Collecting retro Nintendo doesn’t have to be expensive, actually.

Greedy doodoo-heads seem determined to make my favorite hobby unaffordable.

It’s been a little while since DKOldies started popping off on social media, but their legacy of severely overpriced retro games still lives on. For now, at least.

Astute readers already know where I’m headed. Yes, this post exists in large part to promote the budget-friendly retro game shop on this very site. But hear me out! As a long-time collector, it irks the everloving crap out of me to see what the corpo-capitalist mindset and the intrusion of Big Money has done to my favorite hobby!

I’ve written at length about this topic… about how Heritage Auctions and Wata conspired to use their disproportionate financial resources to inflate game prices and manipulate the entire market. You might already know how they bought out their competition to consolidate a practical monopoly over the graded vintage games market. And if you’re not interested in graded games, you should be even more upset.

Heritage and Wata were allegedly bidding their own graded games up to astronomical prices to capture the attention of mainstream news outlets. The ensuing hype over million-plus dollar NES games led to a frenzy of derpy ding-dongs raiding their parents’ attics and attempting to sell their older brothers’ old copies of Mario/Duck Hunt for a million bucks. Prices on retro games skyrocketed, as Wata/Heritage had planned. They got rich. We got our hobby spoiled. That’s messed up, dog.

Today, thanks to Heritage/Wata getting called out and facing some backlash, the hype isn’t nearly what it was. But the damage remains. Capitalism only works in one direction. Prices that spike overnight might take years to come back down. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.

Enter DKOldies

Even after the Watastrophe (yeah, I came up with that myself,) retrogaming couldn’t be left alone. The public appetite was still running high and, even though Wata/Heritage were keeping lower profiles, public interest needed a target.

If you haven’t heard of them, DKOldies is a retro game reseller that managed to blow up on Tiktok, thanks to their nostalgic order-pulling/packing videos. The star of these videos is… Some guy. I don’t remember his name, alright? But his moderate charisma coupled with the public’s interest in retro games led to a meteoric rise in popularity.

DKOldies had been around for years before popping off. I’ve talked to the owner a few times in the interest of partnering with them as an affiliate or creating some kind of referral program. The owner didn’t know what I was talking about, had never thought of it, had zero interest in it… Weird.

At the time I was contacting them, their prices were pretty reasonable. They were higher than eBay, but that’s to be expected for a company that has to pay for their own website, marketing, storage, and a few employees. In return, you would get games that were higher quality. Right? Well, I don’t know because I never ordered from them.

But the impression I got from the owner was that he was not interested in helping anybody. He seemed mildly offended at the prospect of breaking me off a few percent for funneling business to him. Which seems alright. To each their own, I suppose. But the bigger message, in my mind, was that he was not interested in being part of the community. 

As it turns out, I’m not the only one that felt this way. I discovered this Reddit thread while wrapping up this piece. It’s screenshotted at the beginning of this section and here’s the link. The thread is littered with anecdotes from other people and their, um… less than stellar interactions with DKOldies. They just don’t have good vibes, you know?

Fast forward a few years after the pandemic. DKOldies is famous and their prices are absolutely insane. But I don’t really think it’s price gouging. Or, at least, not intentional price gouging.

DK’s upward spiral

From my own experience re-selling vintage games, I’ve learned what an impossible task it is trying to maintain a consistent inventory. Certain items sell out as soon as they come into stock. That’s not good. Imagine every potential customer visits your store, searches for their childhood favorites and all they find is “Out of Stock” over and over… It’s bad for business. And the only way to stop this happening is to maintain higher and higher inventory counts. 

But these are 40 year old games. You can’t just place a wholesale order with the manufacturer. I’m sure that, once DKOldies stumbled into fame, they simply could not keep up with the ongoing, increasing demand. So the only other way to control inventory is to… you know… raise prices.

The increased volume would also have had a major impact on the quality of items they sent, and that bore out big time, with many influencers calling out their “refurbished” consoles and games as being very low quality and not refurbished at all. How could they have refurbished the number of units they were moving?

I’m not saying everything DKOldies has done is moral or “right”, but I can entirely understand what would cause them to raise their prices to the outrageous levels they ended up at. The more popular they got, the more expensive and lower quality they had to be. 

And for what it’s worth, the amount of flak DKO received was probably not proportionate to the extent of their fiddlestickery. Yes, they deserved to be called out, but the number of caller-outers that were just clout chasing was enormous.

Still…

Why we can’t have nice things

But I’m certainly not denying the negative impact their popularity and subsequent price increases had on retrogaming as a community of traders. The increased attention on a limited commodity continued jacking up prices even as the Wata/Heritage nonsense was dying down.

Today, the retro bubble has popped. Kinda. DKOldies is still expensive as hell on certain popular items. Wata is still grading games and Heritage is still pretending to auction them. But all the whistle blowing and community shaming has brought all of those things back to a manageable-ish level.

If you look at the average price of NES games today, you’ll see they’re still outrageously elevated from pre-pandemic prices. And they’ll probably never come all the way down. But if you want to collect and buy NES games at a decent price, you’re going to want to avoid DKOldies in favor of a local shop.

If you’re not lucky enough to live near a retro game shop, you’d do fairly well on eBay or… hey, here’s an idea! You could order right here!

Definitely won’t be my last time placing an order from @longie_long’s website. Got one of the best games of all time for under pricecharting value, even after shipping. Hylian recommended! pic.twitter.com/HzRlfHjb7M

— OctoRock 1982 🐙 (@OctoRock_1982) May 17, 2024

Hey, this site sells games. What a coincidence?!

The Ghetto Gamer does not share the same inventory issues as other shop sites. Traffic here is slow and my priority is growth, not revenue. So for now, at least, you can find some excellent titles right here.

My prices are set to compete with the cheapest eBay sellers, but with a greater emphasis on actually cleaning and actually testing all the games I sell. Everything in my store has a guaranteed baseline quality with minimal cosmetic sticker/cartridge damage.

All games purchased from this site are double-tested, meaning I don’t sell them until they are clean enough to work twice in a row at first boot, with no wiggling or blowing into the cart necessary. Seriously though, don’t blow into your NES cartridges. It’s not good for them.

I hope this article was informative, and I hope my little sales pitch here isn’t too jarring. I really believe in the quality of these items, and I delight in the idea of disrupting the parasitic cottage industry that’s popped up around re-selling vintage games. When sellers have competition, it means lower prices for everyone.

So please: Have a look around. If you see anything you like, know you’re buying quality goods and you’re sticking it to the man.

Thanks, and happy hunting!

~Steve

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