I'd been wanting to make a NW Collection thread for a while. Did you guys know that GameCube used game prices have been shooting up a lot lately? Heck, all Nintendo cartridge-based systems too. It seems like older games are becoming very desirable now to people who grew up with 'em. The GCNGB trolls are eating their words, lemme tell ya!

Also, to those of you who followed my (ShadowCattivvi's) advice back then and bought Skies of Arcadia Legends, you're welcome! You have a game worth 200 bucks!

Check out pricecharting.com for an up-to-date look at what Nintendo games have been going for on eBay lately--you might be surprised. We all know that EarthBound still commands a high price, but triple-digit prices for Paper Mario 64, Thousand-Year Door, the DS Dragon Quests, Ghost Trick, Eternal Darkness, Pikmin 2, Conker, and Mega Man 5? And that's just scratching the surface.

I spent a couple hours inventorying my own collection in that site, which you can see here! You guys should post your own! It's pretty interesting seeing all this stuff actually increase in value compared to, say, music CDs and DVDs/Blu-Rays.

It does seem that the most valuable stuff is over two generations old, since Wii and Wii U games still show up regularly in Walmart and bargain bins. But I can easily see them being the new big thing in a decade when kids who grew up with those systems will want a copy of Fortune Street or Pikmin 3 on its native console.

What are your most valuable games? And will any of you sell me Jack Bros. for Virtual Boy? :p

URL to share (right click and copy)

Wow!

Ah, but you still have all the boxes for all your cartridge games... my N64, Gameboy, and DS games are loose.

And you have three DK Bongos!?

But $90 for Thousand-Year Door? $160 for Pokemon XD? And Pokemon Box at $500!? I knew I should have asked my parents for that one harder...

So now the question is whether to sell all these games now or wait 20 years for a 1000x increase in value. Forget Dogecoin, this is Doshincoin!

Or maybe we'll all be living in perpetual virtual reality by then and no one will care. Decisions, decisions...

I've always been under the impression that people who sell their lifelong game collections for quick cash always regret it. But if I didn't own Pokemon XD, would I buy a copy for $160? LMAO yeah right.

@Secret_Tunnel

Doshincoin, hah!

I wish I had the boxes for my cart games--they get notoriously crushed. But I do at least have the boxes for OoT and MM (and a few more manuals). GCN and onward thankfully have the more sturdy jewel cases, so I've got all those still, but prior to that, just a handful. So most of the prices I've mentioned already are cart-only (for pre-GCN) or complete-in-box (for post-GCN).

Pokemon games have surged in particular, as you noted with XD (I imagine its owners are making that face right now when they see its value). Makes me really regret selling Yellow, Gold, and Fire Red last week at a garage sale for 20 bucks altogether! (apparently Fire Red alone is a c-note, ouch)

So yeah, take care in what you sell. It really depends on the person; a lot of people can drop this old stuff no problem and feel great about the cash made. I'm like that with most stuff...but not my games, apparently!

Not sure how I got three DK Bongos! I think I just enjoyed Konga's multi a lot.

The real question is if these will continue to go up in value or if there'll be some weird crash. Honestly, I'm not sure why DVDs lost their value while games retained theirs. A more passionate fanbase? Maybe ours is just the "gamer" generation and it'll all backfire in a decade or two? Either way, I think I'll hold onto just about all my stuff for now.

Gruhh, it frustrates me that I lent out games like MGS Twin Snakes and Skies of Arcadia Legends and never got them back.

Yup, noticed this. It’s...part of my business, after all. (SHAMELESS PLUG: Video Games Monthly )

My collection is probably worth a lot. Still got a sealed Skies of Arcadia Legends on my shelf, in fact! And yeah, the complete Virtual Boy North American release. Including Jack Bros.. (I’ll sell it for 5 million dollars. Any takers?)

@TriforceBun

Wow, my Pokemon collection alone is probably $1000!

@GameDadGrant

Hey, no joke, there are Pokemon cards and sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. going for hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could probably get a LOT for a Virtual Boy with every game.

I was surprised to see recently that Lost Kingdoms II is worth $160+ and figured it was the From Software fans going nuts. But that's a lot of games that have really risen in value, wow.

