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Top Ten Most Collectible Video Games
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..."
Police Quest I, Kings Quest I, Space Quest I, and Leisure Suit Larry!
Original EGA versions, not that mouse-controlled VGA shit! I'm talking about typing commands at the ] prompt.
Can't believe that my floppy disk version of the original Doom (4 disks) that I had to order directly from id isn't worth something. Still have the box and it's in mint condition.
:)
I would ebay it if someone wants to make an offer.
(I have 71 + comments, 0 negatives)
...on cassette tape, for a TI 994a!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
My favorite rare game was written by a now dead transsexual for the Apple ][. And I am not trolling, Cytron Masters rocked and transsexuals wrote a lot of games during the 80s! Weird but true...
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I read over the list at Gamespy (I know, this is slashdot, but I wanted to see the list).
... sad, I know, but true.
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!
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
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
Unfortunately you gen-y folks will never know the sheer joy of playing Zaxxon or Centipede on a Coleco Vision. Nintendo was a poor substitute.
Activision recently released Activision Anthology for PS2. In addition to almost all the Activision line, some Imagic, and an Atari game or two, it has a couple games called Kabobber and Thwacker that were either not USA releases, as they don't sound American, or they were prototypes.
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.
Anyone know where I can get a copy of King's Quest? This was one of the first EGA colored games I ever played, and one of the very early adventure games. You had free reign to do anything you wanted (to a certain extent), so this one felt really ground breaking to me. Anyone have a copy of this sucker? I've long since lost the box (actually, this one was distributed in a plastic case for the IBM PCjr by IBM themselves).
Chase The Chuckwagon is not only synonymous with hunting for rare games, it's synonymous with the Great Video Game Crash of the early 80's.
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.
How about The Texas chainsaw massacre game for Atari 2600. Apparently this game was banned from a lot of retailers for violence (pixelated blood!) I've seen it go for well over $100 on ebay. Not sure if its worthy of making that top-10 list, but certainly a worthy mention.
That has got to be one of the rarities out there, at least in terms of finding an original boxed version. I remember being absolutely engrossed by that game back in 1986 when it firsrt game out. Even though it had to run on primitive hardware of the time (CGA graphics, PC speaker sound), it was still a both a design and a technical masterpiece (they fit a whole universe of 300+ star systems, 20 sentinent alien races, 1000+ planets, each individually mapped, with unique terrain, artifacts, economies, etc.) on two 360K floppy discs. It was amazingly open ended and non linear, and yet had a completely fleshed out history, storyline, and universe.
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.)
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
There was this company called Active Enterprises. It basically amounted to a guy in his garage making games. They had a cart called Action 52 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 . 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.
Schnapple
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/
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!
Doom made two huge improvements that created the FPS genre we know now, non-grid based maps, and the DeathMatch (and put that term into our vocabularies). Those two things really paved the way for the mainstream popularity of the hundreds of FPS games released since.
-B
I own a copy of "Street Cop" an A+ rare Nintendo game, that people don't believe existed. Its not listed at Funco Land, its rarely listed anywhere. Here's why, its a powerpad game, you're a fat cop, and you have to chase the bad guys, with Uban Champ graphics...
Only like a few hundred were made, and my mother drove 3 hours to get it...
I still love that game...
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
Herzog Zwei 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.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Ok, so it was only briefly, but if you finished Metroid quickly enough, the dude would strip and turn into a chick. I'm pretty sure I saw some nipples in the process too.
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.
There were actually a fair number of games for the Famicom (the real name of the NES before the name was changed for the American market) in Japan that had nudity -- and even sex. The trick was that they were all for the Famicom Disk System, the floppy disk add-on, that wasn't released in the States.
:-) you can find quite a few adult games for the FDS for download.
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).
I think the coolest, rarest game I ever saw an advert for was Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars (starring Zippo the Dog) for the old Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 1000). The vapourware advert cassette cover art was amazing -- anyone who somehow still has a copy please scan it!
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