The retro game collecting scene is in a strange situation these days, with a lot of fans who just want to enjoy old games in peace and who get very upset with scalpers and auctioneers who select and rate old games as Super Mario Bros, with multimillion-dollar margins. . 1994 might have been a simpler time for retro enthusiasts, but they were equally price-conscious back then.
Yes, 1994 had its own retro collectors, looking for deals on classic Atari carts in an era when the Super NES and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive were all the rage. This is illustrated by an article in the January 1994 issue of VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine (recently featured by Chris Kohler in Bluesky) titled “Tired of the same old Street Fighter clones? Collect classic cartridges!”
The article is a review of the second edition of Digital Press's Collector's Guide to Classic Video Games, which tracked current prices for a wide variety of already-old consoles: platforms like the Atari 2600, Vectrex, and ColecoVision.
“If you're cynical about the idea of a cartridge price guide simply because no one has made one before,” the magazine writes, “you'll breathe a sigh of relief when you see how brutally realistic and conservative these figures are. Hundreds of games included, Only a few are priced above what they were originally sold for in stores. The most common titles, such as Atari's Air-Sea Battle, Combat, and Space Invaders, are valued at just $1 each.
You may cynically wish you could go back to the days when only a “handful” of retro games are more expensive now than at retail, but that's still true today. If you take a look at even a notoriously expensive platform to collect like the Nintendo 64 on a modern price tracker like PriceCharting, you'll find average prices across all games around $33 and the median cost around $17. That's well below the $60-$70 these games originally sold for, not to mention inflation.
The difference between then and now, of course, is that the handful of In fact The expensive games out there have a much higher maximum price these days. VideoGames' review of the price guide highlights some extremely rare selections. “Did you know that programmer Rob Fulop (of Night Driver and Demon Attack) independently released an Atari 2600 game called Cubicolor, and that only 60 copies are believed to exist? What about Froggo's Pyromania for the Atari 7800? ( It was announced, but may only exist as a prototype.) Then there's the elusive Dark Tower game for Vectrex: has anyone actually seen this Holy Grail of the video game industry?”
The prices listed in the Classic Video Game Collector's Guide for these titles? “$500, $100 and $100”, respectively. Imagine telling these people what they would have to pay for Panzer Dragoon Saga these days.
Yes, our list of best snes games Include some that sell for several hundred dollars on eBay today, but you can still get plenty of authentic strollers for under $20.