Might need to get into my attic and find my stash of Cube games soon.

EDIT: It is hard to part with your old games but if I'm still only 2/3 of the way through Lost Kingdoms II after all these years, I should probably cash it in. It's sitting right here in my cupboard as if I was about to finish it just as soon as I get around to it. Ha.

TriforceBun said:

Also, to those of you who followed my (ShadowCattivvi's) advice back then and bought Skies of Arcadia Legends, you're welcome! You have a game worth 200 bucks!

I have that!

.... but triple-digit prices for.... Eternal Darkness,

I don't have that. :( I sold it years ago to get a Gold Zelda SP. I probably got like $20-30 for it. (I'd finished it completely!)

@Secret_Tunnel

...I know

A Sunday afternoon can disappear quickly staring at prices on pricecharting.com and games on my shelves. It is shocking to see random games be worth a few bucks, but frustrating when you’re sure you had a game but apparently don’t. My Sega Saturn collection, while not that large, is definitely the most impressive library I have, especially in terms of average value per game. Grew up a Sega kid and broke in my first credit card with the Saturn, so makes a bit of sense. Ended up with a few of the rarer games.

Wow, the value of my sealed copy of Twilight Princess on GCN has more than doubled since I last checked. Not bad for an Amazon daily deal years ago. I had already played the Wii version by then.

Perhaps I’ll use it to fund a Switch Pro in the future, or hold off and pay for a kid’s college tuition in 15 years.

Whoaaa, Path if Radiance is up to $300. I think that makes it my rarest game at this point. Kiiiiinda still worth that price, though

As I’ve had less and less time for games, and as I’ve made less of a point of collecting/owning games physically, it does become more tempting to sell off the bigger cash cows in my collection. I could never get rid of my beloved Fire Emblem. But Conker? That might be a different story. It’s tempting, but I still do value having some of these rarer titles. And even if I’m happy to sell, it seems like most games have trended upward in cost. So there’s always that fear of selling too soon. In the end I just put it off and Conker sits on the shelf for another 3 years.

Well, this is most of my collection. I didn’t include nearly any hardware or loose games, but I imagine I’ll get to them eventually. The dollar amount is considerably higher than I ever would have guessed, by 2 or 3 times. It’s weird thinking of that value. I should insure my collection, methinks. I have no intention of parting with anything any time soon, but I am curious how that would actually translate to real world dollars. A decent percentage of the games are worth $0-10, and would likely be difficult to get rid of.

Most of the collection was naturally built over time, starting with the Saturn. At least, that’s when I started buying my own games. I did have a modest Sega collection before that, but there was definitely some turnover. Over time, I did back-fill some older stuff, and I often raid clearance bins and stores going out of business.

My Saturn and N64 collections are surprisingly expensive, considering how few games I have for each. And I’ve always loved my DS collection, but that is waaay more volume. It is also curious seeing what is and isn’t valuable. There isn’t much value in the newer systems’ games, understandably, but why in the hell is Godzilla for PS4 worth $300?!? Glad I bought it on clearance from Target for $13.98! (Yes, the clearance sticker is still on it.)

Scored a Legend of Zelda manual at the flea market yesterday for 10 bucks. I'd like to have my top 3 games (Zelda 1, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid) complete-in-box eventually, so this was a cool find. They had a lot of interesting old stuff there, including a Super Scope and boxes for the NES and SNES! I almost bought one of those myself, but the NES box was in pretty rough shape and my brother decided on getting the SNES one.

@Brandon

Lovely collection! Kinda blows my mind how much some of those Sega Saturn games are worth these days.

How'd you manage to hang onto so many cardboard boxes (like N64, GBA, etc)? Would you just keep them on your shelves or in a closet or something after buying new games? Wish I'd managed to do that, but nearly all of my cart games are loose.

At the very least, once the GCN showed up with its plastic cases, it became a lot easier to hang onto the boxes and manuals.

@TriforceBun

Yeah, kinda like you already mentioned, I mostly always had stuff on shelves and never got rid of anything. Some of the boxes are a bit worn, but they’re mostly all right. That said, I do have a handful of loose N64 and GBA carts. I don’t think many of those were mine to begin with, but I imagine a few could have been.

