This morning’s post is going to be a little different from my usual fare. I’ve shared a bunch of details about my life over the course of the almost thirteen years of this blog. One that I am certain I have talked about before is the fact that in High School I worked for Sports Card and Comic shop owned by a friend of mine. The store was founded in 1989 which is a fortuitous year when it comes to sports card collecting, because in 1989 the Upper Deck Company released it’s very first trading card set and ultimately changed the entire industry. Over the course of the next few years until the crash began in 1992 we saw the average price of a pack of cards go from around $0.50 to around $3 as manufacturers stumbled over themselves to create newer and flashier sets to attract what seemed like a bottomless market of collectors.
If you are curious about this era you can check out this excellent article, but effectively two things happened. The first was extremely high print runs to attempt to meet the ravenous demand of all of these new “collectors”. The second thing was the fact that said demand was not legitimate. Most of this massive increase of collecting was brought on by speculators and those who got caught up in the wave of hype. For awhile baseball cards were considered to be a better investment than gold, and the crowd wisdom spawned countless weekend card shows where mom and pop stores like the one I worked at sold and traded huge volumes of cards. My weekends during this era were spent going to roadside ramadas and camping out a makeshift tradeshow floors looking for anything that could be bought cheaply or vendors that we could flip our own merchandise to.
When the market began crashing in sports card, so many people pivoted to another market that had been long overlooked… comic books. We were in the middle of some events happening in comics that were somewhat unique as well. We were well in the “hero artist” era of comics, where big name artists sold books more than the stories or characters that were in them. In late 1991 Tod McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio broke away from Marvel Comics to form their own imprint Image Comics. On February 1st a press release was sent out announcing the formation of the group and then follows a sequence of first issues that caused panic and frenzy in comic collectors.
- Youngblood #1 – April 1992
- Spawn #1 – May 1992
- Shadowhawk #1 – June 1992
- Savage Dragon #1 – July 1992
- Wildcats #1 – August 1992
- Cyber Force #1 – October 1992
Since our sports card business was failing… the shop pivoted hard along with the rest of the collectables market into comic books. Everything became valuable and rare from the insanely sought after Valiant comic first issues to a whole slew of gorgeous books from Dark Horse. What followed however was the same nonsense that happened in sports cards as Marvel, DC, and a slew of smaller imprints fought to capture the same sort of attention these first few Image books did. Before long we were in the era of Diamond Distributors touting another must buy #1 issue every single month and with it the nonsense of multiple chase covers and limited edition lenticular chroma plated covers. By 1993 this spectacle was in free fall brought on by the overwhelming nonsense surrounding the Death of Superman. If you want more detail then check out something like this article that talks a bit more about the crash.
Speculative bubbles are always going to be a thing. For years I have felt like we were on the edge of bursting in Magic the Gathering. This card is Wheel of Fortune, which is both an iconic card… but also one that held little value for a really long time. Specifically I am looking here at the Revised edition of the card… which is a truly massive print run as far as magic cards go. This card has seen its prices go from around $8 in 2013 to now selling for upwards of $300. I point this card out specifically because it has been the subject of several targeted buyouts attempting to raise the price of the card by lowering the available supply on the market. The thing is… it has worked and now what used to be a card I didn’t even bother sleeving is now goes in the “most valuable” storage of my collection.
We are now finally getting to the subject of today’s blog post. We are currently living through a bubble in video games that potentially out scales all of the bubbles I have talked about to this point. I was firmly a child of the 90s era consoles and as a result when I got my first job and started making legitimate money… I begin snapping up all of those consoles that I used to dream about owning. I mean as a kid I was lucky because I had a NES, Gameboy, SNES and eventually a Genesis. However I lusted after all of those fringe consoles that I never had access to and through short succession in the early 2000s I snapped most of them up in those early heady days of Ebay and Yahoo Auctions. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and now most of those systems that I snapped up for a few bucks here and there at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions are priced well out of the reach of folks. My complete Atari Jaguar for example that I think I paid $50-70 for initially now goes for somewhere in the neighborhood of $600.
The height of this nonsense though can be most clearly seen in the prices of loose copies of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember not too terribly long ago you could pick up a refurbished NES for $15 and almost always got a free copy of the original Super Mario Bros thrown in along with it. Now that raw loose copy itself goes for upwards of $20 and you can see on the graph above its rise in price really spiked in 2017. For me at least I collected games because I wanted to play them and get to experience the things that I never did as a child. As a result I ultimately realized that I am perfectly happy playing the games emulated as opposed to having to own a physical copy. However there is a whole other breed of collector that is seeking out the most complete copies of the games they can get their hands on.
Along with these genuine collectors seeking to rebuy chunks of their childhood or the nostalgia of walking through Toys R Us during the heyday of the late 80s, have come the speculators. There is a burgeoning business in trying to flip games for profit. What has added gasoline to this fire is that the lockdowns and the general shit state of the world right now has seemingly spurred on this massive desire to recapture a part of simpler times. Amazon and Ebay as a result have become a hotbed of folks looking to source games cheaply and sell them for ever increasing profits. There are many YouTube channels devoted to this reseller lifestyle of showing folks going out into the “wild” and getting good deals and then flipping them for double the money. The problem is I don’t think any of this is sustainable and I question what permanent damage is going to be wrought when this market crashes like was ultimately done to the sports card and comic markets.
The most disturbing thing about this particular bubble however is that it is being seemingly artificially propped up by a questionable relationship between a grading company and a private auction site. I can’t really do it justice but there are several sources that have reported on the alleged connections between Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and a number of shill bidders that have artificially inflated the price of graded games going up for Auction. The end result is we seem to be in this landrun of folks looking to get rich quick by flipping their old video games and feeling like they have a goldmine. I had noticed a bit of this myself as through my frequent trips to Half Priced Books… I noticed the $5 games turning into $15 games and more recently turning into $50 games. Retro gaming right now is a truly unsustainable mess and as a result I find myself sitting here waiting on the other shoe to drop.
I leave this last image as another cautionary tale. No one really wants video game collecting to be the next Beanie Babies. I will say one of the nice side effects of this bubble however has been an increased interest in emulation and with it better devices coming out to market. Similarly there are also way more affordable flash carts allowing you to easily play roms on the original hardware. Effectively these are all more viable solutions in part because the price of games is such that even if you do own the original game… it feels like you are risking your investment if you actually play it. We live in interesting times.
lego sets associated with primo IPs are a better investment than hold.