I'd love to hear about the game ROM. This post is just focusing on a new, slight variant of the packaging, as if the game is a collectible like a stamp or coin.
Something that I wonder about when I see the 'final' results like these NES cartridges sealed in a graded plastic box as a collectible.
Surely the market value of these will only hold up as long as they're within the normal lifespan of the people for whom the original NES is a nostalgia item?
For example: If you were born in 1978 and were 7 to 8 years old when your parents bought the original NES and brought it home with a small selection of games, that's probably a core memory for you. And probably exactly the same demographic now who will pay big money for these things.
But as this generation of people ages, do people who have no childhood memory of a NES (or SNES, or Genesis, etc) because they were born in 1999 consider these things to have any value? Will their value drop significantly when there's no longer a population of age-range-appropriate nostalgic collectors to buy them?
If these are being treated as some kind of "how many dollars per unit" valuable commodity to be traded/hoarded, is it the best possible solution to convert a collection of something like this into currency before the collectors age out of the market?
For an anecdote in a different direction, my father bought a Ford model T a few years ago. Now, "classic" cars of the 60's and 70's are still very popular among those who lived through that time. Maybe your family had one or there was a particular car you wished you could have had. I don't think the model T works like that. Next year, all model T's will be 100 years old, so even if you are 95 today, when you started driving, the newest model T would have been a 20 year old car.
I've been with him to a couple of the local model T club meetings. The demographics are interesting. I was the youngest person there. My dad (late 60's) was the second youngest. But you have to remember that nobody alive, even the real geezers, has experienced a time when a Ford model T wasn't an old car. So by all means, it seems like this hobby should have died out decades ago, even as it continues to die out today. Very strange.
As it stands, it looks like a decent condition Model T can be bought these days for 10-20K, only a bit more than the inflation-adjusted original price. But, I don't really know what the collectors market was like at peak nostalgia.
Googling "psa graded 9.6 NES mario bros" turns up some absurd looking dollar values. I can totally see collecting old video game stuff as a hobby when we're talking about things that a teenager can get for free or nearly free. There's just a vast amount of consumer goods sloshing around North America and lots of peoples' aunts/uncles probably have a SEGA Genesis with some games in a cardboard box on a shelf in the basement.
Or for a few dollars/nominal cost. Sort of like the people who are buying and restoring 30-year old i386 gaming PCs for retro stuff, you can find the hardware for free if you talk to enough older people. Or find a way to intercept it before people literally huck it into a dumpster or take it to electronics recycling. Same for some people who luck into getting nice old 27 inch Sony Trinitron CRT TVs for free.
But when we're talking about thousands of dollars or more per unit for a sealed (so you can never actually open or play it without ruining its value and grading) game in a plastic box, that's a whole other ball game...
Define “high” here - I grew up collecting NES gear and games from the flea market as a teen (circa 2005) and it was perhaps $30 for a working NES console, most games were $5. Perhaps $10-20 for a Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. Few times a year some empty-nesters would hold a yard sale at the flea market and one could snatch up their grown children’s abandoned childhood games, negotiate $20 for the whole box.
Nowadays you go to the flea market it’s a full-time reseller charging e-Bay influenced prices on all products. There’s no deal to be had. Feels like a death of an era sadly.
My personal theory on that is that you bought all your stuff at a specific time (like 2005 or prior) before the population of original 1980s NES-game-owners became old enough, established in their careers and started having enough disposable income to buy back all their childhood favorites in a new collection, driving up the market price per piece.
You get some inter generational nostalgia going on - I inherited my grandmothers NES which I have fond memories of playing any time I visited her.
I don’t play it as much as she did (I have modern games in my backlog to play as well) but I do occasionally buy more NES games to add to the collection.
Honestly, I don't think the average nostalgic Gen X-er is that interested in a sealed video game cartridge.
I think the "sealed, unopened, graded" flavor of collecting is always more of a niche thing, and the actual market potential of tapping into American Gen X video game nostalgia is more clear when you look at sales of the NES/SNES Mini plug and play consoles or the Nintendo Switch subscription for classic games.
Collecting is an absolute rabbit hole, and it's often intrinsically tied to the "lore" and history of the collection's theme/genre more so than a collector's personal feelings of nostalgia.
