One of the things I like about collecting old videogames is the sense of holding a piece of history in my hands.
That’s why I think the most fascinating thing about this copy of Frogger for the Intellivision above is that the original owner kept the receipt in the box. So now I know that on June 16, 1983, a copy of Intellivision Frogger would have run you about $30. That’s about $65 in 2010 dollars, just to let you know how good you actually have it today.
Anyway, on to more of my recent finds from the thrift stores of San Francisco.
Frogger was part of a largish collection of Intellivision stuff that I came across. At $2 each, the price was right, but I already owned most of the common games on the shelves. So I just stuck with games I didn’t have and those that were harder to find.
The interesting thing about Intellivision games is that the boxes were meant to be kept – they had a flap on the front that opened to reveal slots for the game, instruction manual and most importantly the acetate controller overlays that were practically required to play any of the games. This means that you often find Intellivision games in complete condition, if not mint.
Activision’s games for Mattel’s platform had a stylish box design, which deliberately looked quite different from its Atari 2600 game boxes. Pitfall! and Stampede aren’t that hard to find – not nearly as rare as the Beamrider and River Raid I picked up a year ago. Frogger, as you might imagine, is also a relatively common third-party game on the system.
Mattel’s Tron Solar Sailer is missing the instructions and overlays, but I didn’t have the box for this anyway.
The rarest game in the pile is White Water!, a late-release game from Imagic that is a little harder to track down than its other games like Swords and Serpents. That game would be worth a little more if the thrift store didn’t think it was a good idea to fold its instruction manual in half and secure it to the cartridge with a giant loop of clear shipping tape. I didn’t even bother trying to remove it from the manual. I just cut around it.