, not epic masterpieces, things to derive mindless escapism from.



Or maybe I'm deliberately playing Devil's Advocate to wind you all up XD

[Drixxel]

Ehh, there are collectors for every product you can possibly imagine. Collecting does not have to be about the potential for a return-on-investment at a later date. Sure, there is a deeply-routed materialistic fervor behind any sort of collection, and I don't deny having a certain amount of pride in my personal cartridge army, but I myself buy games in order to play them. It's a functional collection, and on top of that there is no better way to enjoy a game other than to play it with the controller it was designed for on the console that made it possible in the first place. That is exactly how the developer intended.

I very much dig emulation, but it's not a perfect substitute for the real thing. Gaming to me is more than disembodied lines of code running on a hardware simulation.

[Dartagnan1083]

MP3s can cover your music needs forever.
But some people still keep Rooms full of Turntables and Vynls.

Comic books can be scanned or redone,
but Spiderman #1 is still worth around $34k.


Oh, and you didn't exagerate the sealed Radiant Silvergun enough. Make the only difference the Spine-Card.

Besides. Nobody charges less than $300 for a sealed Silvergun :P

[David J.]

I don't think most games released today will have a high value years from now. So many copies are pressed and sold. Maybe a few niche titles will, but that's a small number. Due to knowledge of rarity nowadays there will be thousands of copies of game X and Y, and they will be worth the same, or less than what we paid for them.

Games are for playing with. They're not investments. If you get lucky and make money on them, that's great. But don't count on it and don't compare them with real world trade goods.

If you want fast money, buy stocks and CD's. I'm doing that to fund a new car, and with in a year, I have a nice down payment if I financed, or the required downpayment on a lease and payments for a year. Guess what I want to do. :)

[j_factor]

Collecting doesn't necessarily involve buying sealed games or only rare games or anything like that. Just accumulating games is collecting; you could collect Genesis sports games or shovelware NES carts, and it would still be collecting.

I collect games I want so that I can play them. In the old days, non-poor people used to collect books. They'd never get rid of their books, except perhaps one here or there that they decided they didn't like. They wouldn't buy a book for its monetary value or rarity or anything like that. They'd accumulate books they liked to build up their own personal library. Each person had a distinct library of books to their name, which as a whole, said much about their taste, and possibly something about them as a person.

I'm that way with games (except I'm not non-poor, but I do it anyway). You could say I'm a "collector", but my games are my personal library -- someday I'll probably get Radiant Silvergun, simply because it's a good game, but I'll never get an NES competition cart or anything like that.

[Genesis Knight]

I am indeed disgusted with the inflated prices caused by people who just leave them on the shelf, untouched. Envision a world where normal people could get Radiant Silvergun and even stuff like Alien Soldier, then compare that to today when you have to be a diehard collector who doesn't consider monetary responsibilities in order to get them. Just wrong!

[David J.]

Truth be told... none of my Sega CD games are legit, only because there's no copy protection, and a "few pieces of paper" doesn't bother me for these games.

So I have all burned games, and I have most all of the ones I want, and a third of the japanese only games in iso format, and that's saved me some money. :)

[winona]

I fail to see the problem. If you want to play the game in its original form then you can just pick up a used cartridge on ebay. Even the rarest of games will found for peanuts if its just the cartridge.

If you feel fine with using emulators then why even bother complaining at game prices?

Its not like you have to buy the mint in Box Alien Soldier going for 100$. And if you DO feel the need to own complete games...well u can guess what that makes you.