I hate grading companies, they are a part of the retro industrial complex which made old consoles (ones that were manufactured in the millions, mind you!) and games so expensive. Old stuff should be sold at old stuff prices. Look at the New 3DS, it's approaching the launch price!
Should old stuff be cheaper because it's old, or should it be expensive because you can't get it anymore? I've seen many things turn into "vintage classic collectible" after being "cheap, outdated, old junk" for years. Old body style trucks, CRT Monitors, typewriters, Mosin-Nagant rifles.
Ultimately stuff is worth what people are willing to pay.
The proliferation of selling things online has probably driven up prices more than anything because it connects motivated buyers with sellers with low friction, and allows even a fairly unmotivated seller to do accurate market research.
If you want a good deal on something old, your best bet is thrift shops, garage sales, and FB marketplace.
I don’t really have any doubt that these are ‘real’ - but the article author has, to me, a strange amount of confidence in video game ‘grading’, especially since he himself is an expert:
From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.
confirming a game is real is one of the things psa is good at. the problem is a lot of graders act in suspicious ways when it comes to assigning scores at the high end.
you get a lot of reports about collectors sending a game in, getting a score thats obviously low for what they have and sending it again just to get what they originally expected. some of it might be human error but it could also be on purpose to make customers pay the fee twice.
there are also allegations of giving a high score like 9.6 or 9.8 to games that dont deserve it, like the record breaking mario bros cart a couple years back, to create artificial hype and get more volume at affiliated auction houses (i think karl jobst was the first one who reported on this).
and its basically confirmed that graders do "population management" where scores are based on the number and price of equal graded items on the market instead of just the quality. if high grades are too common prices go down, and if its too rare they get less trade volume and disappointed customers.
The physical quality of the cartridge itself: Some might have scratches or off-centered stickers for example.
While most of them would be pristine to a regular user, these small nitpicky details might matter to collectors and help differentiate between two of them.
Ah yes, because a probabilistic text generator should be trusted to appraise a rare collectible that wasn't even known to exist as of the time it was trained.
It should be trusted about as much as any Random Internet Stranger's appraisal, as I suppose we're both aware.
I personally do trust it a tiny bit more, actually, because it demonstrably did a modicum of due diligence by searching for comparable NES collectibles that were sold in the past, having a look at some collectors' roughly known budgets, and doing some numbers off the results. This is something Random Internet Stranger might or might not have done before just talking out of their ass.
Honest questions:
After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth?
Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
If I had used ChatGPT in the way you described, I would have likely verified that the numbers sourced from search results it found were used correctly when it was "doing some numbers," since LLMs don't really do numbers at all. At that point, why not just search and do the numbers myself?
Answers to your questions below:
> After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth?
No, but admittedly I have a lot of experience selling rare collectibles of several different kinds myself. So I knew enough to know that the only remotely accurate way to estimate the value of something like this (rare, not previously known, possible collector base is very small but dedicated) is to put it up for auction. I recognize that not everyone may understand this, though.
If you browse auctions for collectibles, and dig up the rarest of the rare items, you'll notice that even if the auction house provides an "estimate," they are usually wildly off compared to the actual hammer price, despite coming from the presumable experts in that field. Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.
> Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
Yeah, I quite possibly would have, and I likely would have responded with an answer similar to my answer to the previous question.
I much appreciate the insightful comment and answers.
To sort of justify my approach, collectibles are a field I transparently don't know much about, apart from the occasional and sensationalist press article. The article left me casually curious, and I was suprised to find no such comment here. Still, I really didn't want to dive into yet another rabbit hole, so this felt like the perfect task to hand off to an LLM to serve me a rough estimate. It's a niche of thought I've come to gladly delegate to an LLM, have it quickly google sth for me.
>Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.
That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.
FWIW, my experience with recent LLM models is that even free tiers are pretty capable of finding and aggregating information available on the internet, and doing some basic arithmetic with it. I may need to mention ChatGPT's answer was a lot more elaborate than the number I quoted. Possible scenarios ranged from a "conservative" $600k up to $1.5-2 million in the event of a bidding war between serious collectors at a premier house.
