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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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).

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!

> It's just not the same.

To you.

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

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)

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