Most people’s game collections don’t consist simply of games.

You may have read that sentence and thought that is obvious, those col- lections include things like consoles and controllers too, but that’s also not what I was to.

Instead, I’m referring to the trinkets, figures, books, cards, blankets, wall art, and many other things that we often use to decorate the space where us collec- tors keep our games.

There has been an explosion of col- lectibles in the past few years pertain- ing to retro gaming. Stores like Target, Walmart and Gamestop now have areas nearly as large as their video game selection dedicated to trinkets that celebrate arcade and console games of the past. Super Mario Bros and Zelda still have a modern gaming footprint, so celebrating their heritage seems like a natural extension of their popular- ity today, but it is nearly as easy to find things celebrating games like Asteroids, Q*Bert, Centipede and Dig Dug.

Of course, the point of Game & Market Watch isn’t just to discuss what you can find, but to think critically about what might happen with the market for these items in the future. To that end, I expect that the answer is for the most part, not much.

Besides video games, I have been carefully curating my own action figure collection since I was young. The first figure I remember getting was a Peter Venkman from the Real Ghostbusters series. I truly remember debating what todowithit.DoIopenittoplaywithit, or do I keep it sealed in its box?

I blame (or credit) my thoughts at that age on my father, who had started a Star Wars collection in the early 80s. The majority of my father’s collection when I was young was not sealed, and was found at neighborhood rummage sales. I would often tag along with him

looking for Atari 2600 cartridges, and he would look for Star Wars toys. Later, I added Ghostbusters figures to what I was hunting, but for now I’m just going to focus on Star Wars toys.

Read the rest of this article on page 32 by clicking here!

 

 

 

Be sure to sign up to get Old School Gamer Magazine  for free by clicking here!

 

Dan Loosen Dan Loosen (4 Posts)

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!