Why Video Games Can Never Become a Victim of Collectibility
by Stan Dean
09/29/2010

The year was 1988 and every kid in my junior high school worth his salt had a baseball card collection. Trading sessions broke out in between every class, and you were nobody unless you had a Topp’s Mark McGwire rookie or three. Don Mattingly was a household name and the Beckett price guide was required reading. Then came Sportflicks, a new kind of card that featured an awesome hologram on the front. Then came Score, and then Upper Deck with a fancy foil seal and hyper glossy cards that were fewer to a pack and higher in price. Upper Deck cards were particularly prized over all others, particularly Ken Griffey Jr.’s Upper Deck rookie card. Pretty soon everybody and their brother had a card set and fewer and fewer cards came in a pack, but the chance of finding an ultra rare chase card was dangled like a carrot on the front of each wrapper. Seconds later the baseball card collecting hobby was all but dead.

The year was 1992 and all my high school pals were reading Amazing Spider-man, Uncanny X-Men, and smoking hot artist Todd McFarlane was about to rock the world with his uber-hyped comic Spawn. A rash of new artists had revitalized the comic book hobby and a budding young comic publisher called Image was about to usher in a new era of comic books. New first issues were hitting the stands on a weekly basis. Publishers were scrambling to put out the next big collector’s item issue. Comic book covers started coming out with holograms, foil embossing, gatefolds, die cuts, and three or four different variants. Artists began to ape other artists and styles that were once unique and revolutionary were now muddied and common. Somewhere in the tangle, the writers and editors got pushed aside and the soul that kept comic books alive for decades withered. Seconds later, the comic book collecting hobby was all but dead.

We can do the same thing for action figures - 35 year old men camped out in front of Target on the day new Star Wars figures were being shipped to the store waiting to tear the boxes out of the employee’s hands, rip it open and expunge the rare Amanaman figure before any unassuming child got their filthy hands on it - along with many other collectible hobbies, but I am very pleased to tell you that we won’t be able to do that with video games, our last collectible sanctuary. To put it simply, video games seem to be immune to instant collectability.

Now before you shake your head and go back to playing Call of Duty or whatever, hear me out. I’m not saying that video games aren’t collectible. I have a whole room full of VCS and NES games that instantly undermine that point. Video games are collectible, but the collecting hobby is the result of a distillation process that takes years to bear fruit. The thing that makes video gaming collecting unique and impervious to instant collectability is that video games are not created with collectability as one of their primary features.

Consider baseball cards. What's the point of baseball cards? You collect them. Whether you are collecting for a specific player, or a team, or just trying to complete a set, the fundamental purpose of baseball cards is to collect them. They don’t really do much else. (Unless you are thinking about that sweet episode of Heart to Heart where Jonathan gets roped into that crazy high stakes card-dropping game where they place baseball cards against a wall and drop them and the winner takes whatever his card touches. That was freaking crazy sweet!) Anyway, the point is baseball cards are something to collect, pure and simple.

Comic books and action figures are similar, although their primary function is not to be collected. Action figures and comics are meant to be enjoyed and experienced for what they are before they are shelved into a collection. At least, that was the original intention of those collectibles. Originally toys and comics were for playing with and reading. It was only after years had gone by that nostalgia turned these things into sought after treasures. But once it did, the door was thrown wide open and what had once been a quest to recapture childhood became a marketing juggernaut that would soon crush the very hobbies that birthed it.

In all three instances above, as soon as the market discovered that people were collecting these things, it immediately found ways to feed that tendency and exploit it. For baseball cards it was rare chase cards inserted in only a few select packs. For comic books it was the variant covers, and for toys it was extremely limited run figures that only shipped one per case. Specifics aside, the common element was a phenomenon known as manufactured rarity. It wasn’t enough to make collecting all of something a goal, it was necessary to make it difficult to do. That would increase sales and force collectors to pursue rare treasures driving the hobby forward. In theory that works fine, but the problem arises when there are too many companies pouring collectibles into the hobby and over saturating the market. Too many chase cards, too many “collector’s item first issues,” too many Princess Leia’s with double banded belts and pretty soon the market cannot support a wealth of rarities. Everything loses value and the hobby falls apart. Oh sure, people still collect these things, but for the most part it is the people who enjoyed them for their basic purpose to begin with a not because of the hype. The hype enthusiasts die off quick when the collectability and more importantly, the resale value, goes away. In a sense, the collectible markets for these things destroy themselves and the whole thing collapses just a fast as it was built.

But wait! This is an article about video games! And that brings us to my main point; the sad fate of the hobbies above is not predestined for our beloved video games! I tell you, video games are immune to this frightful future because video games are not instantly collectible and there is no effective way to create an artificial collectability around them! Video games only become collectible after a given period of time. It is not practical, sensible, or feasible to collect for the Nintendo DS right now. Such an endeavor would be madness. Yet collecting for the original NES is a strong and vital hobby. What’s the difference? Is it the size of the game library? Is the library for the DS just too big to collect while the NES library is more manageable? Doubtful, collecting for the PSX is currently taking off and while there are vast numbers of craptacular games to track down, the hobby is kept alive by enthusiasts who enjoy the gaming system and the better games available for it. So size of library is not the issue.

