When you're a retro gamer but collecting looks bleak.
I feel like I've been a retro gamer as long as it was even possible to be one. When Super Nintendo was still the biggest thing out there and we were excitedly waiting for Nintendo 64 to drop, I would frequently stop in at my local Funcoland. Their trade-in and used game prices would change every month, and each month they had a newpaper-like print of every game that was available, how much it sold for and how much they offered for a trade-in. Every single game! And the paper wasn't that big!
It was only one generation behind back then, but I was already interested in finding the good NES games that I'd missed out on when they were new. Just a few years later, NES emulation would explode in popularity, and it was easier than ever to at least try out games that I hadn't gotten to play previously thanks to rom sites popping up everywhere. (Just make sure you delete those roms within 24 hours if you don't own the game, okay?)
Fast forward to today, and I'm still playing retro games and loving them. But a few things happened in the past couple years to prevent me from doing the retro game hunting I used to love doing. The big one was Covid, and was and continue to be extremely anxious about being around too many people. So I haven't gone to almost any used game places in the past three years. But the other big event was the rise of Wata grading games and used prices going up to crazy numbers. I continue to think that this whole thing is a big scam, prices are being artificially inflated in order to draw others into it, and that some people are making lots of money off of convincing people games are something to invest in. And the bubble seems to be bursting. Prices have been dropping dramatically on these games, sometimes as much as 90% less in just months. But it did still make prices go up in general on a lot of used games regardless. And I just started getting disgusted with the whole thing. After all, what's the good of a game that's sealed in a plastic container? A game is meant to be played, and I play the games I collect. The whole thing really killed my enthusiasm for looking to get used copies of old games.
Luckily there's a thriving homebrew community out there, still making NES games, and really good ones at that! My wife got me Micro Mages for my birthday, and I was absolutely hooked! So I started thinking that maybe, instead of worrying about whether a used game is appropriately priced, or if it's a bootleg, or any stuff like that, maybe I would start collecting the NEW retro games. That way my money is going directly to the new NES developers who made the game. For Christmas this past year she got me Project Blue for the NES, so my collection is now starting to slowly grow. There's several more titles I'd like to add from this same publisher, Broke Studio, so I'm looking forward to adding many new NES games to my shelf.
