I haven’t bought a lot of PC games on my thrift store adventures, for a few reasons.
First of all, I’d always assumed that there wasn’t much of a collectors’ market for them – I would rarely if ever see old PC games at Classic Gaming Expo, for example. Secondly, I just don’t know much about them at all – things I’d think would be worth money turn out to be worthless, and things I’d pass up would actually be worth significantly more than some of the console games I’d have spent money on that week.
Recently, though, I’ve decided that my trawling for old games at bargain prices might be more exciting if I learned a little bit more about which PC games fetch high prices, and most importantly why.
To really illustrate how little I know about the PC collectors’ market, I give you the best find of this week, which I actually almost didn’t buy. This copy of The Neverhood, an adventure game done entirely in clay, is still sealed. This collaboration between DreamWorks and Microsoft has a cult following and is well and truly out of print.
It’s got some something on the shrinkwrap, but in this condition it is worth over $100, well above the $10 that I almost didn’t pay because I thought it was too much for sure.
The game that actually got me thinking about and researching PC games is Spear of Destiny, the retail-only spinoff of Wolfenstein 3-D. The original game was released as six shareware episodes, but this full-length game was only sold in boxes in stores. Apparently the CD-ROM version of this would go for upwards of $75, but the 3.5″ floppy version here is still worth a little less than half that. Cost me $2.
And I bought this floppy disk version of Sam & Max Hit The Road because I wanted the exclusive Steve Purcell comics inside. $1.50.
Did you know that Acclaim once had the U.S. publishing rights to the Bubble Bobble games? Here are two examples: Bubble Bobble Also Featuring Rainbow Islands for the PC and the “longbox” PlayStation version of Bust-a-Move 2 Arcade Edition. $3.50 each.
Acclaim decided that the series’ adorable dinosaur mascots weren’t going to sell any videogames to the jaded college kids with too much money that every game publisher coveted in the mid-nineties, so instead of Bub and Bob we got all kinds of ugly amateur bullshit intended to appeal to a sort of futurist Lawnmower Man aesthetic. Toothpicks in the eyes? Really?