Couldn't find another one via search, so, here goes (delete if there's some epic, standard retrogames thread I missed).

Me: The early Nintendo stuff, a few Ataris, a couple arcade stand-ups and just recently, getting into collecting 80's/early 90's electronic handhelds (mostly, the ones from Tiger). NES collection is fairly large. Played it right a few years back and started buying the rarer ones first, then working down to the more common ones.

Wish I could be a bigger supporter of the dedicated retrogame stores in Chicagoland, but, ya know... Ebay, and all...

Haven't hunted for them 'in the wild' in quite some time.
Last solid in-the-wild score was in 2005 @ a Flea Market on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, right before Katrina blew it away. There was a guy there who had a S*I*C*K selection (at least 700+ carts), all priced fair. We were on vacation and I didn't have my list with me, so had to go cowboy and guess on everything, but made out like a bandit- 20+ carts in total. Got Black Bass (NES) and Dragon Warrior II (NES) for $5 at a garage sale in Whiting, Indiana last year.

Anyway, woteva. Retrogames. Huzzah.

i still have an old atari with a case full of games because my dad worked for atari in california before i was born =o

Check to see if there are any unreleased games in there (possible since your dad worked there). Those can bring a pretty penny.

yah i should mention it to him since i know he has a bunch of others in a storage unit. on an unrelated note: quadstriker built an awesome machine itt


http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/75...r-pics-450048/

I'd like to find some good working colecovision controllers since the cabbage patch kids world record has my name all over it.

When I was in high school, I literally had 3 giant cardboard boxes full of NES carts, probably ~100 carts per box (they were those big deep boxes you can buy from UHaul when you're moving), plus others strewn about my bedroom. This was like the late 90s when I was "collecting them", right at the end of 16-bit era and in the beginning/middle PSOne/N64/Saturn days. Say 1996-1999. NES was beyond passe by this point.

I put "collecting them" in quotes because in those days, you couldn't give NES carts away. It wasn't so much "collecting" as it was taking what people then saw as garbage off their hands. And I wasn't really "collecting" either, I just had a lot of fun dicking around with games and didn't particularly give a **** they were 8-10 years old by the time I got my hands on them. So I wasn't out for 'rares' or valuable games, I was just out to play as much as I could.

As I'm sure you guys are aware, the life of a typical console is something like this: the first adopters and hardcore gamers jump on board first, then more and more consumers migrate after a few years, then a new console generation comes out, at which point people dump the last generation hardware and games on the market, which relegates the old console generation to little kids and others who don't want to pay for new games. See for instance PS2, GameCube, and XBox used prices at places like GameStop, where you can walk out with a dozen AAA last generation titles for like $75.

Anyway, at this point in the 90s, the NES had even moved out of that last "little kids and budget gamers are still playing" phase into the "this is just garbage now" phase. No one was playing it anymore, the SNES/Genesis were consoles of choice for budget gamers and little kids and their parents. "Retro gaming" hadn't really become vogue at all and anyone inclined to go back and play those old NES games were also the kind of people that had internet access and could discover emulation, which had also emerged and evolved during that time, along with CPU and other hardware resources to accurately emulate those games.

So long story short: people were little just giving away so much NES stuff at things like garage sales, in the garbage, to family and friends. I remember a neighbor literally threw out, literally put a bag of like 60 NES carts out on their sidewalk for trash collectors. I asked the neighbor if I could have them and she was more than happy to have me take them off their hands. I assumed they were broke or whatever but pretty much every single one worked. I remember buying like another box of dozens of games for $10 at a garage sale.

Alas, once I went off to college, I left my NES carts behind and my mom gave them away to a relative, who then threw some away and gave the rest to the Salvation Army. Your typical 50s era baseball card / 90s era NES cart sob story ldo.

Like I said, I don't think I had anything especially rare. I definitely didn't have the Nintendo World Championship or anything like that, but I know I had Duck Tales 2, Bubble Bobble 2, some of the later Dragon Warrior games -- games that now go for $50-$100 on ebay.

One of the somewhat ****ty things about ebay is that it really has commoditized everything. There's no such thing as discovering "valuable" junk like video games on a curbside anymore, something that was relatively common once upon a time. People know these games have tangible (albeit often small) values and realize a box of NES carts they don't want anymore can sell them be sold on ebay for some cash instead of thrown out.

I'm just recently getting back into those old games, after getting rid of my NES and Genesis many years ago. Damn, they're expensive now.

i keep wanting to buy a turbo duo on e bay.

some of my fondest gaming memories were on there.

i cant believe i traded it in along with all my games for a few ps1 games way back when.

**** 's bank on e bay now.

That's actually a pretty standard progression for a lot of things.
At first, it's new, then it's outdated, then it's "old junk", then it becomes retro-cool, then it's finally old enough that the people who had them/lusted after them as kids are now in their earning years and start buying them up as 'collectibles'. Baseball cards, comic books, vintage cars, whatever. This is a collectors tale that has played itself out over and over again whenever dealing with something that has a pop-culture aspect to it.

I'm a serial collector of a many things and am kinda thankful that I had the foresight to recognize the 'collector potential' NES games had in the 2003-2005 time period, which was the very tail end of them being 'cheap' - where the collector momentum was just starting to build, the collectors information on rarity and desirability was very inefficient and anyone with half a brain could use ebay and the data on digitalpress to figure out the ones that were selling cheap relative to the rarity or desirability potential they had.

I'm @ about 400 now, but the best decision I made was to start with the rarer ones and work my way backwards to the more common ones. I don't know whether people will ever get maniacal about them like they have with other 'collectible' type things, but every single metric is present for that to happen (sheer variety being the biggest one) and when the NES generation hits its mid-life crisis years, the potential is definitely there.