Will the 2600 still be collected in 20 years?

[HatefulGravey]

I'm not trying to be funny, or start something negative. I'm actually wondering if collecting the older consoles will still be a thing as time passes. I'll explain my thought process some to hopefully shed some light on what I'm actually asking here. 

 

My birthday is coming up. I'm not old but I'm old enough that no one would confuse me for young (I'll be 39 this year). I have a large collection by my own standard, and no desire to get ride of it any time soon. So, getting older I have reached a point of wondering what will happen with it once I'm not longer here to take care of it and enjoy it. 

 

I have nephews and nieces that are very into video games and thanks to my involvement in their lives they have some exposure to older video games. Even so they have no interest in the older games beyond a passing curiosity. Having no kids of my own I had hoped one of them would take some interest in the older stuff and enjoy having it, even if only so as a conversation starter, when I die. 

 

Seeing no real interest in them has been a little depressing and has me wondering if anyone will be interested in stuff this old in the coming years. I don't know for sure, but I seem to be on the pretty young side of collecting VCS stuff. I know people tend to collect what they remember from their past and I have some memories of VCS age gaming because my family didn't really have the funds to upgrade to new consoles as they came out and I grew up playing my uncle's old games. So I have memories to attach the collection to. Even with my influence the children in my family are much more interested in the modern games. I don't blame them, these are the things they are growing up with. 

 

So to the other collectors in the world: do you ever wonder about these things? Do you think there will still be interest in these older games in another 20+ years at all? 

[sirlynxalot]

I'd look at the classic car market as a proxy. The resale value plummeted for many pre WW2 cars as the generation of people who grew up with them passed away and there wasn't as much interest by younger post war generations. However it's not like no one is interested in this stuff, there are younger people who didn't grow up with those cars who buy them and operate them for various reasons, either as a showpiece in their collection like jay Leno with his hundreds of cars, or because they like the pedigree of the brand or feeling connected to the dawn of automotive history by owning a model T, or because they are the kind of person who likes to preserve a bit of history, etc. 

 

Probably not a large group of people but there will still be people buying and playing 80s atari stuff (even if it's mostly through emulators) 20 years from now.

[buick]

I'm barely half your age and I'm into it

I first got into retro gaming growing up and watching online reviewers like AVGN and ClassicGameRoom. Their videos were humorous but also taught me a lot about certain parts of the video game industry and its operations in the early days before I was around. I can specifically name the AVGN Atari Sports, Pong Consoles, and Swordquest videos into exposing me to the history of Atari-era video games. That's what got me into it and I learned more of my own accord and started my own collection!

Obviously I'm far too young to have any kind of nostalgic connection to Atari, but the early pioneering days of the video game industry are super interesting to me and there's lots of neat stories about the companies that existed at the time. Plus, a lot of the games are still fun! Even though I grew up around consoles like the Gamecube, Wii, and Xbox 360, there's still plenty of fun to be had with the 2600.

The takeaway is that, yes, there will be plenty of younger people interested in these consoles who won't let your collection go to waste! It''s not even just me: I alone have multiple friends about my age who also own 2600 consoles and collect games for them. It won't be a dead hobby for a long while. It'll just shift from being more nostalgia-driven by people who grew up with the console to younger people more interested in preserving the history of old video games and consoles.

[Cebus Capucinis]

No. 😤

[+KaeruYojimbo]

There are people who collect 78s of music made decades before they were born because they think that's the best way to listen to it, so I think there will be a few people who insist on finding old games to play them on the original hardware, but most people will be fine playing them in emulation, just like most people are fine listening to CDs or MP3s of those old songs.

[sirlynxalot]

Was also reminded by this topic of a post on Reddit I saw recently where several people currently younger than thirty weighed in about getting into the 2600 for the first time as teens or adults. 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/w5ji57/did_anyone_here_get_into_atari_consoles_without/

[Hawkeye68]

4 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

I'd look at the classic car market as a proxy. The resale value plummeted for many pre WW2 cars as the generation of people who grew up with them passed away and there wasn't as much interest by younger post war generations. However it's not like no one is interested in this stuff, there are younger people who didn't grow up with those cars who buy them and operate them for various reasons, either as a showpiece in their collection like jay Leno with his hundreds of cars, or because they like the pedigree of the brand or feeling connected to the dawn of automotive history by owning a model T, or because they are the kind of person who likes to preserve a bit of history, etc. 

 

Probably not a large group of people but there will still be people buying and playing 80s atari stuff (even if it's mostly through emulators) 20 years from now.

