Most valuable/wanted Sega games?

I basically stopped picking them up because at some point, the 'collectors' moved in and decided that on ebay at least, anything half decent had to be £50 minimum. And as long as there are enough people willing to pay those kind of prices, then that's technically what they're worth. I don't think any game that old should be going for that kind of money so I just stopped buying them, but clearly other people do!

Mega Drive Konami stuff always seems to be way overpriced. Castlevania, Mega Man and Turtles particularly.

 

My local CeX had a copy of Burning Rangers on the Saturn priced at £260 - you could probably buy their entire Xbox 360 range for the same price... once you take out the strange outliers (all the Sonic games are overpriced, and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is £58 for reasons I can't fathom (it's £70 on PS3!))


I don't really have much time for the "collectors market" - Sega Retro constantly finds undocumented variants of games, so you're never going to have a full set, and your definition of "rare" likely won't line up with reality. The world is better off if we work together, like say, a collaborative wiki that documents all the things.

The most valuable games are those we don't know about. It is not Super Mario Bros. on the NES.

 

Even ignoring LRG, Castlevania bloodlines on the Genesis had multiple prints and only the first are valuable. The original print was by Konami, who shipped the game in sega genesis carts branded by Konami themselves, because they manufactured the cart, in a plastic clamshell box, with a manual with a color front page. This is the print that's sought after.

Many, many years later, when Majesco was making the re-printed Game Gear and Genesis 3, they got licensing to reprint a bunch of 3rd party games, Bloodlines included. These Majesco releases are budget. They come in cardboard boxes, with black and white covered paper manuals, and the carts are either generic sega branded cart shells, or Acclaim branded cart shells. This is because Majesco didn't produce their own cart shells, they bought excess unused cartridge shells from sega and Acclaim (mainly acclaim, as they had massively overproduced Sega genesis cart shells). Sites like gamepricing don't take into account this variation, they only look for ebay listings for "castlevania bloodlines" and thus they are useless when it's a specific variant of the cart/release that is valuable.

TL;DR: Unless you have a CIB Konami release, or you can fleece someone into not knowing the Majesco release is different and not valuable, you likely don't have something worth a bunch of money. There are way, way, waaaaaay more Majesco releases of Bloodlines and actual Konami releases.



As for rare games on Sega Syetems, my goodness there are a lot but they don't necessarily correlate to their quality. Outside of Sega arcade games, I think the most I've ever sold a single Sega game for was Panzer Dragoon Mini, completely mint unopened. People talk all the time about Panzer Dragoon Saga being ultra expensive, but a mint Panzer Dragoon Mini for the game gear will completely eclipse the sale of Panzer Dragoon Saga.

As far as arcade releases go, I've had some really, really pricey ones, but they kinda correlate to how much the game is wanted. I bought SegaSonic Arcade from a person on assembler games over a decade ago for $800. I sold Revenge of Death Adder for about the same amount just a few years back. I sold a Michael Jacksons Moonwalker for about a grand a few years back. These are just PCBs, mind you, not even the entire cabinet. A mint cabinet of these types would fetch multiple thousands.

What I find is most sega home releases aren't that pricey or expensive. It's their arcade or otherwise obscure, mint titles that are. Compared to stuff like Atari Jaguar collecting, or Super NES collecting, Sega's stuff, outside of Saturn things, don't tend to be that expensive. The expensive stuff would be, like, CIB extra rare Game Gear titles, like Tails Adventure, or Saturn titles in super low production runs, like Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru.

 

you don't have to actually open the cart for the konami logo. It's on the PCB, but it's also on the cart shell itself:



the Majesco ones will either say Sega or Acclaim in hard raised plastic where there Konami logo is, and might be covered up with a black sticker saying "Konami" if it hasn't fallen off by now.

 

Before it's mentioned, Radiant Silvergun continues to be touted as some super rare game worthy of stupid money, but there's always tons of copies on ebay. As in, more copies than some of the so-called common Saturn games that nobody cares about.

(note there's only one copy of the demo version, a far rarer disc, and the asking price is a lot less because demo lol)

 

Something to consider before calling something way too expensive is inflation. The money of 30 years ago doesn't have the same value.

 

Radiant Silvergun's price is a mixture of it being a really, really good and thus sought after game, and it gaining that status from back in the day when getting imports was difficult. Radiant Silvergun along with X-Men vs Street Fighter and Nocturne in Moonlight are just a few of the JPN Saturn games to get a western release exclusively through Electronics Boutique: Not an official release, mind you, but they sold import saturn games in 1998, in a bundle with the Pro-Action Replay 4M. That's actually how I got X-men vs Street Fighter: in the USA, at EB Games. I remember an issue of GamePro in 1998 had an article specifically about giving your Saturn second life and picking up imports at EB Games.

This made the game appear to be hyper rare in second hand markets in the USA back in the 90's. You could legitimately run into Radiant Silvergun in America in the wild, but it was exceedingly rare and people were looking for it.

It's status and price today are leftover remnants of that. It was never rare in Japan.

You can calculate inflation, and these games outstep it. Example: Castlevania bloodlines, according to an advertisement of chips & bits I just grabbed from an egm off my shelf, in 1994, sold for $59.99 new.