And frankly, considering how naive the question is, I suppose that guess isn't much worse than yours or mine, isn't it? I understand if you don't indulge in this kind speculation, though.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! Yeah, I just wouldn’t speculate that much. If someone had put a gun to my head and asked me for an estimate of value, I’d probably give a huge range like $100k up to several million, and the grade also matters as only a handful of them got a perfect 10. I’d also give the caveat that video games are not really my specialty.
> That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.
Not sure, but yes it might even out on average! But that still doesn’t help you answer the question of the market value of one specific item.
One thing I didn’t mention is that there’s another factor at play in this specific case, which is that total the number of items (97) is likely as large or larger than the current number of collectors in existence who would actually buy them at current market prices. I’ve seen this before with other niche/high end collectibles. This means that if you put all of them on the market at once, you’re likely to crash the price of this item and possibly others related to it. So if you want to maintain the current price, you need to trickle the items out into the market slowly.
One thing that’s interesting is that the blog post just admits how many total items were found. This is information that collectors don’t always have in other situations like this, and simply knowing that there are 97 out there may be enough to keep the market price lower than it otherwise could have been. There are other items in this field (Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware and accessories, first-run pristine sealed copies of classic games like Mario and Zelda, etc) where the total items in existence are thought to be in the single digits.
That was only one of the differences mentioned; the others were on the cartridge itself and included a different sticker on the back and different manufacturing codes.
I was expecting to read about a new variant of the game ROM itself. But, this just sounds like a new, slight variant of the packaging.
It almost feels more like stamp or coin collecting, than video game collecting as I understand it.
they're like physical NFTs
Do we know if the actual binary on the cartridge is the same ?
I'd love to hear about the game ROM. This post is just focusing on a new, slight variant of the packaging, as if the game is a collectible like a stamp or coin.
My first thought too. Someone dump the rom!
Something that I wonder about when I see the 'final' results like these NES cartridges sealed in a graded plastic box as a collectible.
Surely the market value of these will only hold up as long as they're within the normal lifespan of the people for whom the original NES is a nostalgia item?
For example: If you were born in 1978 and were 7 to 8 years old when your parents bought the original NES and brought it home with a small selection of games, that's probably a core memory for you. And probably exactly the same demographic now who will pay big money for these things.
But as this generation of people ages, do people who have no childhood memory of a NES (or SNES, or Genesis, etc) because they were born in 1999 consider these things to have any value? Will their value drop significantly when there's no longer a population of age-range-appropriate nostalgic collectors to buy them?
If these are being treated as some kind of "how many dollars per unit" valuable commodity to be traded/hoarded, is it the best possible solution to convert a collection of something like this into currency before the collectors age out of the market?
For an anecdote in a different direction, my father bought a Ford model T a few years ago. Now, "classic" cars of the 60's and 70's are still very popular among those who lived through that time. Maybe your family had one or there was a particular car you wished you could have had. I don't think the model T works like that. Next year, all model T's will be 100 years old, so even if you are 95 today, when you started driving, the newest model T would have been a 20 year old car.
I've been with him to a couple of the local model T club meetings. The demographics are interesting. I was the youngest person there. My dad (late 60's) was the second youngest. But you have to remember that nobody alive, even the real geezers, has experienced a time when a Ford model T wasn't an old car. So by all means, it seems like this hobby should have died out decades ago, even as it continues to die out today. Very strange.
As it stands, it looks like a decent condition Model T can be bought these days for 10-20K, only a bit more than the inflation-adjusted original price. But, I don't really know what the collectors market was like at peak nostalgia.
I could see the NES being comparable to the Model T.
People are going to know what an NES or an “original Nintendo” is for decades, just like we all know what a Model T is.
My buddy's teenager has a collection of old systems, sort of does it as a hobby. I am not informed, but I guess they don't pay high for stuff.
Googling "psa graded 9.6 NES mario bros" turns up some absurd looking dollar values. I can totally see collecting old video game stuff as a hobby when we're talking about things that a teenager can get for free or nearly free. There's just a vast amount of consumer goods sloshing around North America and lots of peoples' aunts/uncles probably have a SEGA Genesis with some games in a cardboard box on a shelf in the basement.
