Have you ever wondered how much the old games in your collection are worth? As it turns out, people are willing to pay a surprisingly high amount for titles that aren’t even that rare. This infographic looks at the highest prices 13 popular video games have managed to fetch online. Time to dust off those old PlayStation One classics…
The infographic below comes from online gaming outfit MyGamez. It breaks down the top prices paid for iconic video games from the ’80s and ’90s on online auction sites. Surprisingly, even games that sold millions upon millions of copies at the time of release can still fetch a pretty penny. For example, Final Fantasy 7 recently sold on eBay for $1237 — nearly 25 times its original value.
If you’re serious about gaming, you probably have most of these titles in your collection. If you hardly ever play them, it’s probably time to sell. Now all you need to do is find a gullible buyer.
[Via MrGamez]
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23 responses to “How Much Can Your Old Video Games Sell For?”
You need to take into account if its boxed and complete and the condition. A lot of time has passed since then and a mint condition game of that age is quite rare.
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of old games in pisspoor condition
Was going to say this too. There might be 6.3 million copies of Street Fighter 2 sold on SNES, but how many still have the box, manual, extras and still in good condition? I know Super Potato in Japan has walls of loose carts for around 50-70c, but I don’t remember seeing a boxed one when I was there
yeah this “infographic” is lacking info. I’d like to know the condition/rarity of the items sold in this list. I’ve not seen even a Mint CIB with manual OoT go for close to $380. I picked up mine for $160.
although after a proper look I now see that the Oot was actually Factory Sealed.
there are some sources cited underneath the infographic though. Actual rarity is anyone’s guess.
Yeah. People buying these don’t actually want the game itself, they want the physical artefact – the box, manual, disc / cartridge, etc,and the condition is all-important.
If somebody just wanted to play FFVII, they’d buy it off PSN for $15 (or half that if there’s a sale), not fork out $1200+ for a mint condition physical copy.
I’m selling my N64 with six games.
90 cents
Bargain!
My partner recently sold her N64 with a couple of games and sold around eight or nine games individually. She walked away with over $700 which is pretty cool.
She’s shouting me at a nice Indian restaurant this weekend 😀
I once saw an eBay posting for a factory sealed copy of Ninja Gaiden that was going for like, 4,000 bucks.
The fact that you can get a lot of these games on consoles today, does that ruin the overall price?
I mean, you can get Pokemon Blue, Red, and Yellow on 3DS, and you can trade and battle between other #DS consoles. #DS consoles come with larger screens, backlighting, brightness adjustment, and longer battery life. Why would I want to play on an inferior Gameboy/GBPocket?
Also, a lot of the old cartridge games would have internal batteries which are probably dead or dying by now. Doesn’t that ruin the overall price?
There’s also the fact that the NES works best when you dismember it. There’s a certain chip inside that needs to sync with another chip, and if they’re out of sync by a few ms then you get the blinky screen. But if you cut a particular pin off the chip then it ignores the sync error and plays the game. If I knew this back in 1987 then I wouldn’t have blown into a single NES cartridge.
If anything it’s felt to me like ever since the Virtual Console and such happened, prices on old games have skyrocketed. My theory is that it spreads awareness so you’ve got even more people hunting down these older games than there would have been originally, though it’s all entirely unsubstantiated of course 😛
In much the same way you can get a digitally remastered copy of Abbey Road on CD, digital download or stream legitimately – through any number of devices. You can read most of Sir AC Doyle’s Sherlock stories legitimately on kindle for free – or a complete Sherlock HC for under $50 – most Sherlock hardcores would have trouble passing up a first edition novel – if you love the material, you may very well want an irreplaceable physical artifact. Most just want to appreciate the material and enjoy it – hey, that’s totally why it was created! But a smaller percentage want an artifact, a relic, a physical touchstone from another age – the more it looks like it dropped through a time portal in perfect condition – the deeper the magic. And that’s cool too.
I have an unopened platinum edition FFVII … wonder how much that would go for?
I have Super Mario Bros & Duck Hunt on the same Cart! If Mario is $376 by itself then my cart must easily be worth over $600!
😛
I have a rather large collection of retro stuff at home that is packed away for when I can finally buy a house (so quite a while) and have my own museum of sorts.
I own more or less every major (and alot of minor) consoles that have been released, and a ridiculous amount of games.
My most complete set is my Master System collection, all iterations of the console and accessories (at least to my knowledge) and a complete library of games for PAL.
Its pretty cool but one thing that that stops me from saying it is “complete” is the fact that I don’t have original manuals for all the games, probably 90% of them but not all.
The prices of some of these games on their own even without a manual has been multiple 100’s of dollars, to get them with manuals as well just skyrockets the price.
So it doesn’t surprise me to see those prices up there, especially if they were sealed and in mint condition.
Once you get the bug its not price thats the barrier in your head, it’s pure availability.
I have an old NES cartridge with Super Mario Bros, Tetris and some soccer game on it. Sounds like it might be worth something
That copy of FFVII would have to have been new and factory sealed. There are loads of copies around in mint condition. I have two copies. One is battered and one is close to mint but opened. No way in hell anyone would pay over $1000 for it.
Maybe if it was signed by Sakaguchi or something
it’s cherry-picked info like this that is ruining the retro game market… your average joe sees this and thinks they’re sitting on a goldmine so they put their old games on ebay with these ridiculous prices, then everyone else with the same idea follows suit because “that’s how much it sells for on ebay” thereby falsely inflating the market value…
Exactly right. It’s a distortion. And these stupidly simple info graphics omit loads of variables. Tabloid journalism.