In the last article that I wrote, I discussed the importance that the role of story can have when collecting games – good stories make interesting items more desirable, thus raising their prices, while rare items that are relatively unknown tend to be forgotten about… unless a story comes along.
I personally believe that the role that story plays is perhaps the most critically important part to collectors. I know that it is to me. I value the games that I received as a kid. I remember playing my copy of Donkey Kong Country on the SNES with Gary – who I have run the GOAT Store with for 18 years – the year it came out on New Years Eve well into the new year.
Although, sadly, I have little time to replay Donkey Kong Country today, and being older I have little interest in trying to stay up all night to do so, seeing the cartridge on the shelf reminds me of those times.
Of course, there are other reasons to collect too. I started collecting all of the original Playstation “longbox” games because I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt when I was out and about, and it was fun to see if I could get the whole set.
But even with items like this, the story – the memory of going into a game store and discovering a new game, the times that managers who knew what I was looking for would call me because someone just sold them a handful of the games, and so on… That is a big part of the reason that I really enjoy those games.
If you read my last article, you may be asking yourself what this all has to do with the Virtual Console, and its effects on the retro game market, since that’s what I said that I was going to talk about. The answer, I believe, is everything.
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Midwest Gaming Classic / GOAT Store - He met his future business partner Gary Heil in elementary school where the pair would often find themselves coding Apple ][GS computers after school. Soon, this hobby became more serious when the pair was asked to create a game for a discontinued video game console by a small company. That company shifted away from small run game development before the game was complete, but Dan and Gary decided to forge ahead with their own company, and GOAT Store, LLC was born. While the pair doesn’t develop games anymore, in 2003 the GOAT Store helped bring the first Dreamcast title to market developed on the open source KallistiOS platform with Feet of Fury. Since that time, Dan has helped to bring additional independent projects to the Dreamcast, and has helped created development tools for other projects. Additionally, along with Gary Heil, he runs the Midwest Gaming Classic trade show to help give a platform to smaller projects that are often unsupported from the original manufacturers!
