How and when did video game collecting become increasingly popular?

[a3quit4s | 4,096]

I'll mirror what a few people have said which should explain the phenomenon: 

@RH@doner24@Andy_Bogomil - Kids growing up and having extra money to spend on something, nostalgia is a bitch

@Dr. Morbis - makes a very interesting point about the pre 2012 and post 2012 eras and maybe that can even be broken down further to 2012 to 2019 and then pandemic which we are still in. The price charting "ETF" graph seems to weigh in on this (basing facts on one graph is dangerous mind you): 

https://www.pricecharting.com/page/price-index-details

@mbd39 @GPX - Make great points about internet popularity. This makes things a lot easier to find out about and also makes things a lot easier to buy. Getting involved in a new hobby is a ton easier with the internet, especially when you take the kids with disposable income arguments and nostalgia. 

@DefaultGen@The Strangest - Looks over at complete loose N64 set, laughs in pandemic

Lots of geat points in this thread which help to track the craze. I agree with 2011-2012 being the start of mass commercialization of retro collecting with the 2017 release of the Nintendo NES Mini being the fuel to start a huge price jump which started on NES and reverberated. The pandemic buying and WATA/HA of early 2020 refueled the 2018-2019 stagnant pricing.

Waiting for the bubble to pop since 2015....when I started collecting.

[Strange | 1,700]

2 hours ago, a3quit4s said:

Looks over at complete loose N64 set, laughs in pandemic

*cries in I think N64 boxes are neat*

[Californication | 1,477]

20 hours ago, The Strangest said:

I can’t speak for the others but AtariAge is alive and well. Atari collecting is almost a separate world itself. People don’t really seem to look past the dirt cheap common carts and cheap CIBs, but there’s a lot of depth to that scene. And AtariAge has always rivaled (and bested, at times) NintendoAge in terms of active user base

Maybe in the threads. The buy/sell forum was moving pretty slow, but it looks like it is picking up a little.

Edited November 3, 2020 by Californication

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,012]

6 hours ago, The Strangest said:

*cries in I think N64 boxes are neat*

I find peace knowing that adjusting for inflation, I still get a decent price on most of my N64 CIBs. It's getting hard to find nice ones I still want for under $100 though

[Super Nintendo Chalmers | 53]

On 11/1/2020 at 1:04 PM, Alex Nguyen said:

I remember as a kid before the age of YouTube, game prices would be like Japan where the older stuff (even games of a beloved and popular series) are usually cheap with a few exceptions. We played it, loved it and move on from there. Nowadays, people are obsessed with having a complete set, somewhat uncommon games are getting super expensive, retro gaming on the rise, etc. Now people seem to focus on getting a Switch collection, it's like "this console is too recent to collect for!" How did we get to this? I would like to know.

Speaking from mainly a PAL perspective, agree with the consensus that 2011/2012 is when you really started to see a noticable shift in interest, both within the collecting scenes and mainstream attitudes. And soon after prices and demand increasing as a result. Before this, talking about 7+ years earlier(I've been collecting since 2005), you would see retro stuff generally relegated to the back of stores, shelves and shafted for the newer stuff, with attitudes and prices reflecting that.

Lots of layers to the conversation and moving parts which are intertwined. Some of those would be Youtube taking off, raising awareness of retro and driving the attitude that retro was/is cool.   The rise of social media, giving people fresh new ways to connect. Plus the more mainstream usage and continued reliance on e-commerce, online shopping, eBay and Gumtree for example, became a bit more ingrained around then, giving us new ways to buy/trade/sell and increasing the awareness of retro.

Commercialisation, nostalgia, emulators, mini releases, etc. there's a big melting pot of reasons which created that perfect storm 10 or so years ago.

Somewhat similar to Pokemon cards at the moment...

And then from there there have been cycles, peaks and all that. Across the board there was slowing in 2018/2019, although Game Boy and Gamecube for example have spiked in recent years. 

 

[TheGreatBlackCat | 20]

On 11/3/2020 at 7:39 AM, Californication said:

TL/DR Got feet wet in 04/05 took a few more steps in 2012 and then dove deep in 2016.

I bought about 40 NES games in 2004/5 and the main N64 titles when I got my first job. But I had a PS3 and 360 close to the time they were released so I put more time in them. I actually had a backwards compatible PS3 out of the box and I never once played a PS1 or PS2 game on it, it never crossed my mind. And then when it acted up Sony wanted $130 to fix it so I got rid of it.

I carried the NES and 64 games around for a while. Played the N64 more than the NES. Then in 2012 when I went to college I really played the NES and started expanding into SNES. (I had both consoles as a kid, but never went deep) I graduated in 2016 and started making some okay money and I really started to expand. Really, I think my collecting has followed how much disposable money I have. 

Cali, you've had the most salient explanations of events, when and why retro gaming took off in recent years, and the steady decline before the pandemic. It's interesting because I took a look at some of the more expensive titles on PS1 back in December 2019 to January 2020. I was surprised to see that games had come down so much. I have a pretty pricy collection and I was watching over all game prices steadily decline for about a year or two. The decline was consistent and I was losing about $50-100 off of my collection month on month.

The pandemic has certainly inflated prices and it has to be somewhat temporary. I just received my Price Charting yearly summary this week and my collection appreciated 142% because of the pandemic. I barely bought much over this past year so the needle shoudln't have moved much on it. There is no way that current vintage video game prices are tenable. I'm closely watching certain high-end titles and they have precipitously fallen just this past month. Some titles that are extremely rare like Burning Rangers and Magic Knight Rayearth are likely to fall and subsequently settle at a much higher cost than pre-pandemic levels. Magic Knight Rayearth isn't moving much and it's such an uncommon title that the price is finally reflecting its rarity. However, titles like Tales of Destiny are coming down by quite a bit. The all-time highs were last month and, given the current economic uncertainty, people look to not be buying.

Game prices appear to move with Millennials as we age. Born in '84 and every retro game uptick corresponds to when my generation began having more disposable income. I'm still childless and only recently married, but the decline in the past year or two could definitely be attributed to more Millennials having children and needing the money and/or space. As more emphasis is focused on family I can see retro gaming seeing even more of a decline. Great for hardcore collectors, but kind of sad that it is a fad for many people and that retro gaming has already had its heyday in many ways.

Because we're seeing what is likely the zenith of retro gaming's popularity, I always suggest to people on /r/retrogaming to buy their Analogue consoles, their Game Boy LCD replacements, and whatever replacement parts now. I have this deep sense that this is the second and last wave for the love of these old consoles. Gen Z is getting older and they don't put as much emphasis on physical media.