Nintendo guides
The Funtastic N64 Is Quietly Becoming a Grail ConsolePull a translucent purple Nintendo 64 out of its box and you can see the guts of the thing - the cartridge slot mechanism, the daughterboard, the reset spring. That see-through shell is exactly why the Funtastic Series N64s have crept up collectors' want lists this year,
The Nintendo 64 Deep Dive Every Collector Should ReadCartridges in 1996. Sony had already proven the CD was the future with the PlayStation a year earlier, and Sega was fumbling around with the Saturn. Then Nintendo shipped a 64-bit console that still read chunky plastic carts, and somehow it worked anyway. That decision explains almost everything interesting about the N64 - the good, the ugly, and the reason certain games now cost more than the console itself. Why the cartridge gamble mattered more than the polygons The Nintendo 64 launched in
The Atomic Purple N64 Is the Clear Console Everyone WantsHold a translucent Atomic Purple Nintendo 64 up to a window and you'll see exactly why collectors keep bidding these up: the smoky-clear shell shows off the board, the heat sink, the whole industrial guts of a 1996 console Nintendo usually hid behind grey plastic. It's the same NUS-001 hardware inside every other N64, but the funhouse-clear casing turned an ordinary console into a shelf piece. Right now it's one of the fastest-moving N64 variants changing hands. Why the clear shell is spiking
Pokemon Gold and Silver Still Reward Careful CollectorsPop the back off a Game Boy Color copy of Pokemon Gold and you'll find the thing that decides whether the cartridge is worth buying: a CR2025 battery soldered to the board, quietly dying since 2000. That battery didn't just hold your save. It ran the internal clock that made Bellsprout appear in the morning and Hoothoot at night. When it goes, the game still plays, but a chunk of what made these carts special goes with it. Why the 1999 sequel still outclasses the original Gold and Silver land
Spotting Repro Carts and Resealed Boxes Before You PayFlip a suspicious NES cartridge over and look at the two screws holding the shell together. If they're Phillips-head, you're holding a reproduction. Nintendo used a proprietary 3.8mm security bit on genuine grey carts, and no factory in 1988 shipped a game you could open with a screwdriver from your kitchen drawer. That single detail has saved plenty of buyers from dropping real money on a fake. Reproductions and resealed boxes have gotten good enough that a phone photo won't always give them a
What Boxed vs Loose Really Does to N64 PricesA loose Super Mario 64 cart turns up at every car boot sale in the country, and it's worth about what you'd expect for a game that shipped by the truckload. Put that same cart back in its box with the manual and the cardboard tray, and you're suddenly in a different conversation. That gap between loose and complete is where most N64 pricing lives, and it trips up buyers and sellers constantly. The Nintendo 64 launched in 1996 (1997 for PAL territories), and because cartridges survive abuse that
What Your Nintendo 64 Is Actually Worth in 2024Pull that grey brick out of the loft and the first question is always the same: box or no box? With the Nintendo 64 it matters more than almost any other cartridge-era console, because Nintendo's cardboard boxes were flimsy, the styrofoam inserts got binned by every kid in 1997, and the little instruction booklets vanished into landfill. A loose cart of a common game is pocket change. The same title CIB – complete in box, inserts and all – can be a different animal entirely. Why boxed CIB copi
Why FPGA Consoles Are Quietly Eating the Retro MarketAsk anyone who tried to buy an original Super Nintendo last year and they'll tell you the same thing: a decent boxed console isn't the casual pickup it was five years ago. Loose consoles still turn up cheap, but clean examples with the right cables and a working RGB-capable board have crept steadily upward. And here's the thing collectors are only now admitting out loud – a growing chunk of players have stopped chasing the original hardware altogether. The reason is sitting on a lot of shelves
How to Grade GameCube Discs, Cases and Console BundlesTilt a GameCube mini-disc under a desk lamp and turn it slowly. Honest wear looks random – a stray arc here, a fingerprint there. But if the whole surface carries one uniform, circular swirl from hub to edge, like it went for a ride on a buffing wheel, you're looking at a resurfaced disc. That's not automatically a dealbreaker. It is something the seller should have mentioned. Small disc, small margin for error The GameCube's proprietary 8 cm disc is based on miniDVD technology, and its size
Why NES Collecting Is Still the Hobby's Reference PointPick up a grey NES cart and you're holding the founding document of game collecting. Before anyone slabbed a sealed SNES box or argued over PS1 longbox variants, NES owners were already debating five-screw shells, hangtab boxes, and whether that Stadium Events label looked a little too glossy. The Nintendo Entertainment System didn't just rescue the console business after the 1983 crash – it accidentally invented the hobby. The black boxes that became the hobby's first checklist When the NES
Why SNES Shell Yellowing Is the Honest Collector's TestFlip over the next SNES you find at a flea market. Odds are the top shell and the bottom shell are two different colours – one drifting toward old margarine, the other still close to Nintendo's original grey. That mismatch isn't grime, and it isn't just sun damage. It's chemistry, and it's the most useful thing to understand before you buy, sell, or restore Super Nintendo hardware. Why one console yellows in two different shades The SNES shell is ABS plastic mixed with brominated flame retard
The N64 Condition Checklist Every Collector Should RunGrip the analogue stick and rotate it slowly before you look at anything else. If it wobbles in its socket like a loose tooth, sits low, or crawls back to centre like it's exhausted, you've just learned more about that console's life than any listing photo will tell you. The N64 stick is the most honest condition report in retro gaming – which is why it's step one on this checklist. Why the stick test comes before everything else The original N64 controller stick rides on plastic gears inside