Or for a few dollars/nominal cost. Sort of like the people who are buying and restoring 30-year old i386 gaming PCs for retro stuff, you can find the hardware for free if you talk to enough older people. Or find a way to intercept it before people literally huck it into a dumpster or take it to electronics recycling. Same for some people who luck into getting nice old 27 inch Sony Trinitron CRT TVs for free.
But when we're talking about thousands of dollars or more per unit for a sealed (so you can never actually open or play it without ruining its value and grading) game in a plastic box, that's a whole other ball game...
Define “high” here - I grew up collecting NES gear and games from the flea market as a teen (circa 2005) and it was perhaps $30 for a working NES console, most games were $5. Perhaps $10-20 for a Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. Few times a year some empty-nesters would hold a yard sale at the flea market and one could snatch up their grown children’s abandoned childhood games, negotiate $20 for the whole box.
Nowadays you go to the flea market it’s a full-time reseller charging e-Bay influenced prices on all products. There’s no deal to be had. Feels like a death of an era sadly.
My personal theory on that is that you bought all your stuff at a specific time (like 2005 or prior) before the population of original 1980s NES-game-owners became old enough, established in their careers and started having enough disposable income to buy back all their childhood favorites in a new collection, driving up the market price per piece.
You get some inter generational nostalgia going on - I inherited my grandmothers NES which I have fond memories of playing any time I visited her.
I don’t play it as much as she did (I have modern games in my backlog to play as well) but I do occasionally buy more NES games to add to the collection.
Honestly, I don't think the average nostalgic Gen X-er is that interested in a sealed video game cartridge.
I think the "sealed, unopened, graded" flavor of collecting is always more of a niche thing, and the actual market potential of tapping into American Gen X video game nostalgia is more clear when you look at sales of the NES/SNES Mini plug and play consoles or the Nintendo Switch subscription for classic games.
Collecting is an absolute rabbit hole, and it's often intrinsically tied to the "lore" and history of the collection's theme/genre more so than a collector's personal feelings of nostalgia.
I hate grading companies, they are a part of the retro industrial complex which made old consoles (ones that were manufactured in the millions, mind you!) and games so expensive. Old stuff should be sold at old stuff prices. Look at the New 3DS, it's approaching the launch price!
I have mixed feelings on this.
Should old stuff be cheaper because it's old, or should it be expensive because you can't get it anymore? I've seen many things turn into "vintage classic collectible" after being "cheap, outdated, old junk" for years. Old body style trucks, CRT Monitors, typewriters, Mosin-Nagant rifles.
Ultimately stuff is worth what people are willing to pay.
The proliferation of selling things online has probably driven up prices more than anything because it connects motivated buyers with sellers with low friction, and allows even a fairly unmotivated seller to do accurate market research.
If you want a good deal on something old, your best bet is thrift shops, garage sales, and FB marketplace.
I don’t really have any doubt that these are ‘real’ - but the article author has, to me, a strange amount of confidence in video game ‘grading’, especially since he himself is an expert:
From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.
confirming a game is real is one of the things psa is good at. the problem is a lot of graders act in suspicious ways when it comes to assigning scores at the high end.
you get a lot of reports about collectors sending a game in, getting a score thats obviously low for what they have and sending it again just to get what they originally expected. some of it might be human error but it could also be on purpose to make customers pay the fee twice.
there are also allegations of giving a high score like 9.6 or 9.8 to games that dont deserve it, like the record breaking mario bros cart a couple years back, to create artificial hype and get more volume at affiliated auction houses (i think karl jobst was the first one who reported on this).
and its basically confirmed that graders do "population management" where scores are based on the number and price of equal graded items on the market instead of just the quality. if high grades are too common prices go down, and if its too rare they get less trade volume and disappointed customers.
Why are some copies of the game "graded" higher than the others if they are all the same copy of the same game?
The physical quality of the cartridge itself: Some might have scratches or off-centered stickers for example.
While most of them would be pristine to a regular user, these small nitpicky details might matter to collectors and help differentiate between two of them.
Talk about a barn find. According to ChatGPT, this box might be worth $1 million or more.