One big reason we don’t collect for modern game systems is because it isn’t really practical. Unless you are independently wealthy, you simply cannot buy every game that is released for a modern system. I suppose you can, and I suppose you can shelve them all or stick them in a box, but “collecting” seems to have broader connotations than just amassing games in boxes. They have that in the professional world, it’s called inventory, but it isn’t fun and unless you are a video game store it doesn’t really make much sense. The point is, it is difficult to keep up when you are trying to buy every game that is released for a modern system when new games are released every week. Another facet to consider is that part of “collecting” is hunting down rare pieces for your collection and making trades, etc. ; the true “collecting” part that separates the hobby from the job (see “inventory” above). If you are collecting for a modern system you can just order the game online from a distributor or frequent the local video game outlet on release day. It may be possible to do so, but that doesn’t really have the spirit of collecting.

Another major obstacle to instant collectivity in modern video games is the issue of rarity. Collecting something has built into it the notion and feature of rarity. Some things are easy to collect because they are very very common, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt for the NES for example. You trip over these when you go into any video game convention. But at the other end of the spectrum is Bubble Bath Babes, a game that is exceptionally rare. You’ll not likely see many of these in your collecting career, but chances are good that you will spend a tremendous amount of time searching for a single copy of it. Unlike in other similar hobbies, rarity in video games is purely a function of time. With baseball cards, action figures, and even comics, rarity can be manufactured. Heck, Ty built the Beanie Baby empire on that very notion. You can limit the number of chase cards or Mon Mothma figures or die-cut hologram foil covers. People will still buy packs of baseball cards hoping to find that rare chase card. People will still buy other action figures and comics while they are hoping to track down that limited run item. But with video games, it makes no sense to attempt to manufacture rarity. Only making 10 copies of a game guarantees that the developer will only sell 10 copies of a game and unless you find 10 rich rubes to shell out big cash for those 10 copies you have severely cut short your only source of income. It’s not like it hasn’t been tried, but it has failed to catch on.

With video games the only real way to manufacture rarity is to manipulate the peripherals, i.e. packaging, pack-ins, give-aways, etc. Fundamentally, the game program has to be the same across the board or people will not buy the game. The Pokemon franchise has had limited success with this concept, often releasing two nearly identical games that are meant to be played in conjunction with one another, but the initial reaction to this (Pokemon Blue and Red) was less than spectacular, particularly for those parents who didn’t understand buying the same game twice just so you could start with a Charmander instead of a Squirtle. Nevermind the fact that I doubt Nintendo was doing this as an attempt to create rarity as much as they were trying to cash in on an exploding franchise. But outside of Pokemon, releasing slightly different versions of the same game only really leads to angry buyers.

Since the base game has to be the same across the board, it is the peripherals that help determine rarity, but even then manufacturing rarity is not easy to do. Oh sure, you can have the copy of Zelda in the gold cartridge instead of the gray, and sure maybe your copy came with a sweet T-shirt, but at the end of the day, when the games are plugged into a system, they play exactly the same. The question then becomes, are we collecting rare video games or rare video game packaging? And those are two separate hobbies.

This is why, in the realm of video games, rarity is purely a function of time. Only time will tell which games get hot and flood the market and which games fall through the cracks and become precious gems to be sought after. Theoretically, you could have bought Mr. Do!’s Castle and Frogger for the Atari 2600 on the same day back in the 1980’s and paid the same price for each, yet 30 years later, one would barely be worth a dollar and the other fifty times that! There is no way of knowing at the time which of the two is going to be rare. And it is no surprise that more often than not the most popular games are the ones that are the most common. Why else do Sonic games litter the shelves of second hand stores while copies of Skuljagger are so much harder to find? This is not to say that popular games cannot be rare and that crap games don’t litter the streets (I kicked a copy of Deadly Towers into a trash heap on the way to work yesterday), but because rarity is a function of time, less popular games often see smaller distribution and end up in fewer home libraries and then later collections. So I guess we can amend our equation a bit and say that rarity = time + distribution. Either way, the fact remains, you simply cannot manufacture rarity in video games the way you can in other collectible hobbies. Rarity remains out of the reach of marketing geniuses and is not effectively applicable to video games the way it is to other hobbies.

It is for this very reason that our precious hobby remains unspoiled and unkilled, unlike those ill-fated collections of my youth. Video game collecting is fun because it's a lot like treasure hunting. Games from long ago are buried in garages and basements, flea markets and yard sales, even the occasional and loathsome website auction. They are out there and it's our mission as collectors to ferret them out and add them to our shelves, drawers, boxes or wherever else they can be stashed. As long as our hobby remains protected by its unique immunity to instant marketability we will be able to enjoy our collecting in peace; that is if downloadable content doesn’t render the hobby obsolete. But that is a story for another time, my friends…