Released in early 2000, Grind Session pre-dates Tony Hawk 2, and in my opinion, blows Tony Hawk 1 out of the water. Unfortunately, despite starting development before Pro Skater, it was labeled as a rip off, and went unnoticed at the time.
That’s a shame, because this game has a lot of innovative ideas that I would have loved to see explored in a sequel. Continue reading
If you could pick only 20 games for your entire collection, what would they be? And if you only had 20 games to buy, what kind of condition would you be able to afford them in? This is the idea behind a new coin collecting trend called a ‘box of 20’. Continue reading
Image: Ebay
This is a copy of Turok: Rage Wars on N64. A quick search on Price Charting and you can see it’s worth less than ten bucks. And yet, if it was priced at $20, it would be a great deal. What’s going on? Continue reading
Image assets: Wikipedia
How many collectors do you know that started a huge collection and lost interest? Maybe it all happened in a moment – they stood at checkout in a game store, and suddenly realized that the copy of Chrono Trigger wasn’t worth the stack of twenties in their pocket, then walked away. Or maybe collecting slowly took a back seat to other hobbies and interests. One thing lapsed collectors often have in common: they weren’t collecting what they liked. Continue reading
Image: Museum of Play
20 years from now, you’ve decided to sell off your games. Maybe you need to make space, you need some extra cash, or maybe you’re dead and your kids are getting rid of your old crap. You take some of your games to the store, and you offer up Family Feud on the Sega Genesis. They offer you 99 cents – half of what you paid for it at that flea market in 2008. That’s what you can expect if you fill your collection with noncollectable junk. Continue reading
Some books on coin collecting pre-date the United States. Image: Kolbe & Fanning
Collecting retro games is a pretty new hobby. To see into the future, we can look at older collecting hobbies, like coin collecting. There are a lot of similarities, but one huge difference – coin collecting was huge when your grandpa was a kid. And his grandpa too. Years have been spent analyzing the hobby and making sense of market trends. We can take some common advice and adapt it to game collecting to get ahead of the pack. One such axiom is: buy the keys first. Continue reading
The 1804 dollar is incredibly rare. In 1999, one sold for $4.14 million. Image: Smithsonian
Collecting old games is a very new hobby. It’s only really existed for a little over ten years, and the games being collected are only a few decades old at most. True rarity is still being discovered. Prices of individual pieces rarely cross into four figures.
As both a video game collector and a coin collector, I can see a lot of similarities in the two hobbies. The difference is, coin collecting has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Coins can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s not uncommon for some to go for millions. Decades have been spent developing collecting strategies and researching the market. It would do us all a favor to adapt tried-and-true coin collecting advice to video game collecting. Continue reading
With popular YouTube shows like Game Chasers, Game Sack and countless others boasting large collections of rare and expensive games, the amount of people entering the game collecting world continues to grow. Many wonder what the future of the hobby will be in the coming decades. Will graded games catch on?
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