Vintage Values

This week I spotted a tweet from Keith Stuart, the Guardian's gaming correspondent (@keefstuart). He'd bought an NTSC copy of the near mythical Snatcher on PC Engine. Despite not actually owning a PC Engine. Long story short, he replied to a tweet of mine about me looking for Snatcher on Mega CD saying that he was too, along with Sonic CD, which is fetching silly money. 

This surprised me, because I own a copy of Sonic CD, having picked it up from the bottom of a bargain bucket full of unloved games for unloved consoles for about four quid sometime around 1995, so I never expected it to be all that expensive. Yet somehow in the intervening years prices for it have shot up, so much so that a used copy of a twenty year old game costs almost as much as what it did when it was new. The first hit from a cursory search of eBay has it going at £37.00, with a sealed copy going for a whopping £499! This is madness! First of all, why are there any sealed copies of a game that old even in existence, especially a game as good as Sonic CD, and second, £499! Sonic CD isn't even all that rare, is it? What kind of insane nerd would pay that out that sort of money for a game?

Wait a minute, that would be me. I spotted Mickey Mania on eBay afterwards and the thought genuinely did cross my mind. Mickey Mania is a title I've wanted for years. I somehow had a demo of it and it was so far superior to the Megadrive version that it became a case of the Mega CD version or nothing. Unfortunately by that point, Mega CD games were already getting pretty hard to find, so I wound up not getting it. Now I've seen it on eBay though, I've wound up valuing titles already in my Mega CD collection, just for the kicks. They're mainly titles that I'd thought were pretty insignificant in the history of gaming, yet would never get rid of because they are some of the first I ever bought with my own money. 

So let's look at them. I searched Mega CD in ebay and arranged by highest price first so that I could pick out titles in similar condition to my own, ie, immaculate. After the initial shock of the £999 copy of Final Fight (which I don't have) the first find was Keio Flying Squadron. Would you like a copy? Why that would be a minimum £50 my good man, unless you want a sealed copy, then it would be £494.99. Paws of Fury, yours for the bargain price of £44.99. Battlecorps, £20, or you can have it sealed for £42.99. Ground Zero, frankly awful, yet a great investment, I picked it up when I didn't know better for a fiver in '95, today it's £35. Pugsy is going for £34.99, Microcosm, £18.99. Shockingly, even Road Avenger, Tomcat Alley, Thunderhawk and the Sol Feace/Cobra Command double Pack are going for a tenner each, and they're as common as a very common thing. Then there is Pitfall, which I couldn't find on eBay. I should hope so too, I spent eight years tracking a copy down. Perhaps it's a title so rare that I could name my price, but probably not. I've taken to Twitter to see what the retro gaming community I seem to have fallen in with thinks. 

Still, my collection of bad to middling Mega CD games is somehow worth a fortune and with the notable exception of Sonic CD, which is rightly considered a classic and one of the best in the series, I have no idea why. I mean it's not as if your life is going to be enriched by playing Ground Zero. It's wank. Really, it is. Great though I believe Thunderhawk to be, it's by no means a classic and although Paws of Fury is beautifully animated and a lot of fun, it's not a title that would ascend to the pantheon of fighting game greats. Also despite what I said earlier, after seeing these insane values and thinking about them like a rational adult, I've really been turned off trying to find the games I wanted so badly all those years ago and couldn't get hold of. They're all titles that are sort of considered in some circles to be their definitive versions. Titles like Flashback, which seems to be impossible to find anyway, Final Fight, Earthworm Jim, the Ecco games, Mickey Mania, Eternal Champions or even Shining Force CD. Really, I'd given up hope of owning Snatcher or Shining Force CD years ago, they're rarer and harder to find than traditionally mined, naturally sourced, billion year old Sea of Tranquility Moon Cheese after all, but somehow even Mickey Mania costs three figures now, and it's just a platformer whose defining features were a trip through the titular character's greatest hits and the level where Mickey gets chased by a moose. I could get it on PS1 for one figure. But I don't want to, I want it on the Mega CD because I had a demo of it, and that's probably why the values on games like this are so high.

Despite all the ranting, now that I'm starting to come to terms with the shock that other people besides me like the Mega CD, I now want to value my N64 collection. There's a boxed copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day in there, and it's in great condition. Like the Mega CD, I bought most my games cheap on the second hand market after the N64 became a defunct console. And that was mainly because I couldn't afford a PS2 but needed new games to play. It's quite likely that their individual values have appreciated greatly. I could be sitting on a fortune. While I'm at it, I might as well check out my stack of PS1 games too. There's a few esoteric titles in there that might be worth a bit as well. Sometimes I even wonder how much my Atari 800xl cassettes would be worth if I still had them. Really though, there's no point, because knowing the value of my retro games collections isn't going to matter a tiny bit. I'm not going to be selling any of my old games anytime soon. Perhaps I'm being irrational here, but they have a far greater sentimental value. They're like a record of my childhood almost, although that notion is perhaps no more irrational than the way some retro titles are valued on eBay.

Nostalgia it seems, is now worth an irrational amount of money.