How do people make rarity guides?

[Ross PK]

Like how do they find out how rare a game is?

 

It seems to me that the majority of Atari 8-bit games are rare since they very rarely show up on ebay, even the ones that'd be considered common, like Action Biker.

[www.atarimania.com]

It's all relative... Of course, a classic Atari program will always be harder to find than a PS2 game. Still, Action Biker is about the most common A8 tape out there and is EXTREMELY easy to get, as opposed to the "9" and "10" games in our database, some of which NEVER show up anywhere.

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[Mindfield]

One thing you have to remember is the relative popularity of the machine you're trying to find software for. Computers were never as popular or as prevalent as game consoles back in the day. Since rarities are based on how hard it is to find certain games based on how easy it is to find the most common, you have to understand that even if the most common A8 games don't show up nearly as often as the most common 2600 games, that nevertheless still sets the baseline by which "common" is defined in the A8 library (or any library for that matter).

 

As to how rarity lists are created in the first place -- it's pretty much just from careful and consistent observation. How often you see them up for sale on local forums, Usenet, and especially on eBay, and how many people have certain games in their collection already, is pretty much as good a barometer as you're going to get for determining how rare something is. Of course, quantifiable release figures also help -- we know there are only about 20 Video Life carts out there, for example, so that automatically puts in the realm of "holy grail." Other issues like how big the company that made a particular game was, what their distribution was like, when the game was released (mid-crash games are harder to find than pre- and post-crash games) and so on can also help to flesh out a game's rarity. We know for example that Answer were a pretty small company with a small distribution network that only ended up releasing two games and had a third in the prototype phase, so that automatically shoves it into the upper portion of the rarity spectrum.