Cars are a great analogy and I agree.  When the nostalgia crowd is gone the market will shrink, maybe even collapse.  I suspect we are around the peak of 70s/80s hardware collecting today.

 

Unrelated, but along the same lines, I've been fascinated by the recent trend of Boomer musical artists selling their catalogs for tens of millions, sometimes even hundreds of millions.  Elvis was the King, and arguably the greatest change agent of popular culture in American history...but how often do you hear his music today?

 

 

[keithbk]

As time rolls on, fewer and fewer Atari 2600 consoles will be available...

 

As long as video games are popular, there will be an interest in classic game systems. As time progresses, Atari systems will be cannibalized to fix non-functioning systems. Will people take the time required to upgrade these systems to work on modern TVs? Don't know... it will slowly become a lost art.

 

There was a time you could go to garage sales and find Atari 2600 game systems by the galore... those days are past. But they are readily available on Ebay for 5-10x what you could pick them up at a garage sale. 

 

As with anything, CONDITION is everything. If you have a nice specimen, you can expect a collector to get excited.

[sirlynxalot]

9 hours ago, Hawkeye68 said:

Cars are a great analogy and I agree.  When the nostalgia crowd is gone the market will shrink, maybe even collapse.  I suspect we are around the peak of 70s/80s hardware collecting today.

 

Unrelated, but along the same lines, I've been fascinated by the recent trend of Boomer musical artists selling their catalogs for tens of millions, sometimes even hundreds of millions.  Elvis was the King, and arguably the greatest change agent of popular culture in American history...but how often do you hear his music today?

 

 

 

It's funny you mention we are at peak atari era hardware collecting now.  Prior to the covid pandemic the conventional wisdom I saw espoused on other retrogaming and game collecting forums was that nostalgia collectors for atari had peaked years before when people who grew up with it were in their 30s, and collector prices for atari stuff had greatly softened across the board in 2018 compared to what people were paying for atari stuff circa 2010.  Conventional wisdom at the time was that people go through a nostalgia phase in their 30s/40s but then grow out of the hobby, resulting in less demand and lower prices. Wisdom was that this was already happening for NES by 2018 and would soon happen to Snes/Genesis era.

 

Naturally atari stuff, as well as virtually every other type of retro game item, has had a steep increase in resale value since 2018. Although how much is it due to video game resellers and speculators continuously reselling things to dry and get a profit, versus older nostalgia collectors who owned the item in childhood, or new young owners who want to play the games... I'd like to know the details on that 😂. For example, people buy dozens of atari jaguars and lynxes at ridiculous prices every month on eBay but I don't see any significant new influx of users posting content in atari age forums for those systems.

Edited October 17, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[sirlynxalot]

15 hours ago, HatefulGravey said:

My birthday is coming up. I'm not old but I'm old enough that no one would confuse me for young (I'll be 39 this year). I have a large collection by my own standard, and no desire to get ride of it any time soon. So, getting older I have reached a point of wondering what will happen with it once I'm not longer here to take care of it and enjoy it.

By the way, I'm 36 and I figured I was probably at the tail end of people who might be considered 2600 nostalgia collectors due to playing 2600 extensively in childhood. My story is that we got 2 good sized atari 2600 collections circa 1992 at tag sales, and since my parents were too cheap to buy me the current game systems, 2600 is what I wound up playing extensively throughout my elementary school years until around 1996 when I managed to convince my parents to get me a PlayStation. Quite a jump in console generation 😂. Even after I had the PlayStation I still hooked up the atari and played it periodically until around 2001, when I stopped playing until around 2015 or so when I became interested again via nostalgia.

 

[WhyLee commotari.club]

i think it is a complicated matter. some of the old things are just dust collectors. some of them are attractive enough to be used.

regarding the 2600:
the old cases with the beautiful switches are still very attractive to look at.
the Jr. case looks generic like any other game console.

if you look at ebay, you will see, that the old version with the wood grain has a value of three or four times the value of the Jr. console despite have almost exactly the same electronics inside.
so, clearly beside gaming, having this console at home just to look at it is still an important factor.

it is still the most beautiful gaming console. maybe I get slapped in the face now, but all the other nintendos and x-boxes and playstations and so on look like shit-boxes. completely ugly.
so, this is the Joker argument to have an old 2600 4/6 switcher console.

but beside that, my approach is, to keep these consoles alife. and keeping them alife more me also means zu upgrade them to stay attractive.
(like an av mod or maybe an rgb2hdmi mod, maybe adding memory, maybe adding a rom, maybe adding a stereo audio module, .... while still being 100% compatible)

having fun using them is the most important thing to keep them alive.

