Video game collecting: meaning is more important than dollar value.
Whether 2 games or 2000, for beginners it only has to mean something to you.
The internet is littered with people, probably much like yourself, who are spending way too much time comparing the value of themselves as a collector with notable people and well known collectors online.
For beginners this likely isn’t the greatest feeling, especially as you bid yourself bon voyage on your journey to a wholesome new hobby – it can feel rather terrible to know that the most valuable collectors’ items, the Moby Dick’s of the gaming world, are already out of reach and have been scooped up 100 times over by the most dedicated and wealthiest Captain Ahab’s that ventured before you.
But in those dark times when even I start to doubt the value of my collecting pedigree, I’m often reminded of a video from YouTube’s greatest neurotic Scott The Woz.
Woz, of the Scott variety, produced an exceptionally great video in 2020 where he was able to summarize my feelings about game collecting in just a few poignant phrases.
“I feel like if you’re only into collecting the expensive stuff because they’re expensive, the motives to collect feel much more hollow. It doesn’t feel like you want to own a game because it’s a game you want or because you think it’s cool, it feels like you only want it because of its monetary value”
“Just because a game’s value is worth a dollar, it doesn’t mean it’s inherently less valuable to me personally than a game that’s worth ten dollars”.
He makes an interesting point – is a collector with a smaller, but more personal collection worth as much in the collecting community as someone with a stack of sealed Ocarina of Time N64 games in box?
BEING PROUD OF WHAT YOU HAVE.
I have a small collection of games, but as time has gone on I’ve come to understand the patterns of my purchases:
Games released within the last 12 months that are now on special.
Older games on my favourite consoles that I’ve always wanted to play, and
Games that have an interesting story to them.
This list of purchases may seem odd to more experienced collectors, but I’ve come to understand the method in my madness; I’m only interested in games that I feel like I’m actually going to play or games that have generated a palpable amount of interest in me over the years. I’ve come to the ultimate realization that I’m never going to want to own a copy of Chrono Trigger, mint in box. I have zero interest in selling a kidney to obtain a super rare and pristine version of Donkey Kong Country for the very same reason I don’t collect JRPG’s – I’ll never play it.
Over time I’ve come to understand that this is what makes video game collecting so different from other forms of hobbies - unlike the rows of my action figures that stare out at me from behind their plastic prison cells, I have absolutely no hesitation in ripping open the packaging of a game to get my hands on the contents inside the box.
For years I collected action figures, meticulously dusting, cleaning and storing a whole army of GI Joes and Kenner Star Wars figurines in various boxes, painstakingly moving them to and from every house I have ever lived in over the last 20 years like a chronically depressed hoarder. While they represent awesome things from my childhood, realistically the only thing they’ve ever truly done for me is ensure continued celibacy.
Worst of all is that I can’t use them; to remove them from the packaging instantly devalues the figure to the point it becomes near worthless, except for a few ultra rare examples. Meanwhile in social circles, waving around a He-Man and screaming that “I have the power” to all my friends will probably illicit a response from the federal authorities and raise questions about my proximity to local schools.
This is what makes game collecting so wonderfully different, we should have absolutely no hesitation in using and enjoying the things we collect. Truth be told it could be argued that the playability of a game and its popularity does nothing except increase its value, because games exist in a unique world where the sheer joy of a single player individual experience can be passed onto other players like a virus.
In short, being a collector is more than just totaling the dollar value of your collection, it’s also about being encouraged to get stuck-in and get your hands dirty playing the games. If you want to.
BUYING GAMES ON SPECIAL
For someone looking to start their collection this is actually probably the best place to set sail from. The nature of video games and the constant supply of them means that it is natural for the popularity of games to shift regularly within the gaming ecosystem. Whether it be a litany of bugs like Outriders or just plain old shitness like Babylon’s Fall, the reasons that a game ends up in a bargain bin can be both nuanced and obvious at the same time. These kinds of games do more than just fill out a collection, they offer you a way to get in on the conversation quickly, without having to drop wads of cash from your wallet like a Buck’s Party in Vegas.
