The Collector's Quest

We're going over the games, books, gadgets, and sundries of the season while Tyler tries to drag us into tangents. Be sure to ask your family for boxes to easily store all those bulk games you've been buying!

Due to unforeseen circumstances this month we don't have a new traditional show yet, but we do have a long After Dark conversation we had with Joe about NES variants. So if you're wondering who "Joe" is or want to hear about weird stickers and date codes on Nintendo games, this is the episode.

We try our very best not to pick a Castlevania game as the spookiest, Halloween-iest game on every platform except the BBC Micro.

We're kicking off the season talking about the rare, the obscure, and the categories of games you might not even know exist. We chose some interesting spooky games to discuss this episode, and they just happen to be the most 90s games ever with lots of FMV games, oddly shaped PC big boxes, and Goosesbumps.

Taking in a blend of collectibility, history, relevance, influence, and Tyler's personal taste, we each come up the first 10 PS2 games we'd start our collections with. Is this the first time we talk about the Trance Vibrator?? 😳

Hide the kids and perhaps hide your ears. We are talking about porn games, from delightfully quirky Atari games, to the dark, dark origins of some of your favorite Japanese companies, to longtime grails like the Panesians.

We are here to reiterate that unless you have a plan to corner a collectibles market, drive hype and speculation, and sell at a price determined by your business plan, you are not INVESTING in video games by filling your room up with boxes of PS2 games that might be worth more one day. Also maybe max your 401k and take stock of how those $10-20 purchases add up to $100s or $1000s over time.

McDonalds is one of the most American things ever, but the Famicom game Donald Land is a whole McDonalds platformer that never got released in America. We're talking about western licenses that never got western releases. You know, the import stuff you can look at and go "I can't read Japanese but at least I know what Back to the Future is!".

A basketball fan and a guy who doesn't watch sports cover four reasons you might collect perhaps the least collectible genre of video games.

Or as good as it might realistically get. Near term economic uncertainty aside, we're discussing some current and future factors that might have us looking back on today and saying "I wish I bought that before it blew up". Tools, charts, and ease of access to detailed information are unusually poor but there are numerous startups trying to improve this. The days of CIB Nintendo games costing 1.5x what cartridges do, let alone near mint copies, are NEVER coming back so it might be time to plan realistic future goals rather than hope good-stuff prices somehow return to 2008.