Final mail call: Tales of collector's woe
It really sucks to be a serious game collector these days. Share your lamentations with our sympathetic ears.
And just one final solicitation for listener mail before we embark upon our Retronauts recording spree this weekend. In addition to our more standard single game- or franchise-focused episodes, we'll also be discussing that ultimate bane of the modern retro game enthusiast: The collector's bubble.
Have you seen the prices on old games lately? That stuff is bananas. Crummy NES games no one cares about selling for the price of a decent computer. Game Boy games no one has ever heard of demanding the better part of a decent month's salary. Oh god, and don't even ask about PC Engine or Saturn imports — you really don't want to know.
Where once it was only genuine rarities like Panzer Dragoon Saga or EarthBound that commanded triple-digit dollar prices, these days the libraries of most classic game systems have become veritable minefields of sadness and poverty-in-the-making. How did it happen? Where has this insanity come from? What painful experiences have we had ourselves? All of this and more will be up for discussion this weekend....
And how, you may ask, can you participate in our woeful lamentations? Why, by sending us your own thoughts and experience via email to be read aloud on the show. Please send over your thoughts no later than 7 a.m. PT Sunday morning, July 23. My email address is jparish [at] retronauts [dot] com. Please don't leave replies here or on Twitter, because I need to have everything centralized in a single location.
If you've spent yourself into the poor house trying to acquire a precious trinket of gaming, or have abandoned collecting, or want to brag about how you won the lottery and purchased one of everything, or just want to speculate on how it's come to this... we're game. Send over your thoughts! We'll read your missives live, while struggling to choke back our tears....
