Top Ten Most Collectible Video Games 583
Obiwan Kenobi writes "Gamespy has a new article up on the Top Ten All Time Rarest Video Games. This wacky list includes such gems as Chase the Chuck Wagon and Bubble Bath Babes, the only NES game with nudity (square nipples, anyone?). Makes me wonder what the top ten rarest PC games are..."
Sierra games! (Score:4, Interesting)
Original EGA versions, not that mouse-controlled VGA shit! I'm talking about typing commands at the ] prompt.
Doom Anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
I would ebay it if someone wants to make an offer.
(I have 71 + comments, 0 negatives)
Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy... (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite rare game... (Score:3, Interesting)
OMG!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Rare.. but bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
Quite frankly I didn't see a game there that looked worth playing. Is that why they're rare?
As far as the 2600 goes, I'd have to say Pitfall and Dragster where the best there.
Rare games for the PC: I have, in my posession, the full boxed version [with manual] of "Solo Flight" on 5 1/4" disk written by none other than Sid Meier!
A wise investment? (Score:5, Interesting)
With geek items like this, the half-life is even shorter. Magic The Gathering cards are already past their prime in terms of collectable value; once the people who played the NES in their youth are past the age of buying this stuff, watch the prices plummet.
-BbT
Re:Never Grew up! (Score:1, Interesting)
Rarities Reprinted (Score:3, Interesting)
This shows that: 1) there is a market for crappy old games, 2) there is a way to get crappy old unreleased games, 3) the rarest games are still out there, and 4) I'm dumb enough to buy it.
I can't say I'm not enjoying the old stuff, but Laser Blast is way too boring to go for the !!!!!!! score. I can't believe I ever did that.
KQ, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Note that 'Collectable' don't exactly mean 'Goo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Chuckwagon is not all that rare (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of what led to the video game crash was the proliferation of poor quality, quickly produced games that were flooding the market. Chase The Chuckwagon came to typify exactly the type of game that was being rushed out to "cash in" on the video game craze. Owning it is like owning a piece of Enron stock. Not exactly "rare", but it has a story all its own.
Re:Sierra games! (Score:5, Interesting)
] use candelabra
i was only 9, i had no idea what a "candelabra" was.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre for ATARI 2600 (Score:3, Interesting)
Starflight for the PC (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember many happy hours spent mining, trying to get the most money, upgrade my ship, find out all the secrets, make alliances with alien races, etc. Very fun, and almost impossible to find now (not counting downloading it from a abandonwarez site, of course.)
Rarest in terms of numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
There was this company called Active Enterprises [atarihq.com]. It basically amounted to a guy in his garage making games. They had a cart called Action 52 [atarihq.com] for the NES which had 52 games on it. Of course to call these things "games" was a stretch - most were like quick coding excercises. The idea was that they would make up for in quantity what they lacked in quantity. At an asking price of $199.99 its unclear if his target audience was Blockbuster (which is used to getting hosed with rental pricing) or parents who figured that 52 games at the price of four was a deal.
One of the games on Action 52 was The Cheetahmen. Apparently Active Enterprises also wrote a game called Cheetahmen II [atarihq.com] . I say apparently because Active never released it. It appears that what happened was Active ordered 1,000 copies of Cheetahmen II and then couldn't pay the manufacturer for the carts, so after a year or two the manufacturer just sold them to people (which is legal).
So, Cheetahmen II is probably one of the rarest cartridges ever made.
Sarien is your friend.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not an emulator. Those old Sierra games were developed with a system called AGI. Pretty much the same data files were used on all supported systems with an AGI interpreter tweaked to run the data files. Sarien is a GENERAL AGI interpreter and works quite well. As a matter of fact, I finished Leisure Suit Larry on my Debian box last week. I also tried out but haven't seriously played Kings Quest I and Space Quest with it as well. If you still have some old IBM PC versions of these games laying around (or aren't above some abandonware digging...) then Sarien will take care of you.
One pisser is that it only has one save game slot but there is a workaround. The saved games can be copied and renamed elsewhere allowing arbitrarily many games to be saved albeit in a PITA fashion.
Oh yeah, If you try this be sure to get the ID database file. It is a separate download for some reason and Sarien won't correctly run most games without it.
Cheers!
Re:Note that 'Collectable' don't exactly mean 'Goo (Score:3, Interesting)
-B
Heh (Score:2, Interesting)
Only like a few hundred were made, and my mother drove 3 hours to get it...
I still love that game...
Herzog Zwei (Score:2, Interesting)
Herzog Zwei [classicgaming.com] is one of my favorite games of old times. I believe the real time strategy aspect of the game was the first of it's genre.
One time (no not in band camp) I played a game head to head with a friend for four hours with neither of us doing much damage to each other's main base. Had to quit the game.
Bubble Bath Babes, the only NES game with nudity? (Score:3, Interesting)
Want to see it yourself? Enter "justin bailey" in passcode area (use 12 spaces to fill in the last 12 spaces) and you will start in very good shape. Just get the freeze gun, the power tank (the one closest to the start of the game) and go kill Mother Brain.
NES games with nudity (Score:3, Interesting)
These games were sold without Nintendo's approval, but they are full, original games, not simple ROM hacks with changed graphics.
If you do some searching (searching in Japanese helps
Anyway the article's list seems kind of U.S.-centric... It does list a couple of Japanese games, but there are in fact much harder games to find (that constitute a much greater prize) than those. ^_^ Well, aside from Phantasy Star for the Megadrive, which really IS rather hard to find.
Quite a few ArcadeCD (as opposed to SuperCD) PCEngine games are rather rare. The Arcade Card games were among the best ports of many arcade games, (very notably among them, the best version of Strider).
No matter what the origin though, rare games are expensive. ^_^ It's fun to find all the great hard-to-find classics (like Suchie Pai Remix for the Saturn, which undid the censorship of the original Suchie Pai port -- Suchie Pai Special, but was produced in far smaller numbers).
Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A wise investment? (Score:2, Interesting)
You need to go into collecting because you like it. I have a fairly meager collection of about 1000 games. Thats not even close to being hard core. I am mearly casual about it. I snag things only I like. I could care less about what its worth. That is secondary to why I buy the games. I buy them because I like them.
With DVD's I am the same way. I buy movies I like. Even got a copy of 'They Live'. I had NO idea it was a 'rare' dvd. I bought it when it came out and gladly paid my 20 bucks for it. Because its a fun movie.
The example you gave of Magic the gathering is one of the pitfalls of collecting things I dont really care for, some collecting is a fad. You have to watch out for it. Also collecting takes time and sometimes lots of money. I had the same thing happen to me with baseball cards. I got into it because I thought it MIGHT be worth something. Not because I like baseball, and find the cards cool.
Forget 'collectors editions'. Those are usually HUGE runs with a sticker slapped on em. RARE things are almost always things that were never 'popular'. Junk people never wanted. For example Star Wars toys. Most of the toys are worth about what they originaly came out for. However RARE, and thefore valuable, are the toys that never got opened. Still has the box is rare, but not as rare as unopened. Mail ins are usually rare also. Not a lot of people do it, and they are usually small runs of things.
Another thing to keep in mind is things do not become valuable overnight. Sometimes it takes YEARS. Think of the fun quote from Raiders. "take this watch, 10 dollars from a street vendor. I bury it in the sand for a thousand years. Priceless"
My rarest PC game? Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga. I didnt buy it to 'collect' it. I bought it to blow some Kilrathi scum from the sky!