This shit annoys me so much.
I want a time machine, not to like, assassinate world leaders or anything, but mostly so I can go back with a hundred bucks and get shit that is unaffordable now for no god damn reason.
I am so glad that I got a job right at the last moment Genesis games were affordable. I'm pretty sure I paid like...$5 for my loose copy of Rocket Knight Adventures. I think my 32X was $25 and came with a handful of games (I don't think any were 32X games)
silver lining of the dreamcast dying: they had consoles stacked in a big pile on the floor of the local gamestop for $5 a pop. walked away with half a dozen, most of which i later gave to friends who wanted to experience dreamcast games but missed that window
My first Saturn was a brand-new refurb for $50 from the Electronics Boutique clearance bin. It was full of games that, in retrospect, would have been really good deals if I'd had the money as a teenager - Saturn SoTN for $40, etc.
I get that retro games has turned into a luxury hobby, but it's too bad, because it's one of those things where I wish sharing cool original objects wasn't so expensive. I'm glad emulation is so easy now and ROMs/ISOs are everywhere now - not like when it used to take hours or days/weeks to track down particular rare PS1/Saturn ISOs
Damn near every game and console I owned, for years, was all bought from pawn shops and used game stores. I couldn't afford brand new prices until they started coming down in the PS1 era, and even then my new purchases were few and far between. Everything else was used bargains.
The scalping going on in the wake of the "games rating" scandals with Wata/Heritage/et. al. is a fucking travesty, but scalpers were around even back then. Shops would hoard stacks of perceived rare titles like the Square RPGs and then release them one at a time for inflated prices.
I feel like the speculation bubble of the moment though was kind of inevitable. There's only so many of these things to go around and I wonder if perhaps the increasing push towards digital has people seeing rarity in any damn thing, as if they're panicking that there just won't be physical media anymore period.
I'm one of those people who never got to experience the Dreamcast during it's normal lifetime but picked up a DC a couple years after people basically stopped talking about it for about $40 with a set of 5 now classic games on the cheap and it became PROBABLY my favorite console. Eventually the optical sensor shat the bed so it doesn't work anymore U_U;
