Collecting Sealed Games & Discipline

Obviously it takes a certain level of discipline to collect sealed games and to actually keep them this way. It takes great strength to keep them that way for decades to come! Clearly there are people who invest great time and money in preserving games - As can be seen by the amount of sealed NES games on the market still nowadays, having been preserved by collector's for over 20 years!

How disciplined are you? How long have you collected sealed games, and how many sealed games do you own in total?


Personally, I started buying sealed games after seeing how badly stores treat their products. At the time, the SNES and Mega Drive were popular, and indie shops were everywhere on the high street. Business was booming, although they started the trend of offering pre-owned games at lower prices. Obviously these I stayed away from, as many would be sold without a manual, and in some cases as cart only. I was never lucky enough to own a Snes, although I did see the way the flimsy cardboard cases were treated on store shelves. I stuck to the Mega Drive, and would only buy games which were sealed with teh Sega sticker, even though this has since been proven to be worthless. Even so, cases would still be plastered with huge stickers, and subjected to store soiling.

When I was 16 I upgraded to a PlayStation, and would only ever buy games which were sealed in cellophane. By this time I missed out on many of the earlier releases, and some games were only available as Platinum's. At the time this didn't bother me, as the original versions of games like Crash Bandicoot and Resident Evil used to come in double jewel cases which were hard to get hold of sealed. It wouldn't be until around 2001 when I decided to start keeping my PlayStation games sealed. At this point I already had an N64 and Dreamcast. N64 games were too expensive at the time, so my N64 collecting didn't really start until after 2005. I had a small collection of Dreamcast games, most of which I have rebought sealed in recent times - Same goes for the classic PlayStation games I played and loved so much.

I would say that by 2002 I was generally buying more games than I could physically play. I had just bought a PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, and decided to buy games and keep them sealed until such time I was ready toplay them. Naturally things got out of hand and for every 10 games I bought I would only really get around to playing one of them. This continued until around 2003 where I started working double-time in order to fund my videogame and eBay "habit" (Or addiction if you will). It was at this point I had given up playing a lot of games as I really hadn't much time on my hands. I had also turned to emulation to play those long-lost classics I missed out on, and borrowed a lot of modern games from friends in order to preserve my own collection of sealed gems...

Fast forward to the present day, things are a little different! Collecting sealed N64 and Dreamcast games when I did has paid off, as many are worth double what I paid for them a few years ago, and games for both consoles are less common these days. My habit has subsided, and I have more time on my hands than I have had, athough my obsession with sealed games over the years has resulted in no intention to open what I have amassed. Most games I play these days are borrowed, with pristine sealed copies preserved behind glass doors!

In total I have a collection of some 1100+ games, of which at least 850 are factory sealed copies, many of which have been purchased via eBay since 2002

What's your story, and how dedicated are you?

850 sealed games!

Do you have any pictures of them all?

yobo wrote:850 sealed games!

Do you have any pictures of them all?

Not yet, as many of them are still in box's whilst I finish off my game room. It's not many when you consider that over 100 are PlayStation games; Over 120 PS2; Over 160 Dreamcast; Around 50 DS; Around 50 GBA etc... They all add up in no time!

It takes great discipline to actually buy a newly released game just to put it in shelves and keep it sealed. Even though you know you should buy a guy (MGS4) and keep it sealed for the future, its very hard to tell convince yourself to do it. When Gamecube was released, i said to myself "Its no use to collect N64, it will never get as sought after as NES games", and i said the same thing when Wii was released and GC games were sold, i thought to myself "Well, its too late to start collecting games, GC will never become a collectors item".



Still i am always surprised to see how fast last gen games disappear from the market, to after a couple of years turn up for high prices on ebay.


And i never learn, because even if i knew that i maybe should buy DS games or PS3 games, i do not do it. Its something psychological when you see 20 x of a game in the store, you never think that game will ever get rare, since it feels like there are tons of em that nobody wants. But i guess the video game employees unboxing Chrono Trigger stacks in the 90s thought the same.

In most circumstances most of us do not buy newly released games, unles sthey are part of a collected series (Ie, Pokemon or Final Fantasy) or unless they are Limited Edition's. Unless we feel the game will be harder to get at a later date, or more expensive, we tend to wait a while for prices to go down and then snap them up when they are a quarter of their RRP. However, waiting doesn't always have the desired effect, and sometimes games increase in value.

Another thing we do as sealed collectors is pay above the odds for an older game, whereas we wouldn't dream of paying half that for a brand new released game. I really resent paying over £30 for a new release, yet i'll think nothing of bidding £60 / £70+ on a rare sealed PlayStation or PS2 game, and over £100 for a sealed N64 game which I wouldn't have paid £45 for back in the day...

But I find that the more you pay for something, the more you appreciate and respect it and its condition. A lot of the sealed NES, SNES, and N64 games you see on eBay these days are in perfect condition because they have been looked after well by their owners, whereas more common and cheaper games you often have to buy more than one copy to find one that's in good condition - I found this out when collecting sealed Dreamcast games, where the rarer £40+ games were perfect, and the cheap £3 games I had to buy two or three copies of in order to find one in good shape