Gaming is the world’s largest entertainment genre (with roughly seven times the annual revenue of either music OR movies), and video game prices at auction are at unprecedented levels – but only sealed video games get those prices and with video game antiquity so recent, and the heyday of video game arcades now in the rearview mirror, many historically significant machines are being ignored and undervalued.
Individual still-shrink-wrapped video games have now reached a record price of US$2 million, (up from $1.56 million, $870,000, $660,000 ad infinitum), and going back to a record $75,000 just five years ago, but they will remain sealed for eternity.
Collectible whiskey is notionally quite similar, in that the world’s finest whiskeys are condemned to remain in the bottle forever because they’ve become collectible.
The last world record bottle of whisky to be opened was a Dalmore 62 Year Old. The £32,000 (US$58,500 at that time) bottle was consumed in Pennyhill Park Hotel (Surrey, England) in 2005 by several friends, with each shot costing them $2,500. The record price for a bottle of whiskey in now $1,860,307, ($80,000 a shot) so it will never happen again. Fine and rare whisky is now a notional financial construct.
You can drive a collectible car if you wish, but the depreciation on a million-dollar car could cost thousands of dollars a mile, maybe tens of thousands a mile if it has just had a rotisserie restoration. The restoration of important automobiles can now cost millions, so few such cars will experience genuine road miles ever again. There’s even a growing industry making atom-perfect copies of old racing cars so that an owner can go crazy racing the replica while the real one appreciates in the climate-controlled white-glove comfort of a private museum.
Put simply, most collectible genres effectively turn their finest specimens into look-don’t-touch art and an entry on a spreadsheet of appreciating assets.
Hence the point of this article is that many of the most important items from gaming antiquity can still be obtained for ridiculously low prices considering their massive societal importance.
One area of gaming that receives very little love at auction is that of arcade games – games that shaped the imagination of a generation during the 1970s and 1980s – yet today they struggle to fetch more than $5,000 at auction because the video arcade is all but extinct.
Just 12 months ago at this same RRauction, three of the most iconic and original arcade consoles from gaming antiquity went to auction. The three gaming machines, which we regarded in the preview as the “cornerstones of any museum display wishing to preserve our technological heritage,” sold for $69,773 for Computer Space (the first video arcade game), $29,854 for Space Race (the first to use joysticks) and $12,654 for Pong.
Those are all record prices, being the three highest amounts ever paid for an arcade game at auction, but they are not of the magnitude one normally associates with significant technological milestones, particularly when you consider that gaming is now the world’s dominant entertainment medium.
The stars of traditional artistic entertainment endeavors such as film and music are afforded God-like social status and untold wealth, with props from movies and music videoclips routinely selling for millions – but there has been no equivalent recognized in the world’s most common recreational past-time and emerging new creative domain – if the purpose of art is to draw an emotional response, the movie stretched that to a cavalcade of responses over two hours, but the gaming industry is the first medium to interact with and compellingly engage a human indefinitely.
Just as the iPhone is now selling for $200,000 (up from $495 just 18 years ago) because of it’s emerging role as a significant first in technological history, video game milestones are not yet recognized for their role in the development of the still emerging digital society. Two-thirds of all humans now carry a smartphone that is also a portable gaming machine. Before long, everyone will have one. These artifacts from gaming antiquity will inevitably be recognized one day soon.
That represents an opportunity.
Look through the game enthusiast forums and you’ll regularly see topics like “why are arcade consoles so expensive?”, where enthusiasts have constantly decried the $5,000 prices being paid for iconic arcade games that were once easily attainable for peanuts. Similar responses have been heard from the die-hard enthusiasts across every industry that has subsequently generated a secondary coming on the auction block.
Visual Capitalist’s glorious representation of 50 years of the gaming industry shows clearly the importance of the arcade in facilitating the rise of gaming to ubiquitous status, yet that importance is not being recognized at auction.
This year’s Remarkable Rarities annual technology mega-auction contains two of the most iconic, most desirable and rare-as-hens-teeth arcade games of all time: the immediately-recognizable Atari Star Wars cockpit console from the mid-1980s, and a fully functioning PONG arcade console, the video arcade game that started an industry when it was released on 27 November 1972. Pong was the first game developed by Atari.
Leveraging the all-conquering Star Wars movie franchise which will celebrate its 50th anniversary two years from now, Atari’s advanced vector-graphics, first-person rail shooter arcade consoles enabled Star Wars aficionados to actually be Luke Skywalker behind the controls of an X-wing fighter.
The video arcade industry was forcibly restructuring in 1983 due to multiple societal changes at that time, the emergence of the bricks-and-mortar movie video rental industry and the proliferation of home consoles, and even Wikipedia now recognizes the video game crash of 1983. The Arcade industry survives today, despite the further ravages it experienced with the emergence of mobile and online gaming, but the golden age of arcades has passed.
Hence, although the Atari Star Wars consoles were compelling and in massive demand, they were released into a crumbling marketplace. While the auction description correctly notes that Atari sold over 12,000 Star Wars arcade games in total, 10,245 were of the upright cabinet (from an arcade owner’s viewpoint, they used less floor space) and just 2,450 of the cockpit-style flagship unit were shipped.
Video arcades are an extremely hostile environment for any machinery, and the attrition rate was horrendous, happily tolerated because each machine purchased by an arcade returned 100+ times its cost in nickels and dimes.
With no records available as to where they went, there is no way of knowing just how many Atari Star Wars cockpit-style consoles are extant, but it cannot be many - we can only find one original cockpit-style Atari Star Wars consoles that has reached public auction in the last few decades.
Further indicating that the demand is still strong is the number of manufacturers of replicas of this very machine, with prices ranging up to $20,000.
When the replicas cost more than the real ones, something needs recalibrating.
In November 2024, Propstore (one of the world’s largest movie memorabilia auction houses) took a pristine specimen to auction in London with an estimate of GBP7,000 (US$8,800) to GBP14,000 (US$17,750), with bidding reaching GBP6,500 (US$8,245), which would have been $10,300 with the buyers premium if it had been accepted. It wasn’t.
That’s the only one. Any others that have been offered have been sold by enthusiasts within the game community, which believes that $5,000 is a lot of money for these arcade consoles. We cannot find an instance of the cockpit-style Atari Star Wars console ever having sold for more than $10,000.
Unlike most collectible genres, this is one where using your investment will not depreciate it, so every time you take the controls of Red Five, you're not unwrapping an iPhone or cracking the seal on a bottle of whiskey that will immediately render your investment worthless.
Ditto for the Pong arcade game. They are near perfect examples of gaming antiquity and both machines are likely to move into the top five arcade game prices of all-time at this auction.
That makes it worth watching at very least.
In terms of investments, when items go to auction of this historical importance with sub-$10,000 expectations, the biggest barrier to an investment is validating it is a real one.
The notional rules of play for cars and motorcycles suggest that if you have the original nameplate, you have the basis for recreating/restoring the original. We suspect that as the digital memorabilia industry matures, the arcade game equivalent will become the manufacturers' plaque, separating the replicas from the originals. Replicas sell for negligible amounts compared to originals in the automotive world and we suspect the same will hold for arcade games.
So join the dots ... what will these arcade games be worth 10, 20 or even 50 years from now?
