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Are we seeing a resurgence in Atari 2600 collecting?


teh_lurv

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Atari was hip with the Gen Xers but not the Gen Yers and Millenials. For years I catered to the notion that anything pre-Nintendo was crap. Why? It was the same narrow-minded mindset that was fed to me by my peers in the 90s. I used to believe all music from before 1980 was garbage. Now I've got a turntable and am becoming a classic rock junkie.

 

Always rather had to work at avoiding that. Adopting the attitude and values of peers isn't always a good thing.

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Console generations already confuse me and isn't something I buy into because there are overlapping years, different lengths of consoles on the market, etc. but this really confuses me. We are both Generation X, right? And my parents were Baby Boomers that are in their 60s and 70s now. I don't have a kid but since I'm 34 I could which would make them the next generation(Yers?). So, who are these Millenials after that? Did I not let the girls ride the bologna pony to Pound Town enough in junior high school and then have kids that did the same to make me a grandfather already or something? How are there two generations after mine?

 

Gen X ends around 1980. They were teens around the 80s. My fiance was born in 1970 and identifies as a Gen Xer. I was born in 1981 and identify as Generation Y. We were the kids that were teens in the 90s. Then the Millenials were born late 90s and beyond and grew up in the post 9/11 world and have smartphones, etc. We are due for a new gen by now. What will they call the kids being born post 2010? I don't know.

 

I am a bit of an odd case because my parents actually grew up before the Baby Boomers (50s kids) but I was born late when my mom was 40 and came into the 80s. Generally each "gen" lasts around 10-15 years. Most people have kids in their 20s or 30s, so Baby Boomers raised Generation Y, Gen X raised the Millenial kids, etc...

I remember it going even all the way back to the 80's but it wasn't pre-Nintendo but pre-whatever the current favorite console is now. When the NES came out most wouldn't go before that, when the Super NES and SEGA Genesis came out most wouldn't go before that........., and when the XBOX ONE, PS4, and Wii U came out most wouldn't go before that. In other words, most are always modern gamers for what is modern at the time with an out with the old and in with the new mindset. Then all the retro gamers I knew growing up had an in with the new but sill keep the old mindset with no cut off somewhere because they had an understanding that fun games didn't stop being fun games with the introduction of more fun games. I didn't know about "semi-retro gamers" until online situations like this. It seems odd that one could be in between like that.

 

I just remember among my teenage peers (gen Yers) anything Atari was synonymous with crap in the 90s. This included the 4th gen consoles such as Lynx and Jag. I eventually grew up and overcame this mentality. Many gamers never did.

How did that happen? Where you somehow not exposed to music before 1980 to hear it?

 

When I was a teenager, my musical tastes were very underdeveloped. I liked 80s/90s pop and 90s dance and hiphop. Much later in life I discovered all the classic rock era I missed from my childhood and prior. I think I was 21 when I discovered Bob Marley as well.

That is probably because they are as ignorant as all the eBay sellers that think every game is super rare or like the people that look for the BIN with the highest price and think that is what the game is worth. I went to this retro game store once and nothing had prices on them. Everything that I was interested in the guy would just look up the highest price on eBay. I thought it was silly because I could shop on eBay without his store and he could sell on eBay without his store.

 

The Atari carts were cheap because they weren't collectible, and they priced them low because they were slow sellers.

I think that is just more of the same as what I was stating above because the good NES and SNES titles are so much more common than the titles of most other retro consoles. I bet if I wanted to I could make a day out of going to all the Disc Replays around the Indianapolis area and buy a fairly decent collection of both for relatively cheap. And I would win that bet because I already did that a few years ago along with somewhere around 100 Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games. Other than games that are really obscure and weren't popular, any game for any Nintendo console being called rare is being called rare by a retard.

