After 30 years on the market Nintendo’s Game Boy is again hot property, fetching booming prices among nostalgic gamers and speculative investors. And it’s not just cartridges for Nintendo’s old handheld that are selling out; retro games in general seem set for a vinyl revival-style boom.
The Game Boy was released in 1989 and sold about 120 million units to kids and adults around the world. And while the primitive brick-shaped device has long since been superseded in technological terms, it and its games are more popular today than they’ve been in a long time.
eBay has more than 230,000 listings for old games in Australia alone, running the gamut from less than a d
ollar for random early 2000s titles to more than $20,000 for sealed and graded classics. And Game Boy is a good example of what’s happening generally; the rising popularity and ageing audience for games is spurring interest in retro titles for play and nostalgic collections, while a new market for speculative investors is driving prices for certain cartridges sky high.An investor who bought a boxed copy of Pokemon Crystal for a few hundred dollars a couple of years ago may be able to offload it for $1500 today, for example, while even relatively common but popular Game Boy games like those in the Metroid or Legend of Zelda series typically go for $200 or more.
