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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to understand. The packaging is identical to the originals, the CDs are identical, the games on those CDs are identical, but the product is considered a forgery?

Why do vintage PC game collectors care whether the product in their hand was manufactured in 1995 by the original company or in 2021 by someone in their garage?

Is the goal to play the game or to acquire bragging rights about an old object just because it's an original copy?

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Well, that's just it though. The packaging, storage medium, art and documents that come with these games are not identical, and in a couple examples given the game data is either corrupted, or of a pirated and modified version of the game.

To draw an analogy, if I was a collector of vinyl records and I purchased a first edition album that actually turned out to be a poorly reproduced print made from modern MP3 files, with a label that was printed by some dude's inkjet printer at home, I would be furious.

Because that's the point of collecting. You do not purchase the material, but the history of the item. I say this as a book collector of first edition (among other stuff): I understand second printing may be identical to the first printing (or even better in some quality aspects), but the thrill of buying something that has history is what makes interesting.

Well, if we were talking about century old paintings or art pieces I might understand, but 20-30 year old video games.......

It's just not the same.

> It's just not the same.

To you.

Is there some specific date where you would allow for collectors to value an object? A 40 year old book? A 50 year old car? A Magic the Gathering card from 31 years ago? An arcade console from 35? I’m curious what the calculus is here because it seems quite specific.

It's quite subjective. It comes down to how popular culture romanticizes a thing. Popular culture has romanticized 50 year old cars, or old books, but it hasn't romanticized 35 year old gaming consoles. Why that is, I couldn't say.

It has though, clearly. That people are buying them and this article exists is the most obvious evidence, but there’s a whole retrograming subculture out there who collects and plays with this stuff. Ready Player One was a recent retrogaming pop culture phenomenon. Try searching for a 35 year old console on eBay and be amazed at what you find.

How can you say that when there clearly is a market where people are willing to pay 5-6 figures for a videogame?

In many ways it's exactly the same. They're both art, both created by the original "artist."

But it's normal for most people to think collectors of certain items are silly. I used to collect books, and most people think it's utterly stupid to obtain books and only read copies of them rather than the original (opening a binding causes it to deteriorate a little bit).

It's the same as in you are owning a piece of history (20-30 years ago is a LONG time ago in video games)

At one point, centuries old paintings were 20-30 years old. Someone made a conscious decision to keep them in pristine condition.

To be fair, that's about all you can do with a painting: hanging it on a wall and keeping it clean. A better way for me to read your comment is: "No one made the decision to throw them out with the garbage."

And many of them weren’t considered special at the time.

Van Gogh died a pauper, not having sold a single work during his short life.

Your walls are compatible with 30 y.o. paintings, along with a century old, five centuries old or even a prehistoric ones (if you manage to find such).

99% of 20 y.o. games aren't compatible with anything newer than a 2010's hardware and for 30 year old games you can't even copy/try to run them on anything modern - floppies died ~2010.

20 y.o. video games are roughly equivalent of Late modern period art.

30 y.o. video games are somewhere between the classical antiquity and the Middle ages.

40 y.o. are closer to Egyptian Pyramids.

Plus anything more than 20 years old looks wrong on a non-crt

I have a book in one of my bookshelves that was printed in 1906. It's in awful shape but readable. I just wanted the first English printing of the book, because newer prints are abridged. That's over a century old, and it's just a book!

You do not purchase the material, but the history of the item.

I don't really buy that for functional objects. I've restored old Teletype machines, some almost a century old, and provenance is not a big issue. In fact, because of the way they were maintained, many are not an original set. There are four main components of a Model 15, keyboard, typing unit, base, and motor. All are field-replaceable, and the first two are easily swappable without tools. Maintenance was often a swap, not field repair. The units went back to a repair depot, were repaired, cleaned, and oiled, and then went to another rental customer. Retired machines rarely have the original subunit combo, and nobody cares.

Is a video game any more of a "functional" item than a book? Or a vinyl record, in another analogy given in this thread?

The content on the cassettes is random recording noise and not a playable game.

The content on the disks are cracked copies that contain missing or modified data and are not the original game.

Ah okay then I can understand. If the product is intentionally broken then it's fraud.

It’s fraud also if it’s a forgery, even if the game worked. It was represented as an original when it was sold, not a high quality modern copy.

Also yes, in the case of collecting, the point is "acquire bragging rights about an old object just because it's an original copy"

If you wanted to just play it you'd just play it in an emulator.

I will point out that the history of video games is not that old in itself, meaning a several decade old game is falling into the "one of the first games made" vintage tier.

Yeah, the case of "this is something we knew existed but didn't have a copy of" makes a lot more sense than "I want to be one of 20 people who own a copy of this thing". Even the collectors openly admit to actually playing the games via emulators.

When a collector purchases the Ship of Theseus, they expect to get the Ship of Theseus, not some mere copy.

I see what you did there.

IANA game collector so take my comment with a grain of salt, but no the goal is usually not to play the game. Playing the game could damage/harm the original media. Many times the original shrink wrap hasn't even been removed.

There are definitely some collectors who do play the games so this is not a universal statement.

If it's exceptionally rare, the collector will often work to make an image of the data (which is how the rare one discussed was found, the image revealed a pirate copy).

The goal of collecting is not to actually use the thing. It loses its value if you do. (This makes the whole thing bonkers, IMO.)

Also, the packaging apparently wasn't identical. It was hand-cut at least some of the time and imperfect.

There are as many goals in collecting as there are collectors. Many collectors do not want to use their items as some of the items are pushing 40 years old and will not last forever. Every disc read and manual flip subtracts from their life. This may all sound silly, but compare this to Silent Era films. 75% of films from that time period are gone, forever [0]. We are still in the beginnings of the medium of games and we could fall prey to the same mistakes as previous mediums. Some section of the medium must get locked down so that future historians can study them in as much detail as possible.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/12/most-ame...

One advantage we have is the rapid increase in digital storage space means that many of these will not be lost if we can get them imaged, many people can each have a copy of almost every known NES game in only a few hundred megabytes.

What will be lost are the manuals, boxes, cloth maps. little post card inserts for some random warranty or club, and most importantly, the physical feel of all these things. That is the primary thing collectors want to preserve.

The thing is, these are so arbitrary.

I like buying used (not collectible) books, and once in a while I find artifacts used as bookmarks - a store receipt, an airline boarding pass, a newspaper clipping. These objects are fascinating to me; I'm briefly transported into the world of the person who originally bought the book and how different it seems from that of today. The details of the 'bonus item' are like clues to the identity of the mysterious reader that preceded me, whose identity and trajectory are as entertaining to speculate about as as the fictional or theoretical subject matter of the book itself.

Over time, everything becomes an antique; competitive collecting (for well-defined subsets of items in a niche market) is arguably a way for people of similar temperaments and taste to locate each other socially, but the more effort they invest in this (by developing catalogues or price histories of their favored artifacts) the more likely they are to be crowded out speculators who recognize the hallmarks of an asset class without especially caring what they are attached to.

There’s something to the novelty of the old - I found a one cent coupon for Lysol or something like that inside the wall of the kitchen.

No expiration date - I should try to use it!

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