大象传媒

By Jordan Middler // 大象传媒 The Social contributor // 17 August 2021

Despite mass production and huge popularity, many modern video games are worth a surprising amount of money, and you may own some of them.

Earlier this year, Heritage Auction, a company that had previously made headlines for the sale of the mythical “Nintendo PlayStation”, sold a copy of Super Mario 64 in perfect condition, for $1.5 million dollars. This sent a shockwave around the industry, as it was the highest sale for a single game ever recorded. What made it even more surprising is that it was almost double the price of the last record breaker, a copy of The Legend of Zelda for the NES. This previous record had only been set days before.

Much of the cost of the game was attributed to there being “fewer than five copies in such condition”. This may be surprising, as while the game is 25 years old, it was massively popular, and thus the expectation would be that there were many copies in such good condition. However, Nintendo 64 games were famous for their cardboard shells, which were often dented or scratched before they even hit the shelves.

Mario and Zelda aren’t the only iconic Nintendo franchises whose games can sell for well above their original retail price. Pokemon, the highest grossing entertainment franchise in history, is famous for the rate in which its games increase in price.

Pokemon HeartGold and Soul Silver, two games released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS, now regularly fetch upwards of £100 to £200 in complete condition on auction sites.

A large attributing factor to this is the extremely popular aftermarket of reproduction cartridges. These cartridges are hard to spot, and often feature game-breaking defects such as the inability to save your progress.

While some of the increase in the prices for games can be attributed to the collectors’ market, and the rise in popularity of “flipping” games, the process of buying games for cheap and selling them at a profit, the COVID-19 pandemic massively impacted prices too. Retro consoles such as the PlayStation 1 and 2 saw a huge increase in the price of games that were previously only a few pounds.

This was a combination of factors. First, the video game market grew massively during the pandemic, and second, there were a large number of people rediscovering the hobby, and thus wanting to purchase games from their childhood, causing the market to rise. Games like Def Jam Fight For New York and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door have almost tripled in price.

If you’re the type of person that kept all of your old games, it may be worth taking a look, because you may be sitting on a gaming gold mine.