I somehow managed to not include my 90 game Dreamcast collection, so that has now been added. If ever I were to try to complete a system’s library, it would be the Dreamcast. A man can dream!

Would you guys believe that my 3DO collection is worthless?

Wow ! Nice collections you guys. I’m really debating about my N64 collection. I had it on sale but backed out after a couple of days. A couple of people were interested but it’s now worth more money then even 6 months ago. All 8 of of my games are complete -I was careful to keep boxes on good shape. Biggest regret? I was working at toys r us years ago and had the opportunity to buy more copies of Conkers BFD for $12 a piece. Just wasn’t thinking about turning around and selling them 15 years later. Oh well. It’s. It like there were more then 4 of them or something.

My collection is here

@Smerd Nice collection yourself!

It’s fun looking through other people’s collections. I see @TriforceBun has added to his as well. And I’ll keep on adding for a while. The unfortunate side effect of me going through my collection is that it has activated the collection bug in me again. I’ve been scouring eBay, looking to add to my Saturn or Dreamcast games, and that’s never a good thing. We’ll see if I can hold out!

@Smerd

Lovely--I'm impressed that you still have all those boxes and manuals for the N64! From what people are saying, the quarantine is part of why game prices have been going up. No idea if they'll revert back down once things settle down, or if they'll just stay where they are.

Hinph said:

Would you guys believe that my 3DO collection is worthless?

Really? Most of those games are incredibly valuable. You're not sitting on any Metal Slugs or anything?

@Brandon

Yeah, I'm the same way, I've been visiting my local flea market the past few weeks to see what they have. Was tempted to pick up a Super Scope from them recently! (never owned one or even saw one) But I did nab a Zelda 1 manual. I'd like to have my top three games CIB one day.

Amazingly, I do not own my all-time favorite game (Super Metroid) on its original hardware. I seriously have to remedy that someday.

@TriforceBun

I think you’re thinking of NeoGeo, sir. 3DO was a $700 failure early cd based console that tried to make an open video game format which multiple hardware manufacturers could release like VHS or DVD or something. The problem with it (aside from the ludicrous price) is that it doesn’t really have any killer unique exclusives. All of its best games are available on other platforms, usually with superior versions. My most valuable game is like $58. Haha. You know, I never once regretted buying the thing though. I got it from a classified ad with like twenty games for $200 from some kids who were hastily selling it to upgrade to a PlayStation or whatever in the fall. Then all of the other games I wanted for it could be found for like $5-20 since the system was such a flop. My first online purchase of all time was in 1995 buying a bunch of 3DO games I couldn’t find in local stores. It wasn’t easy convincing my mom to go through with that risky business!

It had Gex. Gex was cool. It had the best version of Road Rash ever made and the closest you could get to arcade quality Street Fighter II at the time. Out of this World, Theme Park, and Wolfenstein 3D were the best console versions at the time. It was the first time I played 3D football and soccer games made well by Electronic Arts since Trip Hawkins founded both companies. Need for Speed was also born on the system. It had the Alone in the Dark games which Capcom most definitely modeled the Resident Evil games off of. One of Naughty Dog’s first games was on the system, a not so good mortal kombat clone they developed before moving on to Crash Bandicoot next. Then there was just a bunch of weird experimental stuff, often involving FMV cutscenes.

Quarantine is what really made me the coolest kid in the neighborhood for a few weeks... it was basically Crazy Taxi combined with Doom and Grand Theft Auto... much jankier but amazing for a bunch of edgy 90s kids to discover! I didn’t play it around my parents. Haha. Now it’s worth $15!



Odd system but I’m glad I found that classified ad and had one. Perfect stop gap between the 16 bit consoles and the good next gen systems. For more info, this guy seems to have done a good job on the history lesson:

@Hinph

I just realized (well, thanks to your post) that I've been conflating the 3DO and the Neo-Geo my entire life. Wow. I'm all mixed up.

I have an old GamePro that raves about Gex, saying that Mario and Sonic better watch out!

But yeah, the important thing is that it sounds like the system gave you some great memories, and it's got its own quirky bit of history itself. I love stuff like that and wish more Nintendo junk fell along those lines of oddball obscurity! (I think that's why I have such a fascination with the Virtual Boy)