As I have just bought a house and a mortgage can be kind of expensive, I will no longer be able to pay up to $110 for a Playstation 3 game…so I have decided to get into the retro gaming scene. The way I figured it, the old game systems and games would be cheap because the graphics and game play are outdated….but how wrong I was.
Apparently older games and consoles are considered collectables now as there are only a limited number of them left which also makes them quite valuable. Take for example a Nintendo Entertainment System: Release in Japan in July 1983, US in 1985 and Aus in 1987 retailing for between $150US ($165AU) and $300US ($330.00AU)…(I could only find US prices) depending on what version you bought, a system which is now almost 30 years old will now sell on eBay for up to $400-$500AU if it is still in it’s box and $100-$200AU for the console itself….that’s as much as a brand new Wii or Xbox360 and much more that it originally cost, especially since the US gets consoles and games cheaper than here in Australia!
There are so many old game consoles out there, you would have to take out a second mortgage to be able to afford them all (click here for a list) + a library of games to support them and sometimes the games can even cost more than the consoles themselves with the record being $17,500US paid for a NES cartridge (Article).
There is quite a large movement into retro gaming nowadays making it even harder to find certain items but thanks to the internet, you can at least see reviews of games so you can decide which ones to avoid, the generations who played those games are now running game review websites and have sections devoted to older games. and there are heaps of them such as:
Classic Game Room, Angry Video Game Nerd (Warning: He uses some foul language) and Screwattack’s Video Game Vault.
Unfortunately, I sold a lot of my games and systems when I was younger because I wanted to move onto bigger and better things and now it is going to cost me a fortune to get it all back…but all is not lost, there are some places where these things will not cost the earth…I found two websites in Britain that seem to have a lot of the old systems and games in stock (some even brand new) and are not asking too much for them. The good thing about buying from Britain is that they use the PAL system just like Australia as opposed to the NTSC system used by the US, although you may have to get a power adapter. The websites are Retrogames & Console Passion, I have not purchased anything from Retrogames yet, but I did order Virtuacop 1 & 2 for the Sega Saturn from Console Passion and they work great. Of course there are always other methods to play older games like MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) machines you can purchase that contain thousands of games, these are essentially arcade machines with PC’s running inside of them or you can download emulators for your computer from the internet, but you must own the original game to be able to download the version for PC and it will never be the same as playing the original with the original controller.
As soon as I can afford an old console I will do a review of it.
Chris Thursfield