The strange fluctuating monetary value of games also means that unique, yet poorly promoted games end up cheaper in price to purchase than their much higher intangible enjoyment value – indie Advance Wars clones like Wargroove or RPG side-scrollers like Kingdom are now less than $10 to purchase new, but their individuality and overlooked aesthetics may very well be worth something to other collectors in the future.
In the short term these kinds of games are just super interesting to play and they represent a way for beginners to experience unique gameplay very cheaply. To a more seasoned collector trawling through the bargain bins for popular games might be like buying penny-stocks on Wall Street, tantalizing yet fruitless investment opportunities that just muddy the water for real investments. However that’s really only the reality if you treat your collection like it’s an investment fund.
GAMES YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO PLAY
The PS2 and PS3, for me, have for as long as I’ve owned those consoles, given me some of the best gaming experiences I have ever had on a gaming machine.
For beginner collectors the Playstation 3 especially is an exceptionally cheap and effective way of breaking into console game collecting in 2023 – while not exactly soaring to the highest mountains of success like its older and younger siblings, the PS3 is still a mostly disc driven platform that outputs games in HD. Ok, albeit 720p HD, but the console offers a way for gamers to experience some classic gameplay moments without needing additional TV adaptors or a dedicated CRT television display. The PS3, straight out of the box, connects to your modern TV with existing cables and is ready to go instantly.
PS3 games are also currently in that strange grey area for sellers, you see the PS3 isn’t quite old enough to be collectable, but not young enough to warrant higher game prices for relevant gaming experiences. For this reason Ebay, game stores and other digital retailers often sell their PS3 games quite cheaply. There are notable exceptions, usually the likes of rarer JRPG experiences, but it’s not uncommon to start filling your PS3 game shelf with games that cost anywhere between $5 and $15.
The PS3 also currently inhabits that strange space reserved for gaming consoles that are still visible in our community, yet unpopular enough to warrant being passed over – second hand stores, goodwill and pawn shops are often still overflowing with the games, alongside their PS4 brethren, offering up diggers and eagle eyed shoppers games for sometimes only $2.
Large chunks of my PS3 collection have come from these kinds of lucky finds. While sometimes it is clear that time (or people) has not been kind to the physical game cases themselves, cleaning game cases in 2023 is as easy as gently removing the game cover and disc, applying a little goo-remover and slowly rubbing unwanted stickers and dirt off with little effort. Even high(ish) value games in my collection like Armored Core 2 and Armored Core V I managed to secure at prices far below their usual retail value because most collectors believe that tainted game cases make them unpopular.
Let’s not also forget that older consoles allow us to finally buy games that we’ve always wanted to own. Maybe it’s a game we rented from Blockbuster that has lived rent-free in our heads since 2002, or maybe it’s the game that everyone at school played but you never could because your family were assholes and didn’t want to buy you the popular console for Christmas. The ever creeping march of time and the always present fluctuating value of games has meant that your gaming holy grails are now probably within grasp.
These kinds of games don’t need to valuable to other collectors, they only need to hold value to you. As a child I was mesmerized by the strange audacity of Artdink’s 1997 game Carnage Heart for the Playstation. While I owned a second hand copy that I had found on sale at a Blockbuster in the early 00’s, it still pained me that a proper, unscratched version of the game was always seemingly out of my grasp. While the game doesn’t hold much monetary value, to me the game is absolutely priceless and worthy of ripping open my wallet and laying $30 on the table at a second hand video game store.
Carnage Heart is not going to be my retirement plan, definitely not, but it is something that I cherish that I can continue to play for decades to come.
In the end that’s how we really need to approach our investment in video games, if we walk into the whole endeavour believing that we are going to get rich than we haven’t quite been paying attention to the state of the market. Unless the game is rare, whether due to a limited run or just the ever passing passage of time, waiting more than 30 years to make a profit is not the best way to plan for your children’s future.