Buying a Game Boy Advance Without Getting a Fake CartTwo cobalt-blue Game Boy Advance SPs on the same shelf: same clamshell, same honest scuffs, same price. Flip them over and read the sticker on the bottom – one says AGS-001, the other AGS-101. That middle digit is the whole ballgame, and if the seller hasn't mentioned it, you should be the one who checks. The GBA is the rare platform where the hardware revision routinely matters more than the game in the box. It's also – less charmingly – home to some of the most counterfeited cartridges in all
How to buy an original Game Boy without getting a re-shellSlide the battery cover off before you talk price. On an original Game Boy – the grey DMG-01 brick Nintendo shipped in 1989 – those four AA terminals will tell you more about the machine's last few decades than any glamour shot in the listing. By spec-sheet logic, the brick should have lost. Its Sharp LR35902 ran at roughly 4.19 MHz and drove a 160×144 screen in four shades of pea-soup green, while Sega's Game Gear and the Atari Lynx offered full-colour, backlit displays. But those rivals devou
Collecting the Nintendo Switch While It's Still WarmA sealed copy of Super Mario 3D All-Stars turned into a collectible before the console it runs on ever left store shelves. Nintendo put an expiry date on the physical run – production stopped at the end of March 2021, roughly six months after release – and collectors treated it like a sneaker drop, not a game launch. That's the Switch era in one sentence: the first Nintendo generation where the collecting started while the hardware was still selling. Which makes it a strange platform to collect
Collecting the Nintendo 3DS After the eShop Went DarkWhen Nintendo ended new purchases on the 3DS eShop in March 2023, it didn't just retire a storefront – it turned every cartridge into the only remaining door into the library. Pushmo, Intelligent Systems' brilliant block-pulling puzzler, was digital-only. So was Game Freak's oddball golf-poker hybrid Pocket Card Jockey. Neither ever got a cartridge, so on 3DS there's simply nothing left to buy. Why the closure made cartridges the whole story Even physical releases lost something. Fire Emblem:
The Nintendo DS Is the Sleeper Library Hiding in Plain SightEvery flea market has a shoebox of loose Nintendo DS carts priced like chewing gum, and somewhere in that box there's usually one cart worth more than everything else on the table. That's the DS in miniature: one of the biggest handheld libraries ever assembled, with genuinely scarce games sitting shoulder to shoulder with landfill – and almost nothing on the label to tell you which is which. Why the biggest library of its era is also the least sorted The DS was one of the best-selling system
Why GameCube Collectors Check the Back Panel FirstThe first question a seasoned GameCube buyer asks has nothing to do with the games. It's "does it have the digital port?" Spin the console around: early units carry two video sockets on the back, and the smaller one – labelled Digital AV Out – quietly decides how much that little cube is worth to a picture-quality purist. Why the back panel matters more than the colour Nintendo launched the GameCube in 2001 as model DOL-001, digital port included. A later cost-cut revision, DOL-101, deleted i
How the Wii U Turned a Sales Flop Into Collector GoldNintendo shipped roughly 13.5 million Wii U consoles across the machine's entire life. The Wii before it cleared 100 million. That gulf – the hardest faceplant in Nintendo's home-console history – is exactly why the Wii U has quietly become one of the most collectable Nintendo platforms you can still build without remortgaging the house. The maths is simple: a tiny install base meant tiny print runs, and a small library means actually finishing a collection is achievable. Add the eShop closing
The Wii is everywhere, so what's actually rare?Somewhere in a drawer near you, a white Wii is resting under a tangle of cables, its sensor bar wrapped around a remote with a slightly chewed silicone jacket. Nintendo shipped over 100 million of these things, and it sometimes feels like half of them were donated, boot-saled or handed to a nephew before 2013 was out. That glut is exactly what makes the Wii interesting to collect: the hardware is nearly free, so all the collector attention concentrates in the stuff that isn't. Flip it over fir
How to Start Collecting Nintendo Without Losing Your MindTry to destroy a loose N64 cartridge. Short of power tools, you'll struggle – Nintendo moulded that grey plastic like it fully expected the thing to be hurled down a staircase, which, in the average 1997 living room, it was. Now look at the cardboard box the cartridge originally came in. Three decades of attic damp, price stickers and enthusiastic children have made surviving boxes the real prize. That tension – indestructible game, fragile packaging – is the whole story of Nintendo collecting.
Why Collectors Chase Black Label PS2 Games Over Greatest HitsTwo copies of the same PlayStation 2 game, side by side on a shop shelf. Same disc, same manual, same everything – except one spine is black and the other wears a red stripe. To a casual buyer they're interchangeable. To a collector, only one of them is the copy. That red stripe is the Greatest Hits banner, and learning to read it – along with Platinum, Player's Choice, Nintendo Selects and the rest of the budget re-release family – is the fastest way to level up from "person with old games" to
Decoding RGB, SCART and Mod Chips in GameCube ListingsA seller somewhere is asking a serious premium for a GameCube because of one square port on the back panel – and if you can't explain why, the listing was written in a language you don't speak yet. Retro hardware descriptions are dense with jargon: RGB, recapped, region-free, line doubler. None of it is decoration. Every term changes what the console does, what it's worth, and whether it's still the machine that left the factory. Composite, S-Video, RGB: the cable pecking order All three desc
The GameCube Isn't Retro Gaming's Bargain Bin AnymoreThe purple lunchbox got the last laugh. For most of the 2010s, the GameCube was the console dealers couldn't shift – stacked in a crate under the folding table while boxed SNES carts sat in the glass case. That era is over. The GameCube has quietly become one of retro collecting's strongest risers, and if you're still mentally pricing it like clearance stock, the market has moved on without you. A console that lost the sales war is winning the scarcity war The GameCube sold a small fraction o