Good thing the owner talked to the author before putting them up for $15 each...
Is ChatGPT well known for its skills in appraising NES cartridges?
Not at all, but's certainly faster at doing a web research about a topic im only interested in passing.
It goes without saying that if anybody has any deeper knowledge or wants to spend more time on research, I'd appreciate a more professional estimate.
Ah yes, because a probabilistic text generator should be trusted to appraise a rare collectible that wasn't even known to exist as of the time it was trained.
It should be trusted about as much as any Random Internet Stranger's appraisal, as I suppose we're both aware.
I personally do trust it a tiny bit more, actually, because it demonstrably did a modicum of due diligence by searching for comparable NES collectibles that were sold in the past, having a look at some collectors' roughly known budgets, and doing some numbers off the results. This is something Random Internet Stranger might or might not have done before just talking out of their ass.
Honest questions: After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth? Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
If I had used ChatGPT in the way you described, I would have likely verified that the numbers sourced from search results it found were used correctly when it was "doing some numbers," since LLMs don't really do numbers at all. At that point, why not just search and do the numbers myself?
Answers to your questions below:
> After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth?
No, but admittedly I have a lot of experience selling rare collectibles of several different kinds myself. So I knew enough to know that the only remotely accurate way to estimate the value of something like this (rare, not previously known, possible collector base is very small but dedicated) is to put it up for auction. I recognize that not everyone may understand this, though.
If you browse auctions for collectibles, and dig up the rarest of the rare items, you'll notice that even if the auction house provides an "estimate," they are usually wildly off compared to the actual hammer price, despite coming from the presumable experts in that field. Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.
> Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
Yeah, I quite possibly would have, and I likely would have responded with an answer similar to my answer to the previous question.
I much appreciate the insightful comment and answers.
To sort of justify my approach, collectibles are a field I transparently don't know much about, apart from the occasional and sensationalist press article. The article left me casually curious, and I was suprised to find no such comment here. Still, I really didn't want to dive into yet another rabbit hole, so this felt like the perfect task to hand off to an LLM to serve me a rough estimate. It's a niche of thought I've come to gladly delegate to an LLM, have it quickly google sth for me.
>Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.
That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.
FWIW, my experience with recent LLM models is that even free tiers are pretty capable of finding and aggregating information available on the internet, and doing some basic arithmetic with it. I may need to mention ChatGPT's answer was a lot more elaborate than the number I quoted. Possible scenarios ranged from a "conservative" $600k up to $1.5-2 million in the event of a bidding war between serious collectors at a premier house.
And frankly, considering how naive the question is, I suppose that guess isn't much worse than yours or mine, isn't it? I understand if you don't indulge in this kind speculation, though.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! Yeah, I just wouldn’t speculate that much. If someone had put a gun to my head and asked me for an estimate of value, I’d probably give a huge range like $100k up to several million, and the grade also matters as only a handful of them got a perfect 10. I’d also give the caveat that video games are not really my specialty.
> That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.
Not sure, but yes it might even out on average! But that still doesn’t help you answer the question of the market value of one specific item.
One thing I didn’t mention is that there’s another factor at play in this specific case, which is that total the number of items (97) is likely as large or larger than the current number of collectors in existence who would actually buy them at current market prices. I’ve seen this before with other niche/high end collectibles. This means that if you put all of them on the market at once, you’re likely to crash the price of this item and possibly others related to it. So if you want to maintain the current price, you need to trickle the items out into the market slowly.
One thing that’s interesting is that the blog post just admits how many total items were found. This is information that collectors don’t always have in other situations like this, and simply knowing that there are 97 out there may be enough to keep the market price lower than it otherwise could have been. There are other items in this field (Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware and accessories, first-run pristine sealed copies of classic games like Mario and Zelda, etc) where the total items in existence are thought to be in the single digits.
Posted yesterday: "Unreleased Versions of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Discovered in Warehouse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099113
Now that is a new variant I actually like to hear about. Thanks for the story behind it!
[dead]
TLDR: The new variant is that the word "repair" was changed to "service" in the user manual.
That was only one of the differences mentioned; the others were on the cartridge itself and included a different sticker on the back and different manufacturing codes.