Old Computer Game Covers - Collectible, Or Just Nostalgia?

zentechno writes "While cleaning out some very old boxes in a long-untouched closet, I discovered my first supply of PC games, some of which came out when 386s were new. While there's almost zero use for these, I still think the cover art is quite cool. I found the original Zork, its sequels, Enchanter, and Sorcerer from InfoCom, Star Trek: 'The Kobayashi Alternative' from Simon & Schuster, Pool of Radiance and Eye of the Beholder from SSI, Loom by Lucas Games, Nuclear War from New World, Annals of Rome and FireZone from PSS, Sidewinder from EA, and Defender of the Crown from Mindscape, to name many. I loved these games, and wonder if there's any sort of serious collector's market out there as exists for vinyl album art — or is it just a personal thing?" I know I'll always hang on to my copies of Star Control II and Think Quick! from when I was a wee PC gamer. What's still rattling around in your closet?

Comments

Ogre!

[Weaselmancer]

I've still got my original C64 Ogre box. Complete with rulebook, backstory, and even the radiation badge. Although the radiation dots have long since maxed out.

They just don't go out of their way to add cool stuff to games like this today, AFAIK. Like an actual working radiation detector.

Re:Ogre!

[Z34107]

You may not trust the steam servers to be running in 25+ years, but the steam program lets you back up any and all of your games. You tell it which ones you want to back up, whether you're backing them up to CD, DVD, or a network share, and it will compress and burn them for you. When the steam servers die, boot up your steam client and restore the games. Run them in "offline mode."

If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can always apply one of the many no-steam/no-CD cracks they have out there. Before steam, I would never have purchased a "digital download" copy of a game; I want my box and CD. But, steam saves me gas (or shipping), isn't run by some fly-by-night company, gives me the all-important instant gratification, and makes it ridiculously simple to back games up.

Other than your steam username and password, there's no DRM, either. Install the games on as many computers as you want, as many times as you want. (Of course, multiple users can't log into the same steam account at the same time.) No CD checking, no Starforce - I wouldn't buy Bioshock, for example, anywhere except on steam.

The only problem is that there's no secondary market - there's effectively no way for you to sell steam games you've purchased; somebody in another discussion on slashdot brought up the "right of first sale" problem. So, if you like selling used games back to Gamestop, then avoid steam.

But, all the games that I've had 25+ years ago (well, OK, 10-15) like Might and Magic III, IV, and V have all since decayed. Some of the floppies just plain wore out being boxed up on a shelf for so long; I had to pkzip the installed game onto a couple dozen floppies and move it off my 486 to get a "backup." Good thing I still had the manuals, too - finding manual passwords is an even more invasive form of DRM in my opinion, though MicroProse handled them better than most.

It's personal

[EightBits]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's personal. At least for now. You'll have to wait until your grandchildren are in college to even be anywhere near that kind of value.

As a previous post says, it's how rare it is that counts. Basically, if you can still easily buy these games right now (and you can on Ebay for instance, with boxes intact even) then there will be little to no intrinsic value to these items.

I collect them.

[snarfies]

I have a computer game box collection from my Commodore 64 days. Go back in time 10 or so years - a website called lemon64.com was just starting up and they were putting box covers online. Turned out I owned some rarities and alternate versions of boxes they already had scans of, so I scanned what I had and my scans are still in use there (see http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D2309%26coverID%3D1370 - that box is sitting on my bookshelf right now).

I consider my boxes to be interesting and nostalgic. Even if they aren't worth any money, I consider them to be important cultural artifacts - after all, was not my entire generation the first to be raised with video games? Most of the games has been preserved through emulation, but the boxes aren't so easily replicated.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

number of programmers have stayed largely static

You obviously haven't read the credits for a recent game :-)

Compare Grand Theft Auto 4 core+engine team (Rockstar North+Rage) with GTA 1 core team (2008 vs 1997) approximately:
Coders: 40 vs 16
Artists: 88 vs 18
Design: 28 vs 6

Not including publisher credits since they never bear any resemblance to reality anyway.

And that is nothing like the size of credits on an EA game, which would outpopulate a small country...

Artists and content producers have scaled faster than coders, but there are still big coding teams out there.

The "official" answer: It Depends

[Trixter]

As someone who runs a software collector's mailing list and a co-author of a collectible software grading scale, I think I'm qualified to report: It depends. The collectible value of software is pretty much the same as any other collectible:

• Desirability (not the same as rarity)
• Availability
• Condition

The reason rarity != value is because, if nobody knows about it, nobody wants it. I own a fairly nice copy of Wibarm, and I believe I'm the only one left in the USA to own it. But since nobody has heard about it, and it's not part of some Infocom/Sierra/Lucasarts legacy, nobody would offer me more than $20 for it.

Condition is obviously important. Incomplete items are worth nearly nothing, and even if it's complete it should be in decent condition (ie. the box isn't crushed). If it's in mint condition (still shrinkwrapped), you are holding gold.

One exception to this is diskettes: For reasons I don't quite agree with, most collectors feel that the condition of the diskette media is not nearly as important as the other materials, mainly because most of the software has been cracked and available. I disagree, because without working originals, you can never be sure if the cracked versions are complete (and in my experience easily 15% of them are not).

The ebay market for collectible software started to dry up around 2005, but for a very long time it was a hotbed of collectible software buying and selling. You can still find some reasonable bargains (ie. an average of $20-$30 a title) but most of the time it still costs $200 for a Kilrathi Saga, or $1600 for an original Infocom Starcross Saucer.