A good-old-fashioned PS1 find
Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — Playstation games are way too cheap
My name is Steve. I've been collecting retro video games for about 15 years. I'm a deal hunter, and I do a lot of reselling to bring my overall spend down. This has been a great way to build a collection at almost zero net cost. But: aggressively chasing cheap games puts me in a lot of weird situations, and fighting for deals frequently forces me to ask questions about the direction of the retro gaming market, the ethics of buying low and selling high, and my own obsessions and greed.
Do you want to spend 10 minutes, a couple times a month, reading about my finds and eavesdropping on my internal monologue as I try to figure out what compels me to keep buying all this stuff??? Then you’ve come to the right place.
The seller’s photo of the games. Would you pay $20 Canadian for this?
The find:
Jersey Devil (PS1)
Twisted Metal: Small Brawl (PS1)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (PS1)
Tomba 2 (PS1)
Einhander (PS1, no manual)
Jet Moto (PS1, no manual)
Jet Moto 2 (PS1, no manual)
Grand Theft Auto London Missions (PS1, no manual)
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (PS1, no manual)
Contender (PS1, no manual)
Search and Destroy (PS2, loose)
Guitar Hero III (PS2, loose)
This one was an old-fashioned score.
What do I mean by "old-fashioned"?
There was a time, about 15 years ago, when most people weren't aware of game collecting as a concept. Smartphones didn't exist and it wasn't possible to check a game's eBay value instantly, so people often did their buying and selling with little or no knowledge of a game's online resale price.
You'd load up Craigslist, or go to a flea market, and find video game stuff that was preposterously underpriced. And you'd buy it. End of story.
Sounds like insanity, I know. But that’s how we lived in the mid-2000s. The internet hadn’t yet seeped into the atmosphere and people were fine with it.
Right now, in 2020, things aren't so simple. Most sellers are aware of the value of their games — and, even if they AREN'T aware, today’s stratospheric retro-game prices have created such intense competition among buyers that almost every buying opportunity turns into a de facto auction. Anything priced too far below eBay value is almost sure to get multiple offers.
Retro games are a seller’s market. And so I've learned to accept deals that are less than amazing. Fifteen years ago I was buying entire game collections for under $20 (seriously!) at yard sales. Now I'm happy if I'm paying 60 per cent of eBay value (or less) for my games.
There is one online marketplace, though, where these seller-friendly market dynamics don’t always apply. I'm not going to mention this service's name or supply any real identifying details about it. It's my happy place and I hope to keep it that way. I’ll call it Howard’s House of Crap, because that is cooler than its actual name.
It's a web-based, local pickup service, similar to Kijiji and Craigslist but not as well known. The way Howard’s markets itself is a little different. Rather than positioning its platform as a way for users to make money, Howard’s sells itself as a way for people to recycle unwanted items. People who use this service are mostly looking to get rid of things. As a result, many of them aren't too concerned about getting anything in return.
Using Howard’s, for me, is like stepping through a portal to 2005, before the world started thinking that old video games might be the next great investment vehicle.
Video games don't show up a lot on Howard’s. I often go weeks with no results. But the other day I refreshed the page and saw a pile of Playstation games. There was only one picture (I’ve embedded it at the top this post) and all I could see were the titles on the spines of the jewel cases. There were a couple high-priced names in the mix, but no information about condition or completeness.
The ad had been up for nearly 20 minutes. (On any other online marketplace it would have been gone in five.) There was no price on the listing. The seller was looking for offers. I asked her what she wanted and this is what she said:
"Uh not much, ~$20 I guess?"
The squiggly line seemed to indicate a lack of confidence about the $20 figure, but I decided to treat it as a firm number. It was definitely low enough for me.
It turned out the seller lived about 10 kilometres away from me, in a part of the city with poor access to public transit. I hopped on my bike and cranked as hard as my legs would crank. The route was almost entirely uphill.
We'd arranged a contactless pickup so that nobody would infect anybody else with COVID. After about 50 minutes of riding I rolled into a quaint suburban driveway and saw my games bulging out of a shopping bag that was dangling by its handles from a porch railing — all those brittle jewel cases suspended six feet above black asphalt with just a thin strip of plastic between them and disaster.
Anyway I was able to get them down without incident. I made myself comfortable on the seller's doorstep while I assessed the merchandise: all in pretty good condition with the exception of some missing manuals.
This was a better deal than I'd had in a long time — so good that it felt a little wrong. The agreement with the seller was that I'd leave money in the mailbox. I could easily have left more than we'd agreed upon, and I considered doing that. Game hunting is a zero-sum pursuit: your great deal is always someone else's financial loss. Maybe I didn’t NEED to squeeze this one for every last dollar. Maybe I could give the seller a better reward for taking care of these games for 20 years.
But what would the seller make of receiving several times the agreed-upon amount? What if the bonus cash tipped her off to the fact that she'd lowballed herself? Wouldn't that make her feel MORE cheated, instead of less? She had set the price, after all. And if I hadn’t snagged this pile of expensive games for $20, well… surely somebody else would have.
Having nicely rationalized all this petty larceny in my head, I slipped $20 in the mailbox. It had been a while since I'd paid so little for so much.
What's happening to the haul?
The keeper: The only game from this lot that I'm actually adding to my collection is Einhander. It's one of the rarer 1990s Squaresoft games, and (I think?) the only scrolling shooter ever developed by the company. (Unless you count King’s Knight.) As someone who spent his teen years as a Squaresoft fanboy, I've always been curious about this game, but never curious enough to pay the very high eBay price to get a legit disc. The current Pricecharting value for a complete copy is about $180. Mine doesn't have the manual but does have the back cover art, so I'd put its value at closer to $125. (All prices are in Canadian dollars.)
For sale: What I love about this lot is that it included a genuine heavy-hitter: Tomba 2 is pretty hard to find, and the game has had a major post-pandemic bump in resale price. Pricecharting value for a complete copy is currently around $120. I’m not a huge fan of 1990s 3D platformers, and my focus is mainly on Nintendo stuff — so those were two good reasons not to keep this one around. I put it on eBay with a $145 "buy it now" price and sold it in a couple days.
Also going up on eBay: Jersey Devil (Pricecharting value $67), Twisted Metal: Small Brawl (sold for $42), Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (sold for $30).
The leftovers: Sometimes games aren't worth the effort it takes to sell them individually. Search and Destroy and Guitar Hero III had negligible value, and I don’t do Playstation 2 games at all in my collection, so I threw them right in the trash. The two Jet Moto games, Contender, and GTA London all went on eBay with low starting bids. They sold for a grand total of $1. Who Wants to be a Millionaire is so bereft of value (no disrespect to Regis, RIP) that I'll probably eventually throw it out — but it's in a good jewel case so I'm keeping it for the time being, and maybe I'll reuse that case if I ever have a loose disc I need to store or ship.
Total paid: $20
Likely earnings after eBay fees: $242
Value of games kept for my collection: $125
Total profit: $347
(All prices in Canadian dollars)