 

Rare is such an overused cliche. But Rare is subjective. A rare game to one collector may be common to another. So if someone posts Atari 2600 Mario Bros RARE game cartrige, they aren't really false advertising because common or rare, the game has been out of production for years. Also newb shoppers who don't know how to search will put "rare" in their search terms and miss any auction that doesn't include this useless moniker.

It is a blessing and a curse. When games like Doom and Golden Eye came out I thought it was awesome but then.... Call of Duty 25.

 

FPS genre got killed when companies started skimping on campaigns and made the games all about getting headshots online. Some of those old games like Goldeneye are really good.

I think there are different flavors between all consoles and the game libraries with them but I think there aren't any lines between one flavor and the closest flavor to it. For an example, if someone made a huge tree of life like evolutionary chart of every game that has ever existed with everything branching into their genres and future games within those genres then the transitions would look pretty smooth.

 

Fads come and go. What I do appreciate is many of the Indie devs making smaller games with gameplay styles remeniscent of the 8/16 bit days.

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I believe that as technology uses less of our imagination and provides more of a virtual reality then 1rst person games will divide into a different form of entertainment and the old stuff will possibly be sought. Using ones imagination is an exercise and very few iconic and popular systems require this more than the VCS. When people buy carts without the boxes in a way that is more for playing than collecting then I would hope that this comes with a resurgence of that system and it's games rather than it being a popular fad for collection, which may be the case. With the landfill dig drawing attention to the value of the unopened and rarer games I would think that an increase in purchasing complete games would be linked to this. If a noted increase in purchases of opened games without boxes or less valuable games is the case then we may be having a wave of popularity for the older styles of games. With pixel-heavy graphics being found in many Android and DLC games I could see how some would go back in time to the precursors of this style to enjoy it's caveman days.

 

I happen to love using my imagination and find much of the content today too all-consuming and life-replacing when compared to old five-minutes-and-your-done games like checkout line Pacman machines. I also find it conservative to play a 5v system that still works well after forty years and has a pile of worthwhile games. If a noticeable divide happens then I'll be on the side of the 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit systems that still evoke my imagination.

Edited by Papa
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The few gaming stores I frequent in my area tell me I'm one of the only people who comes in looking for Atari stuff, but not the only one. Some of them have a few VCSes on the wall, usually 4-switches, and usually have a few stacks of common games, largely pre-Space Invaders stuff. But I keep going back because every few weeks, somebody pops up with more games and I find something new. So there's a trade still going on.

 

For what it's worth in this census, I'm a barely-Gen Y who's old enough to have had several formative years of pre-NES gaming, so I never lost my affinity for the system. In 2015, I finally got around to educating myself about what I needed, and getting the system I'd always dreamed of.

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I happen to love using my imagination and find much of the content today too all-consuming and life-replacing when compared to old five-minutes-and-your-done games like checkout line Pacman machines.

 

Yeah this is key. Between jobs, kids, home projects, I just can't see myself spending hours and hours on a video game. The classic games are great for unwinding for a few minutes.

 

I notice the benefits with the kids too. They can spend hours turning into potatoes in front of the TV if we'd let them. But Atari self-regulates. They play a bit, have some fun, then get bored and do something else.

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I noticed the shift to the NES several years back and it hasn't changed in my opinion. At thrifts or flea markers, if I mention old videogames, they'll point out the NES or Genesis.

 

I think there's a pretty prominent belief among people my age (20s) that systems before the NES aren't worth looking at anymore. I know I used to believe that.

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Yeah this is key. Between jobs, kids, home projects, I just can't see myself spending hours and hours on a video game. The classic games are great for unwinding for a few minutes.

 

I find that all my 10 and 15 minute short stints of gaming add up to more than I'd spend on some mega-epic-episodic modern day game. Not that I play modern games all that much to begin with!

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The few gaming stores I frequent in my area tell me I'm one of the only people who comes in looking for Atari stuff, but not the only one.

 

Same here. I'm known as the Atari guy. Everyone else wants NES or newer. SNES seems really hot right now.

