I've always been something of a collector. In the late 70s and early 80s it was Star Wars and Hot Wheels Cars. In the mid 80s, it was G.I. Joe and Transformer toys. In the 90s, as I had grown into more of an adult, I had moved onto something more mature - comic book toys. As I entered into the twenty-first century, the toys started to come from Japan and other countries. But one of the things that I've been collecting since the mid-eighties and never really thought of as being collectible was videogames.
Videogames as collectibles makes a whole lot of sense, as experiences have become collectible. It's the reason why souvenir shops at popular tourist attractions exist. It's not enough to simply experience the place, for many people, it's actually necessary to purchase a reminder of the experience, and so they trundle off to the souvenir shop and buy a poster, or a keychain or a spoon, or some other knicknack, as some proof that they were there.
I remember my first entry into the toy collector's market when I went to a comic book convention in the late eighties. It was San Diego Comic Con, and for sale was a figure of Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark. When these figures first came out, they were everywhere -- in toy stores, in drugstores, even major department stores like Sears and Montgomery Ward's had aisles dedicated to these toys. While the movie did extremely well at the box office, the toys did not. The Indiana Jones toyline was never really successful, probably because the figures were so stiff compared to the ultra-flexible G.I. Joes, and probably because one could recreate the scenes from the movie only so many times. Years after the discontinuation of the line of I'd walk into a toy store and see these figures just sitting in the clearance section, gathering a fine layer of dust. I knew the toy was a clearance figure. The package still had the red sticker over the orange one from Toys 'R' Us marking it down as such. What surprised me was the green sticker on the Ziploc bag that enclosed the figure, which read $45. As a fourteen year old boy, I did not understand the economics of this. How could a toy be worth forty-five dollars when I had seen it in the clearance section of toy stores so recently. I didn't want the toy, but I resolved myself to visiting a Toys 'R' Us later that week to see if they had other Indiana Jones toys sitting there. They didn't, and apparently, Indy, mint on card costs about $225 from eBay these days.
More recently, I was looking for Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS (which post-Christmas, still hasn't gone done in price very much), and starting thinking about the collectibility of games. I (and the majority of gamers out there) tend to think of videogames as an entertainment medium, and not as an investment vehicle. In fact, game companies have taken the approach that games are fruit, that is to say that when games are fresh, they are sold at full retail price, and when they get old (a period anywhere from 2 months to a year), they clear their inventory and discount the title down. Online games, such as World of Warcraft can be thought of as a fruit service vendor -- you pay them a fixed amount per month, and they deliver fresh game content straight to your desktop.
I don't think of games as fruit. I think of games as wine. Vineyards grow grapes, which are then processed and turned into wine, bottled, and sold. Wines can be opened and enjoyed right away, or stored away and allowed to age. The winemaker makes the money when the wine is sold, but it is the wine collector who profits years later when the wine reaches maturity and flavor peaks. Most wine, the stuff you pay $10 bucks for, is stuff that's not meant to be saved or collected -- it is for drinking.
Games are meant to be enjoyed right away, but once the gamemaker sells out, that's usually it -- sometimes they issue a second print run, but with the market shelf life what it is, it's usually only the blockbuster games that get this consideration. I've noticed the shelf life of games getting shorter and shorter, as prices for expired games keep going up. Just as some people have a cellar for storing wine, I have a space set aside for storing games and their consoles. (Yes, I know emulation exists, but I want to play games using the original controls on TV and not using some keyboard/mouse approximation).
Most games do not sell for much on the secondary market; as with anything collectible, there are always the rarities and prototypes that one hears about occasionally hitting eBay selling for bundles of money, but the vast majority of games for consoles sell for a fraction of what they cost when they were new. I wasn't the type to ever sell my games after I was done with them, so I kept all my old games along with some of their boxes and their inserts. Apparently on eBay, the "Complete" version of games, which includes the inserts, the manual, and the box, go for good sums of money for the more sought after titles. Just as they packed Indiana Jones cases with more Indys than any other figure, the sought after titles, are actually what I would consider to be game classics of RPG titles that were widely available at the time: Chrono Trigger ($96+), Secret of Mana, and Valkyrie Profile.
Zelda, apparently, is still incredibly popular, and the special collector's edition of Zelda for GameCube goes for an average of $70. Games that were back then touted for their great graphics rather than their great gameplay, you'll find them for around $5.
The reason why these markets exist is because as kids, we didn't think of these games as being collectible, or that one day they'd sell for two or three times what we paid for them. We just thought of them as great games, and we enjoyed playing them. Good gameplay retains value after time, while good graphics become dated and old. With the Wii and the virtual console, the days of console collectors may be numbered -- with great classics making their way onto the Wii, soon we won't be shopping on eBay for Zelda -- we'll just be downloading it off Nintendo's site.
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