It’s undeniable in the past 20 years, the market for retro games has changed a lot. The market changes have come for a lot of different reasons, and in this new column, Game and Market Watch, I’m going to explore some of the changes we’ve seen and the factors that influenced them.
Before we get started on more specific changes to the market, I think it’s worth explaining who I am and the perspective that I see on this. In the late 90s, my friend Gary Heil and I started a company called the GOAT Store, LLC. GOAT stands for “Games Of All Types,” and our goal was to provide games to people who wanted to collect them.
We came up with this because we had both been acquiring games for the Atari Jaguar, but we were doing so with different goals. Gary was looking for games to play, and I was looking to see if I could complete a set. But we had a problem – when we could go to a web site and order games from it, we didn’t know if that game was going to arrive brand new (which often was the case back then!), used but complete, loose, or loose with the label chewed on by a dog. We decided to start the GOAT Store with the idea that if we better described the items that people were getting, those people (like myself) who cared if the game was in good shape could pay a bit extra for them as they would know what they were getting, and people who just wanted the loose game (like Gary) could get a loose cart just to play. Read the rest of this article on page 15 by clicking here!
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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!