Pop that into the inflation calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

and it should be $128 today at the same price. Yet, looking at Gamepricings:

https://www.pricecharting.com/game/sega-genesis/castlevania-bloodlines

looking at sales this year:
$192.98
$170.85
$196.22
$166.75
$196.50

It's selling way, way above inflation.

 

Not all games. Take Sonic & Knuckles for example, said to be around $100 if it's complete. I think it was sold for about 2400 Belgian Franks back in 1994. The inflation since then is 90,67%, netting an adjusted price of 4576 BEF. Converted to euros (divided by 40,3399), that's €113,41.

 

I think I (stupidly) paid $2000 for a copy of the prototype Mega LD port of Myst. Apparently, there is only about 8 copies in the world.

While we are calculating inflation, we should also factor in that these games usually have about 30 years of wear and tear and are no longer brand new from the store. A 30 year old Toyota Corolla may have cost $13,000 in 1994, but I aint selling it for $28,000 today.

 

I've never been particularly convinced by the inflation argument. I get the logic, but along with wear and tear that's already been mentioned, there's also the fact that these games were state of the art at the time (or close enough), whereas they're very much not these days. Doesn't mean they're not still alot of fun to play, I wouldn't be here if they weren't, I just don't think you can really justify the prices other than 'lots of people want to collect these and they're willing to pay more to get them'. Nothing wrong with that, but it does freeze out a casual collector like me.

 

Did someone ever get that disc the Domesday treatment? I've had one heckuva time finding captures of it and there's some people who ran Mega LDs through the Domesday.

 

We do. Ebay listings are categorized by quality. There are multiple levels of quality on ebay you can use when selling something: New, Mint in Box, Complete in Box, Opened Box, like-new, good condition, used, acceptable condition, poor condition/for parts only. The prices I'm listing are CIB or MIB. This accounts for the large variation of price, the difference between $160 and $195 are great.

 

It's with Nemesis. I think he had an issue with the Domesday treatment in that it didn't quite preserve all of the data on the disc. He's working on it.

Yeah, but I still think mint in box and complete in box will inevitably have signs of wear and tear and should still be classified as "used." Used products are supposed to go down in value. The only way you could justify RRP adjusted for inflation is if it is NOS (New Old Stock) and had been sitting forgotten in an old warehouse, shrink wrapped, with no previous owner or owners.

So while inflation is a factor, it's more to do with market value and rarity.

 

I've sold things for "reasonable" prices, and they end up immediately getting scooped up by resellers, who turn around and sell them for the market price. So if you're selling an old game, you may as well take the profit yourself instead of giving it to a middleman, given that you're the one who kept the item in good condition for 20-30 years and the market for games that haven't been produced for 20-30 years only exists because of people like you anyway.

What you're really mad about when you complain about retro game prices being too high is that retro games have become an efficient market with good price discovery. When you call someone "greedy" for asking the market price for an item, what you're saying is that you wish they were less informed and didn't know the value of their item so that you could get it for less than it's worth, lol.

You can't look to things like inflation as if the retro game market moves the same way the new game market does. They're completely different markets, just like the market for old and new cars is different. A new Land Rover and a new Land Cruiser cost about the same, but a used Land Cruiser, even with 200,000 miles, depreciates significantly less than a used Land Rover. That's because the people who buy used cars prioritize different things from people who buy new cars (like long-term reliability past the warranty period).

People who buy retro games tend to be older and higher income, to start. It's inherently a much smaller market since the number of items that old and still in good condition is much more limited, and it gets smaller as collectors buy them up, stick them on their shelves, and remove them from circulation. And retro games are valued more for extrinsic things like the item being original and not merely the intrinsic value of having a way to play the game (otherwise, people would buy reproductions or digital copies instead, which cost significantly less). So you have market that appears to resemble a luxury goods market since it's primarily driven by extrinsic value and since the supply is naturally limited, but people expect it to be priced the same way as mass produced, super commodified consumer goods that they buy at Amazon or Wal-Mart for some reason.

All that said, I wish stuff was cheaper too.

 

Value is an agreement between buyer and seller. Fact of the matter is, most of these "rare valuable games" are not valuable to the vast, vast, vaaaast majority of people in the world. The number of people for whom these releases are truly valuable are a tiny, insignificant minority compared to total market. You can go on and on and on about how only X number of copies of Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru were ever printed, and factually for the majority of people in the world, it's worthless garbage. Even ignoring the need for an import-friendly Saturn to merely play the game to begin with, there are a huge amount of people in the world for whom a 2D game on a relatively obscure japanese video game console from 25+ years ago which failed on the home market does not hold any value what so ever.

What you are describing is called whaling -- selling at a high price to a very small minority specifically because you know only that small minority will pay unusually high prices outside of what is considered the "normal" value. Whaling is accurately described as predatory and is not well respected in most western societies. Truth is, the super high prices these games go for, are not accurate reflections of their value in the truest sense.

 

Someone PLEASE lend me a HeartBeat Catalyst. Our entire ecosystem of articles covering it was practically written in the dark.

I have so much to document.