Retro Game Collecting: From Cartridges to Sealed-Game Auctions

More and more people are pulling out old consoles and switching them on again. Some hunt for cartridges at secondhand markets, collect "complete" copies with the box and manual, or even go out of their way to get a CRT TV so they can play games exactly as they looked back then. Together, these trends are called "retro gaming" culture.

In this post, we look at what retro games means, how collecting culture emerged and grew, and the controversy that arose when sealed games sold for more than a million dollars, as well as the issue of game preservation.

What Are Retro Games?

English Wikipedia describes retrogaming as "the playing and collecting of computers, consoles, and games from previous eras." It usually involves devices that are no longer manufactured, but it also includes playing on modern devices through ports, compilations, or emulation.

Opinions differ on where "retro" begins. Roughly three criteria are commonly used:

The Japanese gaming TV show GameCenter CX uses the standard of treating consoles released at least 20 years earlier as retro challenge targets. Among collectors, it is generally felt that childhood games start being treated as "retro" about 15 to 20 years after release. As a result, the scope of retro widens a little every year.

Three reasons are commonly cited for why people seek out retro games: nostalgia for a particular era, the belief that older games were more original, and the enjoyment of their simple structure.

Collecting Culture Born in Fanzines and on the Internet

Retro game fandom began in the early-to-mid 1990s with homemade newsletters (fanzines). In the United States, fanzines such as 2600 Connection and Digital Press shared information about Atari 2600-era games. Later, as the internet spread, Usenet discussion groups about classic games and personal homepages became the center of information exchange.

During this period, old games were so rarely re-released that people said "the game industry didn't seem to remember anything before 1985." Then, in the mid-1990s, classic game compilations such as Namco Museum began to appear, and as personal computers became more powerful, emulators that imitated the Famicom (NES) and Game Boy also spread widely.

In the early 2000s, online auction sites such as eBay changed the collecting landscape. Once rare cartridges could be found and bought from anywhere, "full set" collecting, gathering every game for a particular console, became popular. In North America, the NES was the most popular target. Up to this point, people didn't care much about box condition as long as the game worked, and rarity was the biggest factor determining price.

What Do Collectors Collect?

People collect retro games in very different ways. The main types are as follows:

• Collecting to play: Collecting only cartridges or discs to actually play. This is the most common approach and the least expensive.
• Complete-in-box (CIB) collecting: Collecting games with the box, manual, and the game itself (cartridge) all together. In Japan, this is often labeled "with box and manual."
• Sealed collecting: Collecting brand-new copies whose packaging has never been opened. These have the highest prices and are strongly investment-oriented.
• Console and peripheral collecting: Collecting regional consoles, limited-edition colors, unusual peripherals, and so on.
• Themed collecting: Collecting only games of a specific genre, character, or developer.

There are also things collectors watch out for. The more popular a game is, the more bootlegs there are made to look genuine, so collecting communities share guides for telling authentic copies apart by label printing, circuit board shape, screw type, and more. In addition, some old cartridges have internal batteries that protect save data and have reached the end of their life, so saving no longer works; replacing batteries is considered something of a basic skill for collectors.

Grading and Million-Dollar Auctions

In the 2010s, collectors who had collected comic books or coins began to see games as a new long-term investment. A major change came in 2018. A company called Wata Games created a standard for rating the condition of a game's box, media, and manual on a 10-point scale, and sealed graded games in clear plastic cases. It carried over the method used in comic book grading to games.

After that, the American auction house Heritage Auctions began putting games up for auction in January 2019, and records were quickly broken.

These prices sparked major controversy. During the same auction period, a grade 9.4 Super Mario 64 sold for $28,800, and critics pointed out how strange it was that the price jumped more than 50 times simply because of a 9.8 grade. Game historian Frank Cifaldi acknowledged the difference in grade but said the surge was hard to understand. There was also analysis that investment-minded collectors from other fields, reacting to grade numbers rather than a game's historical significance, were driving the market up, and a class-action lawsuit was filed claiming that Wata had manipulated the market.

