Expensive Games: Worth More Than Your Life

Some people, like myself, squirm at the thought of paying $60 for a next-gen game that will provide a dozen hours of fun. On the flip side, there are gamers who are all too eager to drop hundreds of dollars to get an extremely special gaming experience.

At the top of the list of “experience games” is the $200 Steel Battalion. It was a standard mech game with an unorthodox controller that was split into three large parts, each with an array of functioning buttons and blinky lights. If mechs existed, this would be the most realistic interpretation of driving one. One of the best features was that if the player did not hit the eject button as the user’s mech was blown to pieces, all of the saved data was lost. The extreme attention to detail may be worth the excessive price since it also provides the most realistic mech experience.

Unlike Steel Battalion, other games are expensive for the sheer nostalgia factor and the developer’s inability to manufacture enough copies. For instance, Rez is as hard to come by as a talking dog, and its price has soared through the roof–a roof that is made of hundred dollar bills.

It gets worse. Back when we were kids, we traded in games willy-nilly. “Secret of Mana, you say? Sure, I’ll sell you that for $20! I’m twelve years old! Who cares?” We’ve all been there, and if we had a time machine, we would travel back to that moment we traded or sold our SNES treasures for a small price. In the present, our past is fetching insane prices, especially if the instructional manual, box, and map/poster it was packaged with is still in tact. Games like Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, Megaman X3, Final Fantasy III, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger can easily fetch $100 online.

As long as games are fun, exciting, and timeless, they will continue to hold their value. Good games are not only a gold standard for the industry, but they are literally like gold. Who knows what games will be valued in the future? It’s not too late to run to your local Gamestop and buy a copy of Luigi’s Mansion.