Collector Chronicles #1: That one game

I'll tell you one thing that drives me crazy about being an obsessive video game collector. It seems that no matter what system you want to collect for, there's always that one game that is super expensive and hard to find. It seems like every system has at least one.

Atari 2600 is probably the king of expensive rare games. I'd say there's probably half a dozen of them that cost at least 1000 dollars regularly, and I don't even want to talk about all the games that are more than 100. It depresses me just thinking about it. There's also an added catch that all of the rare Atari games are awful. Boing is a notable exception (and the only one that I own), but many of them rank among the worst games ever made. You would have to be crazy to spend 600 dollars on a game that you knew was terrible. Of course I probably would if I had the money.

You would think that a system with a small library would be free of this curse, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Take the Virtual Boy for example. There are only 14 US games to hunt down. 13 of them of relatively easy to find. You can find them on ebay any day of the week. But good luck finding a reasonably priced copy of Jack Bros. I'm sure a lot of people's Virtual Boy collections are stuck at 13. Either that or they have no idea what a Virtual Boy is.

It's much the same way with the other Atari systems. The 5200 has one of the least expensive libraries to compile except for. However, there are two, Meteorites and Bounty Bob Strikes Back, that each cost as much as all the other games combined. Atari 7800 is similar although it does have more obscure games that don't pop up that often. Most of them can are still pretty when you can find them. The two super expensive games were the ones made by Froggo, Tank Command and Water Ski. The worst part about this one is that neither one of them are particularly rare, and both of them used to be somewhat reasonable. Water Ski is only a 4 on the Atariage rarity scale and I never see it for less than 80 dollars. It's gotta be the most expensive 4 I've ever seen. Jaguar I don't even want to talk about except to say that I one time put a 70 dollar bid on Air Cars and lost. I'm sure some of you will laugh at that one.

So it seems like just about every system's got one, and I look over at my collection and know that most systems will always have a gaping hole where that one game should go. I'll probably never have a Stadium Events or a Quadrun. I'm either gonna have to search every dusty little flea market in the world until I find a guy selling video games who's never heard of the internet or get a higher paying job and buy up all the expensive ones before I have kids. Either way it's both a pain and a thrill. At least I can take comfort in knowing that all the 32X games are fairly cheap. Now if only I could find a connector cable for that thing.