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The game store I went to a few weeks ago had the Atari stuff shoved way in the back and the aisle filled with boxes and old monitors. I'm pretty small so I was able to fit back there to take a look, but I guess more people go in looking for Nintendo and Sega stuff.

 

I went back yesterday and took a picture of the Atari section.

 

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The thing about Atari collecting is the rare stuff is RARE and the common stuff is COMMON.

 

Anybody just starting out in Atari collecting will wipe out the first hundred or so commons in one Ebay swoop. This makes those same hundred commons sitting at stores and vendor tables just sit there, forever.....

 

If vendors and stores were stocked with mid range to rare stuff, it would move just as fast as anything else, it's just they don't have that. They have those same hundred or so games that every single collector has. Most new collectors start collecting because they scored a big lot, be it from a relative, friend, thrift store or whatever....guess what games were in that lot they scored? You guessed it, those same hundred commons...

 

I think the Crash had a lot to do with this. You can look at what I call "family collections" These would be family systems that eventually get pulled out of the attic to be pawned on Ebay/etc.. The typical Family Atari collection is 50+ games while the typical family NES collection is around a dozen or less games. NES and beyond never experienced the absolute close out prices we did, getting new shrink wrapped games for $1/etc.. this just didn't happen in the following generations. Due to this, the typical "base collection" a new Atari 2600 collector receives already has all these common games that everyone on the planet already owns. The typical "base collection" for NES and beyond just has a mere handful of games making those not so rare games a lot more desirable since yes, they are out there, they are obtainable...but that new collector actually needs them!

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More than likely video games will follow the same collecting pattern that baseball cards and comics will. With both of those there were huge spikes in prices once the people who grew up with them got their careers going and had disposable income and wanted to re-experience their childhood. After prices hit ridiculous heights the market crashed and settled into a new normal.

 

This is probably not true. The people who grew up with these are already out of college, myself being in my mid-40s, so the disposable income is already here. What seems to keep a market going are younger people getting into the vintage systems that they weren't alive at the time these were out.

 

Phil

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This is probably not true. The people who grew up with these are already out of college, myself being in my mid-40s, so the disposable income is already here. What seems to keep a market going are younger people getting into the vintage systems that they weren't alive at the time these were out.

 

Phil

Yes. The big difference between NES collecting and Atari collecting is that the younger generations don't care about Atari. That is why Atari games aren't worth much more now than they were 10 years ago, while NES, SNES, and others have soared.

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I started collecting Atari games in the 90's when everything was dirt cheap except Chase the Chuckwagon. I went from 0 to over 200 games in less than 2 years, almost all of them from thrift stores, pawn shops and flea markets. Then I got married, bought a house, all that grown-up stuff and kind of drifted away from Atari. I'd still look for stuff occasionally, but it was pretty rare to find anything I didn't have. Then I stopped looking at all because I knew the odds of finding anything were so low it wasn't worth the effort.

 

A few years ago I started getting back into it and the market had totally changed while I'd been away. Games were going for thousands of dollars. Kind of but not really all that rare games were hard to find for less than 20. It seems that while I was away was when the hobby went from a community of enthusiasts to a network of dealers selling overpriced games to the casually curious, who thought 10 bucks for a loose Pac-Man seemed reasonable enough. About 5 years ago I sold a bunch of Pong clones and 70's handhelds to a woman who runs a vintage store. She didn't really seem to know what they were, but she was very enthusiastic about buying them and convinced she could sell them for way more than I was asking for them. I don't doubt that she eventually did, probably entirely to 20-somethings who wanted an ironic old video game.

 

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but people who don't know any better paying high prices to feel nostalgic for a night has really screwed things up for those of us who genuinely want to have and play these games.

 

I wonder if returning to the hobby makes me part of the "resurgence?"

 

I have noticed a prejudice against Atari even among friends my own age (40-ish), who started out playing Atari games but really came of age with the NES and now won't play anything pre-crash.

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