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by mepiethree
1669 days ago
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“it’s hard to justify any real value for a US copy of Super Mario Bros, no matter how old or sealed it is, as it’s just a newer copy of the same game.” This point is lingered on for a while and I don’t get it. Nothing about pricing collectibles is a rational assessment of utility: value is essentially a function of rarity, desirability, and condition. Obviously, in this case, the US versions score higher on “desirability” for US collectors, because the whole point of buying the things is for the sentiment. You can, after all, emulate the games in a million different ways. I collect civil war stuff, and we have a similar ‘paradox’. Confederate relics score low on “condition”, because the confederacy had worse iron. Yet, confederate relics fetch very high prices. Why? Because they score high on “desirability”: many of the few people who are VERY interested in the civil war are (unfortunately) very sympathetic to Confederates. |
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I think for older collectors, it was due in large part to a very weird shift in recent years, epitomised by THAT copy of Super Mario Bros selling for so much.
Traditionally, high priced games were what you described, a combination of rare, desired (maybe not so much for play reasons) and condition. Examples of this were Stadium Events, NES Championships and to a much lesser degree Uforia (which was released only in certain PAL markets)
But the SMB copy was weird. It went to outlandish lengths to justify its "rarity". Sticker sealed with hanging tab not punched out. But other than those relatively minor factors (Opinion, I know), it was entirely unspectacular. Worse still it was an example of a highly published and distributed game, it is somewhat easy to obtain a decent condition boxed copy of SMB for a good (Sub $100) price and (at a guess) to get GREAT condition, it probably wouldn't have gone for much more than $200, just due to the commonality of it.
Game collectors struggled with this paradigmatic shift moment and how to internalise it, most of us (myself included) were somewhat worried it was the sign of non-collector money coming to drive up the prices massively. This happened recently with Pokemon cards to such an extent that Target in the U.S stopped stocking them because man-babies were fighting over it.
I can understand where the author is coming from in the piece. When taken in to account everything, it is functionally wrong, but if you scope it down to people who collect for collecting sake, then it holds true but its a denial of existence to a second segment of people that now exist in game collecting (For better or worse depending on what side of the sale you're on). But it is also fantastically reductionist even for a collector to make that statement. Age isn't the single factor that makes a game's desirability go up. As you've correctly pointed out, Rarity, conditional and personal desirability. (I recently really REALLY wanted a copy of Faxanadu, nothing special, but I paid more than most probably would of because of that).
But its really hard to properly contextualize what happened since the moment that copy of SMB sold for so much. It's not really well understood or even finished having its impact on collecting.