For collectors who had been collecting games for a long time, this trend was a double-edged sword. It led to the discovery of many sealed games that had been sitting in storage, but it also drove collecting costs up significantly.

Mini Consoles and FPGA: Rebuilding Old Machines

As original hardware became more expensive and aged, companies began re-releasing old games packaged in new devices.

• NES Classic Edition: A small Famicom (NES)-shaped device released by Nintendo in November 2016, containing 30 games and connecting via HDMI. About 2.3 million units were sold before production stopped in April 2017, and shortages drove resale prices way up.
• Super Famicom Classic (SNES Classic): Released in 2017, it sold more than 5 million units by March 2018. Combined sales of the NES and SNES Classic exceeded 10 million units as of September 2018.
• Digital re-releases: GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games), launched in 2008, tracked down the rights holders of classic PC games and re-sold them without copy protection (DRM). Console makers also run Virtual Console and subscription-based classic game services.

Recently, FPGA devices have been drawing attention among collectors. An FPGA is a semiconductor chip whose circuit configuration can be changed, and unlike emulators that imitate hardware in software, it can reproduce the original hardware's behavior almost exactly. For example, the Analogue Pocket, released in December 2021, uses FPGA chips to reproduce the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, and lets you plug in original cartridges directly. It is designed for collectors who want to collect original cartridges but play them on a sharp screen instead of an aging console.

Why Collecting Is Also Preservation

Retro game collecting is sometimes described as going beyond a hobby to become a form of "preservation." Unlike books or films, games require specific hardware to run. When devices are discontinued and break down, the games can disappear with them. Media such as floppy disks and CDs suffer data degradation over time, and games that depend on online servers become completely unplayable once the service ends.

In fact, Nintendo ended purchases of new content on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShops on March 27, 2023. Games already purchased can still be re-downloaded, but games that were sold digitally only on those devices can no longer be newly bought.

In 2023, the American nonprofit Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), together with the Software Preservation Network, studied how many classic games released in the United States before 2010 are currently officially available. The result was that only about 13% are officially available today, while the remaining 87% are "critically endangered." For Game Boy-family games, the share available digitally was just 5.8%.

For this reason, the holdings of individual collectors sometimes become important resources for museums and researchers. The VGHF collects not only game software but also development documents, promotional materials, magazines, and photographs, and it has even worked with Wata to receive information on prototypes discovered during the grading process.

A Legendary Collectible: The Atari Landfill

A story often mentioned in retro game collecting culture is the "Atari landfill." During the collapse of the North American game market in 1983, Atari buried unsold games and hardware in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For a long time, it was passed around like an urban legend that millions of E.T. cartridges were buried there, but on April 26, 2014, a documentary crew actually dug up the ground and found the games. An Atari representative said the amount buried was about 700,000 copies across multiple games, and about 1,300 of them were recovered. Some were sent to museums and the rest were sold at auction, creating a symbolic scene in which games buried in the ground became collectibles.

How to Get Started with Retro Games

If you've just become interested in retro games, the following steps are worth recommending before you spend a lot of money:

1. Start with official re-releases: Play old games first on a mini console or subscription service to find out which consoles and genres suit you.
2. Narrow your goal: Setting criteria such as "only my favorite series" or "only games I played as a kid" makes costs easier to control.
3. Make a habit of checking condition: Check labels, contact corrosion, and battery condition, and be suspicious that an item priced far below market value may be a bootleg.
4. Storage environment: Avoid direct sunlight and humidity, and store boxes upright so they don't get crushed.

What retro game culture shows is that games, too, become cultural heritage over time. The pixel-art puzzle games and indie games we enjoy today also carry on the design of these old games.

References

• Retrogaming - Wikipedia
• Video game collecting - Wikipedia
• Video game preservation - Wikipedia
• NES Classic Edition - Wikipedia
• Analogue Pocket - Wikipedia
• Atari video game burial - Wikipedia
• Video Game History Foundation