I haven't bought a lot of PC games on my thrift store adventures, for a few reasons.
First of all, I'd always assumed that there wasn't much of a collectors' market for them – I would rarely if ever see old PC games at Classic Gaming Expo, for example. Secondly, I just don't know much about them at all – things I'd think would be worth money turn out to be worthless, and things I'd pass up would actually be worth significantly more than some of the console games I'd have spent money on that week.
Recently, though, I've decided that my trawling for old games at bargain prices might be more exciting if I learned a little bit more about which PC games fetch high prices, and most importantly why.
To really illustrate how little I know about the PC collectors' market, I give you the best find of this week, which I actually almost didn't buy. This copy of The Neverhood, an adventure game done entirely in clay, is still sealed. This collaboration between DreamWorks and Microsoft has a cult following and is well and truly out of print.
It's got some something on the shrinkwrap, but in this condition it is worth over $100, well above the $10 that I almost didn't pay because I thought it was too much for sure.
The game that actually got me thinking about and researching PC games is Spear of Destiny, the retail-only spinoff of Wolfenstein 3-D. The original game was released as six shareware episodes, but this full-length game was only sold in boxes in stores. Apparently the CD-ROM version of this would go for upwards of $75, but the 3.5" floppy version here is still worth a little less than half that. Cost me $2.
And I bought this floppy disk version of Sam & Max Hit The Road because I wanted the exclusive Steve Purcell comics inside. $1.50.
Did you know that Acclaim once had the U.S. publishing rights to the Bubble Bobble games? Here are two examples: Bubble Bobble Also Featuring Rainbow Islands for the PC and the "longbox" PlayStation version of Bust-a-Move 2 Arcade Edition. $3.50 each.
Acclaim decided that the series' adorable dinosaur mascots weren't going to sell any videogames to the jaded college kids with too much money that every game publisher coveted in the mid-nineties, so instead of Bub and Bob we got all kinds of ugly amateur bullshit intended to appeal to a sort of futurist Lawnmower Man aesthetic. Toothpicks in the eyes? Really?
There aren't very many good PC price guides out there, so I don't really have a value for this Bubble Bobble port. Digital Press lists the PlayStation game at $15, but these early longbox editions usually trend a little higher. How much higher depends on the game, although this one doesn't seem to vary much.
On the right, two common Genesis games – Sonic Spinball and Ecco: The Tides of Time – that I bought for some unknown reason. $2 each, and worth, oh, about that. Maybe a little less. What was I thinking again?
At $2, Othello for the Atari 2600 is another one in the "what exactly was I thinking" pile. Apparently the answer to this is, at $2 I'll just buy it and figure out later if it was worth spending the money. (But why does the answer always turn out to be "no"?)
Penguin Wars ($3.50) turned out to be pretty hilarious. You're a penguin and you have to throw these balls at a variety of other animals. If you get all of your balls on their side of the court before they have time to throw them back at you, you win! Repeat until you are crying about having spent your allowance on this instead of Kirby's Dream Land.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest and Wolfenstein 3-D for the Super NES were both priced at $7, but for that price I only bought the Final Fantasy game. This is the game that Squaresoft produced especially for Americans, who as we all know are amazingly stupid and could not play Final Fantasy II because it was too complicated, so they had to make us this dumbed-down version. Still had awesome music, which is why I popped it in as soon as I brought it home.
Meanwhile, I went back to the same store a few weeks later and the manager gave me Wolfenstein for a mere $3.50, which was much more agreeable to me. You might remember this as the version of the groundbreaking first-person shooter that was... well, the only word for it is bowdlerized. No Hitler, no blood, no swastikas. Hell, the evil Nazi dogs are even turned into mutant rats.
The painful thing is that for all of the sanitization that the game had to endure at the cold, unfeeling whims of Nintendo, this was a pretty awesome console version of the game. It even supported the SNES mouse. And you could still learn things about the Nazis, such as that they selected members of the S.S. based on how many times could they be shot point-blank in the head and not die.
Finally, some words about a few NES games.
Donkey Kong ($2): Yes, of course I own this already, but "black box" games are inching up in value.
Karate Kid ($2): I had not played this game since we rented it back in the day. Here is my review: Screw. This. Garbage. Seriously, LJN, you guys made such unfathomably awful shit. The game's like 15 minutes long, but they pad that out by making it brutally unfair.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project ($3.50): I promise you that somewhere, in someone's attic, there is a copy of a review of this game that I wrote for my 6th grade newspaper when I was 12.
Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt ($2): You never know when you are going to need one of these.
Images: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
