Garage sale season is upon us and I'm haunted by memories of happy hunting in yesteryear where today I come up totally empty. In a story I've doubtlessly recounted here many times, growing up garage sales were never a thing for me and my family... but when I met my wife I was sucked into their world of endless entertainment by touring outlets of secondhand goods, from garage sales to thrift stores to swap meets and flea markets. Coming along for the ride, I had to spontaneously come up with a category of consumer goods to keep an eye open for just in case we stumbled across some, and naturally I gravitated to old video games.
Now it is not only garage sale season but the season of coordinated neighbourhood sales, where you can drive to a part of town and be assured of dozens of nearby sales offering their goods. Neighbourhood sales we've visited year on year and have beloved memories of! There are some eternal constants: always lots of women's clothing and children's clothing, none of it of interest to me... but the games are good, right? It's been a couple months of garage sale season and I've gotta say by and large it seems that people are no longer selling video games at garage sales! I might visit two dozen sales on a sunny Saturday and return home with just a handful of brain-stimulating Nintendo DS carts for seniors or a couple of PS4 sports titles, thin soup! It stings when I have memories of visiting the same neighbourhood sales a decade ago and coming home with a complete Sega Dreamcast or a boxed VIC-20 for $10.
It's a weird thing returning to the same places across the years and ... well, some things change and some things don't. (I remember seeing an NES on a thrift shop shelf for $100, outshining an entire cohort of unwanted $10 GameCubes... I used to visit Value Village basements to assemble NES and Sega Genesis units one component at a time! It doesn't matter how many times I return to those stores, their shelves will never again boast those particular dispositions of goods.) Back In The Day I think there was a greater likelihood of parents emptying the attic and liquidating their college-bound children's video game collections for pennies just to get the space back, whereas possibly with inflation games are now so expensive to buy and bizarrely retain their value so much better (especially Nintendo games, see below) that the buyers are more sensitive to recouping as much of their initial cost outlay as possible, ideally on Facebook Marketplace, priced according to recent eBay listings. (Sometimes you do see these kinds of games cluelessly being sold at garage sales also, but ... you only achieve eBay sale prices by selling to the global pool of potential buyers, not the few dozen randos who stop by your garage sale. Even on eBay, the buyers are only pocketing a portion of the revenues, the house takes a large cut and you're paying for shipping. But don't get me started!)
Back to that Nintendo piece -- back when the Wii came out, my wife was briefly interested in exploring the exercise possibilities of Wii Fit and its Balance Board, but blanched with sticker shock. As the PlayStation 3 had also recently hit the market, I was able to convince her that we could also enjoy substantial calorie-burning enjoyment along with profound pocketbook savings by instead buying a soon-to-be-discontinued PlayStation 2, a couple of dance mats and a DDR disc. (We picked up two other games at steep fire-sale discounts, the all-time classic Shadow of the Colossus and the delightfully bizarre underdog Chulip.) There were genuinely great savings to be had as one popular platform was eclipsed by its successor and was shown out the door with a celebration of sorts, inviting folks who had missed its entire commercial lifespan to take part at last for a hugely reduced ticket price. (That PS2, which of course also played PS1 games, was an incredible investment, and over the years my collection of abundant and affordable (basically $5 or less) secondhand games for it has burgeoned to over 600. They're not all winners, but how good does a game have to be to be worth at least $5?)
Compare and contrast: we came to the Nintendo Switch party years late, and its replacement the Switch 2 just having dropped, we thought we might fill in some gaps in my kids' Switch game collection for their birthdays. My kids have enjoyed TOTK and Mario Kart 8 and Kirby & the Forgotten Land, Fae Farm, the untitled Goose game and Little Kitty, Big City... and logged many, many hours sucking the marrow out of Animal Crossing: New Horizons... but the killer app for any Nintendo console is its first-party Mario game, and we never yet got around to acquiring a copy of Super Mario Odyssey. The game is now what, seven-odd years old, and we've reached the end of the line for its native platform, so surely we can pick it up for a song now as we eventually did with Super Mario Galaxy, right? Buying it from a store today basically costs as much as it did eight years ago when it was brand new. Maybe we can get a deal buying it digitally from the Nintendo e-storefront? No, this old game long since paid off is still being sold at full price even though we give them a break on the costs of printing, packaging and shipping the media! Surely we can get it on the cheap secondhand on Facebook Marketplace? Stop me if you've heard this one before... It seems that my frugal collector's mantra of "don't collect for a system until the games become cheap" over the past couple of generations is now somehow translating to "don't collect games for Nintendo systems, they never become cheap." We haven't quite yet arrived at the future where you don't buy games, only nontransferable licenses to play them -- but I am expecting its arrival every day, which will really bring this hobby of video game collecting to an ignominious end...
... which, somehow, brings us to the jaw-dropping photograph this blog post opens with. Because I never actively began collecting console games until I very belatedly entered the "gainful employment and regular income" part of my life, basically by the time I had started the window had already closed on the likelihood of stumbling across any that I might have had childhood nostalgia for. (Granted, as I never owned a console as a child, even this nostalgia is kind of false valour -- but I am able to resonate with kinship for generations of technology contemporary to my youth whether I got to experience them in their temporal context or otherwise. After all, I saw them at friends' houses, I heard classmates exchanging tips on beating them in the schoolyard, and I saw the ads on TV.) As I was travelling to the neighbourhood garage sale, an old friend was announcing it online, specifically noting to me that he had stumbled across some long-forgotten treasures in a dusty crawlspace while scouring his home for surplus housewares to sell. Hilariously, my rounds brought me to his yard sale before the message ever had a chance to reach me. Presented with his offerings, I gulped and concluded that basically I was going to have to pay him whatever he was asking, since some of these games are basically unobtainable without taking out a loan.
That guy! He just wanted to be assured that these games would be appreciated and cherished, not crassly flipped for profit or more vulgarly tossed in the trash and consigned to the Atari E.T. graveyard. Well, I can't make any promises about the Super Scope cart whose peripheral I am not in possession of, but between me, my kids and my annual vintage gaming parties, those top-tier JRPGs will absolutely be put through their paces and, basically, we will be making up for lost time with them. (The Star Control 2 box is empty, but I can fill it with all my memories of playing the best computer game ever made!)
In conclusion, it looks like I don't have to go to any more garage sales this summer, because I'm definitely not going to stumble across any further lots anywhere near remotely as amazing as this one! (Heck, I'm only ever going to be seeing lots like this again by visiting estate sales of deceased collectors!)
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