If you've had an eye on the retro game collecting scene recently, you know the price of old games has risen dramatically in the past few years - and Pokemon fans in particular are driving some of the most ridiculous price gouging.
As a not-altogether-serious collector I've been vaguely aware of this trend for a bit, but a tweet from Goodwill Goblin - an account that highlights video game items posted on the ShopGoodwill auction site - really put the situation in perspective. Loose Pokemon Emerald cartridges are now selling for close to $200.
You know how popular Pokemon is today? You know how popular Pokemon was back in the early 2000s? The best selling games on the GBA were Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, with 16 million units sold, Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, with 12 million units sold, and Pokemon Emerald, with 7 million units sold.
we interrupt our usual programming to bring you this important public service announcement: Pokemon Emerald sold more than 7 million units and is not rare, please do not spend this much money on the third most-common Game Boy Advance game. pic.twitter.com/PIZIXBagVTFebruary 25, 2023
Despite that, auction tracking services like PriceCharting show that they're also some of priciest games on the GBA, rivaling even the handheld's most obscure, sought-after titles. Emerald averages a sale price of $178. The others routinely reach near $100. None of these games are hard to find, so why are they so expensive?
I can't pretend to be able to fully pin down the market dynamics of retro game collecting, but I've got a few theories. First, it's worth noting that average retro game prices have effectively doubled since the beginning of 2020, but that doesn't fully account for what we're seeing with Pokemon. Where other beloved retro games have doubled in price, many Pokemon games have tripled - or in Emerald's case, quadrupled - over the same period.
The thing with Pokemon is that it has never truly come unshackled from its past. Through a long, convoluted chain of transfers, you can bring every old Pokemon you've collected going back to the GBA games up to the current generation, storing them in the cloud with Pokemon Home and transferring them into whichever modern games still have a Pokedex that supports them.
That means all these games remain relevant for modern Pokemon fans, and there's a big question mark lingering over how much longer this will be the case. Pokemon Bank is a downloadable 3DS app that's essential in the transfer process, and you might have heard that Nintendo is preparing to shut down the 3DS eShop. All official indications suggest that Bank will remain available for the foreseeable future if you've used it at least once before, but nobody knows how long that will continue to be the case, and fans are getting nervous.
Nintendo has previously made Virtual Console versions of the original Game Boy Pokemon games available on 3DS, complete with the option to directly upload creatures into the cloud, though obviously those are about to become inaccessible, too. With Game Boy and GBA games now available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online service, I don't understand why the classic Pokemon titles aren't already available there and directly connected with the modern Pokemon Home cloud.
Would that solve the price issues on the secondhand market? I don't know, but it would at least mean that retro game collectors and Pokemon fans who just wanna catch 'em all would no longer be competing over the same cartridges.
In the meantime, take this as a PSA from both me and the Goodwill Goblin: you shouldn't spend nearly $200 on the third most common GBA game.
You know you can get Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 for like seven bucks on eBay? That's still one of the best GBA games of all time.
