Are Old Video Games Worth Money?

The short answer

If you just hauled a tote of old games out of a closet and want a number: most loose, common cartridges and discs are worth somewhere between $1 and $10 each. Sports titles from any era, movie tie-ins, and the big hits that shipped by the millions — your fifth copy of Madden, the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cart that came packed with every NES — sit at the bottom of that range, and some are worth less than the gas to sell them.

But the market's exceptions are large and specific. A complete-in-box copy of the right game, a sealed copy of almost anything desirable, a low-print title from the end of a console's life, or a rare RPG on the right platform can be worth hundreds to thousands of dollars — and the traits that separate a $3 cart from a $300 one are things you can check in a few minutes with the game in your hand. That's what this guide walks through: what actually drives value, and how to figure out exactly where yours lands.

What makes an old video game valuable

Game values stack a handful of factors: what survives with the game, which printing it is, what platform it's on, and what shape it's in. A game that hits several of these at once is where the real money lives.

Completeness: loose vs CIB vs sealed

This is the single biggest multiplier in the hobby. A loose game is just the cartridge or disc. A CIB ("complete in box") copy has the original box, manual, and inserts — the cardboard tray or plastic clamshell, dust sleeve, poster, registration card, whatever shipped inside. A sealed copy has never been opened at all.

Why do boxes and manuals matter so much? Because almost nobody kept them. Cartridge-era boxes were thin cardboard that kids tore open on Christmas morning and parents threw out by New Year's. Forty years later, the paper is often scarcer than the game. As a rough rule, a CIB copy brings two to five times the loose price — and for NES and Game Boy titles with fragile cardboard boxes, the multiple can run far higher. Sealed is another world entirely: a sealed copy of a desirable cartridge-era game can be worth ten to a hundred times the loose price, which is why grading exists (more on that below). Even a lone manual or box has standalone value — collectors buy them to complete their own copies.

Print runs and variants

The same title can exist in several printings, and collectors care intensely about which one you have. On the NES, the original 1985–86 launch titles came in "black box" packaging — a black box with blocky pixel art of the game itself — and those first prints carry real premiums over later reprints of the same games. Flip an NES cartridge over and count the screws: 5-screw cartridges are the earliest production, later replaced by 3-screw shells with plastic clips, and for many titles the 5-screw version is the scarcer, more collected one.

Sealed collectors go a level deeper, reading the shrink-wrap itself: seal styles and hangtabs — the punched cardboard tab that let early boxes hang on a retail peg — date a sealed copy to a specific production window, and an early seal variant can multiply what a sealed game brings. And across every platform, watch for reprint lines: Player's Choice (Nintendo), Greatest Hits (PlayStation), and Platinum Hits (Xbox) are budget reissues of popular games, printed in huge numbers, and they're worth a fraction of the original "black label" first print. The game inside is identical — the printing is the product.

Platform tiers

Not all consoles age equally. Nintendo first-party games hold value better than almost anything else in the hobby — Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon titles stay in demand across every generation they appeared on. At the other end, systems that sold poorly produced games in small numbers, and the good games on those systems are now genuinely rare: RPGs on the Sega Saturn and original PlayStation are the classic example. Panzer Dragoon Saga — released late in the Saturn's life in a famously small North American run — routinely brings several hundred dollars loose and four figures complete, and Suikoden II on PS1 is one of the most valuable common-format discs of its era.

The same logic applies within a console's own timeline: late-lifecycle titles shipped after everyone had moved on to the next system had tiny print runs. Little Samson, released for the NES in 1992 as the SNES took over, is a four-figure cartridge loose and far more boxed — not because it was famous, but because almost nobody bought it new. Meanwhile Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games are in unusually strong demand right now — portable nostalgia runs deep, the carts are easy to collect and display, and Pokémon titles in particular have pulled the whole handheld market up with them.

Grading: when it pays and when it doesn't

Professional grading — WATA, VGA, and CGC are the names you'll see — authenticates a game, assigns a numeric condition grade, and encases it in an acrylic slab. For sealed copies of desirable games, grading is close to mandatory at the high end: buyers paying serious money want third-party confirmation that the seal is original and the copy is what it claims to be, and a strong grade on the right title multiplies the price.

For everything else, do the math before you ship anything. Grading costs a meaningful fee per game and can take months. Slabbing a $15 loose cartridge or a Greatest Hits reprint will cost more than the game is worth, and a graded loose cart of a common title rarely brings much over the raw price. The honest rule: grade sealed rarities and exceptional CIB copies of high-demand games; leave the rest raw and playable.

Condition: the specifics that move the number

Within any category, condition sorts the winners from the also-rans — and game collectors have their own particular checklist. Label tears, writing, and price-sticker damage on a cartridge are the first thing a buyer sees, and a torn or marker-scrawled label can cut a cart's value in half. Sun fade — a label or box bleached from years on a sunny shelf — is just as costly and impossible to reverse. Inside the cart, battery corrosion is the silent killer: many cartridges carry a coin-cell battery for save files, and a leaking battery can corrode the board. For disc games, check the underside under a light for disc rot — pinholes, bronzing, or clouding in the reflective layer — along with deep scratches, and make sure the correct disc is in the correct case. Cracked case spines and water-rippled manuals drag CIB prices down the same way a crushed box does for cartridges.

About those million-dollar headlines

You may have seen the stories: in 2021, graded sealed copies of early Super Mario titles brought six and seven figures at auction — a sealed Super Mario 64 hammered for over $1.5 million at Heritage Auctions, and sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda set their own records the same year.

Those results are real, and they're also the most extreme outliers the hobby has ever produced: perfect-grade sealed copies of era-defining games, with early seal variants, sold at the absolute peak of a heated market. They tell you the ceiling exists — they tell you nothing about a typical copy. The same games loose and played are $20–40 cartridges. Enjoy the headlines, then value your own games on completeness, printing, platform, and condition like everything else in this guide.

How to check what yours is worth

You can spend an evening cross-referencing cart codes, screw counts, and print runs by hand — or you can let the video game analyzer do the identification for you. Either way, the photos you take make all the difference. Here's how to give the analysis everything it needs:

Upload those photos and you'll get back an identification of the exact game and platform, the printing details that drive collector value, and a current market estimate based on what collectors are asking for comparable examples. It's a fast way to find out whether the cart in your hand is a $3 common or something worth setting aside.

Working through a whole game room? Start with our guide on where to start with an inherited collection, and if the same boxes hold long-boxes of comics, see whether old comic books are worth money. You can browse every guide in the value guides index.

Frequently asked questions