[LatchKeyKid]

I'll mainly restate what's already been said... there will still be interest but it will be diminished.   In 20 years, the cohort of people who grew up with the 2600 (with childhood being the biggest source of nostalgia) will have already started dying off of natural causes in large numbers; that's not me being pessimistic but simple facts and biology.  With that loss of first person nostalgia, the market will shrink even more and become even more niche.  That said, I don't think it'll ever go away completely and instead it will transistion to the video game equivalent of people who still buy records or even wax cylinders for their music collections.

 

It's hard to realize but, if you're an 80's kid that grew up watching reruns of B&W sitcoms like I Love Lucy and the Munsters on local free TV while your parents listened to early Elvis and Beatles on the radio, the modern day equivalent for a 10 year old is binging on  Seinfeld and Friends on streaming while we're listening to GnR and Nirvana.

[zzip]

In the same way people collect antiques of bygone eras, there will be collectors of old games.   We already see younger people in this forum collecting.

 

However there won't likely be as many collectors,  also much of the hardware/carts will end up in landfills or stop working, so the supply will diminish over time too.

[Keir]

4 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

It's funny you mention we are at peak atari era hardware collecting now.  Prior to the covid pandemic the conventional wisdom I saw espoused on other retrogaming and game collecting forums was that nostalgia collectors for atari had peaked years before when people who grew up with it were in their 30s, and collector prices for atari stuff had greatly softened across the board in 2018 compared to what people were paying for atari stuff circa 2010.  Conventional wisdom at the time was that people go through a nostalgia phase in their 30s/40s but then grow out of the hobby, resulting in less demand and lower prices. Wisdom was that this was already happening for NES by 2018 and would soon happen to Snes/Genesis era.

I'd even go a step further and say that collecting for the 2600 (and systems contemporary with it) peaked 10-15 years ago. Once people are in their 30s/40s many have families and therefore less time and disposable income to spend on hobbies like this.

 

To the OP, yes I think there will always be interest but over time it becomes more niche. Also, if you're thinking about what will happen to your collection when you die maybe be a little more optimistic and look beyond 20 years!

[Mockduck]

I think there will be far fewer people interested in it, so kind of in terms of the "market" collapsing, but there will remain a few history buff collectors from future generations that will remain interested. But, yeah, most of our collections will eventually end up at estate sales and go for pennies, if they don't just get trashed by cleanout companies. It's sad, but it's how it goes. 

[Cynicaster]

This story of old-school gamers having high hopes that their kids/nieces/nephews will take an interest in 70s-80s video games, only to eventually be disappointed when it becomes clear that those kids could not possibly care less about 70s-80s video games and would rather watch someone on Youtube play Minecraft instead, is something I've seen or heard about countless times on forums, in podcasts, etc.  

 

I'm an old-school gamer myself who started late having kids (I'm mid-40s with 2 kids under 5) so I totally get how cool/fun it would be if my kids were to end up loving Atari 2600 or classic arcade games.  They see me playing these games all the time and maybe they will start to show an interest, but I've got very low expectations on this front.  I think of my own situation, where really the only "generation" of gaming that pre-dates my direct firsthand involvement is the standalone Pong consoles and perhaps some of the really primitive early-mid-70s arcade games.  And guess what?  I don't give a shart about Pong or Stunt Cycle or Death Race; my interest starts in the late 70s arcade games and Atari VCS because those are the games I started with as a kid.  

 

There will always be outliers - people in the younger generations who develop an interest in ancient-to-them stuff.  But I imagine these people will be so few and far between that the available cartridges and hardware will start to far outnumber the amount of people who want them and much of it will end up in landfills.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

[sirlynxalot]

Since I'm at the young end of the nostalgia collectors, feel free to leave me your atari collections in your will so I can become the ultimate king of atari for 5-10 years before it's my turn. 

 

Actually don't do that, it would be really depressing to get buried in atari games and hardware in my old age, and any meaning your respective collection had as an embodiment of your personal taste or personal history would just be lost in the shuffle.

[Keatah]

Having grown up with Pong-era and 1st generation cartridge systems such at the Channel-F, VCS, Intellivision, and Colecovision, the nostalgia pull is strong for those and others of that era. 

 

For better or worse, love it or hate it, I've chosen emulators as the way forward. Made the choice in the early pre-MAME days and haven't regretted it ever. This enables us to enjoy all the classics without hassle or inconvenience. I figure that emulators will let us enjoy it all well into the future. Long after the hardware no longer exists. Eliminates extraordinary efforts to get going. Already this has been proven with many 80's arcade cabs and "impossible to find" cartridges.