In end games aren’t that valuable – A boxed version of Super Mario Brothers 3, a game released in 1989, might run you back around $70. Simple maths will tell you that waiting 35 years to make the equivalent of around 30 bucks profit is not the wisest investment. Unless of course you never actually opened the game or removed it from its original shrink-wrapping your investment return is a little higher, but in 1989 unless you happened to be a soothsayer with a crystal ball instead of a being a child I am willing to bet money you tore into that box on Christmas morning faster than Sean Connery in a nunnery.
But as a collector that doesn’t mean that 35 years later you shouldn’t own it, or want it, or play it.
COLLECTING INTERESTING GAMES
To circle back around to the Scott the Woz’s point at the beginning of this article, your reason for collecting games is a solely individualistic experience – these reasons can extend beyond monetary investments or even nostalgia, sometimes a game can be valuable to your collection simply because of the story behind its development.
Babylon’s Fall, Ride to Hell: Retribution and Balan Wonderworld each represent unique collecting experiences that are both cheap and also fulfilling. In truth, terrible games can be just as fun to collect as excellent games. Each of these games have unique backstories and larger than life individuals that helped to bring them into existence and each of them illicit emotional responses from players that become unifying among the gaming community.
Babylon’s Fall has to be seen to be believed – how did a AAA title from Square Enix sink so low in popularity that at one point only one player in the entire world was playing the game on steam? One player. One.
What was going through the minds of Deep Silver developers when they pulled Ride to Hell: Retribution back from the dead and Frankenstein-Monstered together one of the most laughable gaming experiences from the corpse of a long dead open world gangster game?
How did Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic the freaking Hedgehog, manage to get the funding to cobble together an unimaginably boring gaming experience in the form of Balan Wonderworld? A PS5 and latest gen console game that is now so unwanted a new copy from a legit commercial retailer, disc and all, will only set you back the princely sum of only $4? Incredible. Surely Square Enix was looking at the game as it was being developed, right? How do things like this slip under the radar? Nobody thought to interject?
Questions like these are great for collectors, they do more to drive our desire to play these games than the lackluster marketing campaigns ever could. I would hazard a guess and say that seasoned collectors would probably avoid these kinds of titles purely because they do nothing more than fill up spaces on a wall or shelf that could be taken up by better games. Being brutally honest about it all, they’re not wrong. However as someone looking to wade into the collecting community you need to be the kind of collector that you want to be – it could easily be argued that wanting to preserve terrible games holds as much weight to gaming history as shelving the most popular ones, it could also be said that it isn’t quite true that these games hold no historical monetary value.
The PS3’s Rambo: The Video Game is an iconically bad on-rails-shooter game that was developed by Teyon, a developer that would later go on to redeem themselves with gaming fans by developing the much liked Terminator: Resistance FPS. Due to the large amounts of customer returns, retailer write-offs and general disinterest with the discs that game has over time become somewhat of a rarity. While not soaring to the heights of the PS3’s (terrible) Godzilla strategy game in value, it stands the test of time as being an enjoyable gaming experience you can collect for around $30-$40.
While this is definitely a far cry from a bargain bin terrible game, it demonstrates that even terrible games can still hold some kind of monetary value. They can be used to preserve enjoyably bad gaming experiences for generations to come and can still pay for themselves once you’re finished with them in your collection and you want to pass the fun onto someone else.
The ability to put the disc or cartridge in my machine and partake in the gem or the junk is the core reason I want to be a collector; Foie Gras or Totino’s Party Pizza it doesn’t quite matter to me. Both are equally delicious and both offer completely unique, yet enjoyable experiences despite the variation in quality. In the end if you decide that the monetary value of collecting is secondary to your interests than that is not only perfectly ok, it’s actively encouraged.
I’m proud of my collection, small though it is. The mecha games, nostalgic throwbacks and reliance on story-driven first person experiences say a lot about my DNA as a gamer. I can wear it as a badge on my chest with pride knowing that it’s still in its infancy, or even if I decide to stop collecting it’s still an accurate depiction of the man I am or used to be.
When all is said and done our collections end up as legacies that we can pass onto future generations, whether that be our own kin or the next generation of buyers looking to purchase our games to start making enjoyable experiences of their own.
Putting truth to power, meaning is more important than dollar value.
~ Andrew Archer