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Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

At the height of baseball card collecting in the 90's, my best friend's dad went out and bought a closet full of baseball card sets (not classic sets, but sets from the time period). He told my parents he was doing it to save for his son's college education.

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Yeah. People don't get this, but what you want to collect is what kids are having fun with today that they'll want to have fun with again when they're older.

Nostalgia and natural rarity. If it weren't for emulators, I'd wager that old Nintendo systems would be the rage right now.

Nintendo has sold over 10 million units of the NES Classic Edition and Super NES Classic Edition.

While this shows the demand is there, it also shows that the "if it weren't for emulators..." part of OP's comment is important.

Stashing a mint NES back in 93 with the hopes of making fat stacks today would have been a folly because of how people are valuing the whole thing(they value the game/experience, not the console/object).

So maybe not the NES console, those are still only moderately pricy even in mint condition due to the extreme number of consoles made, but certainly if you bought a stack of Little Samsons and Mr. Gimmicks and Panic Restaurants for $39 each in ’93 and sat on them until today you would be set for a while:

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eb...

Yes, the ROM can be had for free and the experience of playing the game is identical. No, a collector doesn’t care.

But a game is not a system...There are def individual GAMES that are bananapants expensive (I'm looking at you Super Copa!) but the systems aren't as expensive.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic?

No I think you get it even better than I laid it out. The extreme or rare ends are where nostalgia meets numismatics.

The casual nostalgics are happy with emulators, hence the systems not being expensive. Still enough SNESes out there to placate the the small number of people that want the original.

I think you need to check the prices on mint unopened nes consoles.

Old gaming consoles and their games have had their prices sky rocket over the last 5 years or so. There is a huge retro gaming community and a whole industry or after-market emulators, addons, old console modifications, upscalers, etc etc

NES and SNES games in good condition or of higher rarity regularly fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay and the like, and retro game collecting has grown enormously popular compared to ten or fifteen years ago.

> People don't get this, but what you want to collect is what kids are having fun with today that they'll want to have fun with again when they're older.

LEGO would certainly fit the bill

My dad did the same with Magic: The Gathering. It actually would've worked okay (though still probably not as good as investing in an S&P 500 index fund), except that he died, my mom knew nothing about M:tG (or negotiating, for that matter), and she took the first lowball offer from a card dealer she ran across. He made a nice 80% profit off of them, at least.

On the plus side, I had a lot of fun showing off & playing with my dad's "investment" as a teenager.

He probably did pretty well if he invested at the right time. There were a few cards I got when I was a kid that were worth $6 at the time and spiked to about $800 in 2018 -> http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Revised/Underground_Sea. I dumped everything valuable in my collection as I just play for fun occasionally and "bad" cards are just as fun as "good" cards.

That's kind of tragic. Out of curiosity, do you know what happened to the cards?

Sadly I'm not sure what happened to them, my family moved away from the area when I was 14. I caught up with him a few years ago, and he did go to college, though I'm not sure if the cards were sold to help pay for it.

As an aside, his dad was for the most part a pretty smart guy, he had a PhD in Physics. He just got caught up in the hype and made a bizarre financial decision after reading articles on the projected value of baseball cards in the future.

I had imagined the worst case, "I traded our cow for magic beans" scenario, but without the goose with golden eggs.

Intellectual Darwinism.

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