Video Game Collecting

The hobby of collecting and preserving video games, video game consoles and related memorabilia, with most systems and titles becoming sought after by collectors years after being discontinued, and collectors often specializing by platform, genre or character. Enthusiasts spent years accumulating older cartridges through venues such as internet auctions as childhood games reached "retro" status roughly fifteen to twenty years after release, with rarity long mattering more to price than physical condition. Beginning around 2018 the hobby's high end changed considerably as third-party graders introduced professional condition-grading standards for sealed, unopened games and major auction houses began accepting them for sale, driving sealed early releases, a widely reported 2019 sale of a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for about 100,000 dollars among them, to prices far beyond what the hobby had previously seen, a shift whose legitimacy is still debated among hobbyists, journalists and the games' original developers.