 

Additionally, post-life descendants will likely more readily accept and manage a small HDD compared against a room full of decaying plastics and out of tolerance electronics.

[MrTrust]

18 hours ago, Hawkeye68 said:

Cars are a great analogy and I agree.  When the nostalgia crowd is gone the market will shrink, maybe even collapse.  I suspect we are around the peak of 70s/80s hardware collecting today.

 

Pretty much the consensus, and that's almost certainly what will happen, though I wonder if we really are at the peak, because...

 

7 hours ago, zzip said:

However there won't likely be as many collectors,  also much of the hardware/carts will end up in landfills or stop working, so the supply will diminish over time too.

 

This is also what you'd expect but for the fact that there's a fairly widespread perception that old video games are worth money, and in many cases, they are.  I'm sure everyone here knows someone who's holding onto that box of Beanie Babies or roll of Sacagawea dollars that they think are going to be worth money someday.  Every thrift store still has that stack of of Paul Anka Christmas records in the corner that nobody wants, but never seem to disappear for any discernable reason other than people seem to be hesitant to throw away old vinyl because it might be worth something.

 

So, given that, and given that it's still fairly easy to turn over old games when your Atari Grampa dies and you don't want them, even if it's just for what would be a pittance now, I wonder how quickly the supply will actually shrink.  I'm thinking of when the homebrewers start to age out; those games are almost by definition rare, and are almost exclusively purchased by people who intend to hold onto them.  Once those people start to die off and those games start to get released into the wild, that could fuel a little resurgence of collector interest even if it's just for money purposes given that whatever collectors remain will likely have much interest in them relative to their number.

 

4 hours ago, Cynicaster said:

I'm an old-school gamer myself who started late having kids (I'm mid-40s with 2 kids under 5) so I totally get how cool/fun it would be if my kids were to end up loving Atari 2600 or classic arcade games.  They see me playing these games all the time and maybe they will start to show an interest, but I've got very low expectations on this front.

 

Same boat as you here, and my daughter runs hot and cold with old video games.  She often likes to watch me play them, she sometimes likes to play them with me, but she very much prefers the Nintendo Switch and all the games that are on that.  Oddly enough, she really, really likes the Flashback portable.  Not sure why.

 

The chances of her interest in it being anything like mine are effectively zero, but you never know.  I didn't grow up playing marbles, or pickup sticks, tiddlywinks, or any of those old time-y games, and yet I do get them for her and make the effort to introduce them to her if for no other reason than to get a sense of what life was like back when this was a common form of play.  Of course, there will be plenty of alternative ways for my kids to do that with their kids, but then again, my son was just born last week and I'm 39, so I will likely die right around the time he starts having kids (assuming and hoping he does), and there all the stuff will be, so it might get kept if for no other reason.

[sirlynxalot]

Don't look now but the market for pre war cars has seen double digit growth in demand from millennial buyers as of very recently. One point made in the piece is that the affordability of these cars (since they haven't been in huge demand in recent years and the market softened) made them attractive to younger buyers who don't have the deep pockets as older buyers.

 

https://www.hagerty.co.uk/articles/market-analysis/ageing-pre-war-cars-draw-a-younger-crowd/

 

I could see this for atari era stuff too.

Edited October 18, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[Ecernosoft]

Heya ZPH!

Just so you know, this was seen on ZPH's broadcast. 

[Nintenloup]

I'm in my late 20's and I've started collecting for the 2600 this year. I'm the kinda person who loves owning everything old, but the 2600 is what I can afford, so that's what I do and it gives me tons of fun. Few people enjoy this today already, so I suppose it'll be smaller in the future. I'm not in this for the money, so if the market plummets it'll make me happier 😛

 

The thing is, the collectors will probably hang up on them for a while, so even if the market goes down, in 20 years, I guess most of the supplies will have dried up.

[buick]

On 10/17/2022 at 10:04 PM, sirlynxalot said:

I could see this for atari era stuff too.

Not to mention how much lower the bar for entry is to get into this hobby! It's a lot easier to keep a box of old plastic electronics around than it is to maintain a 100 year old automobile.

[4ever2600]

As long as humans exist, they will collect classic gaming systems.

[hizzy]

The kids in my family enjoy playing Atari but I don't see them having a 2600, 5200, 7800, NIB games & homebrews. There is a great appreciation for the games but the actual physical objects seem less meaningful. I could see them buying the occasional loose cart and having a console with a flash cart. We like Adventure, Did Dug, Asteroids at home, also lots of homebrews.