As I'm pretty sure I've said before, the thrift store scene hasn't been as bountiful for me here in San Francisco as it has been in the past. Part of this could be due to the fact that the weather has been pretty much terrible, keeping people from doing spring cleaning and chucking out their old games. I also feel like the competition may have increased, perhaps owing to my broadcasting all this stuff all over the Internet. Oh well!
Either way, I'm going to pad this story out with some stuff that technically wasn't from thrift stores – they're games I bought from dealers at Wondercon and PAX East. And occasionally I paid a little more than I ordinarily would have. I'm not going to lie: It's because I felt like buying things.
The games in the photo above, now, those did come from a thrift store in town. I saw the blue boxes sitting high up on top of a shelf in back of the counter, and almost wasn't going to bother asking about them because I generally don't pay a lot of attention to PC games – it's an area of collecting where you can waste a lot of money on stuff that's not worth much of anything. But something about the odd size and color of the boxes made me ask about them.
As it turns out, they were two old, sealed IBM PC games. Starglider... Starglider... Where had I heard that name before? I turned the boxes over and...
Oh, of course: Starglider! As in the early PC game from Argonaut Software, the co-creators of the Super FX chip and Star Fox. This was the first game that Dylan Cuthbert, who now runs Q-Games, ever worked on. Even Star Fox started out as a Starglider game – apparently, if you look in the game's code you can find files that are still called by its original prototype name, "SNESGlider."
Starglider and Knight Orc were both published by Firebird, the U.S. branch of Rainbird software, which was part of Telecomsoft, which was the computer software division of British Telecommunications. These imprints didn't last very long. Like many PC games of the time, they come packed with a variety of extras. In fact, both include (probably very short) novelizations of the games in the box. Not that I'll ever read them, because both games are sealed. I paid $5.49 each. Value? No idea.
I used to go to school in the Boston area, so while I was there for PAX East I decided to go hit up my old stomping grounds and see if I could stomp on any gaming deals while I was there. As it turns out, yes. A store in Harvard Square that mostly sold anime and bootleg game music soundtrack CDs had, for some strange reason, a whole rack of old videogame magazines for $2 each.
I didn't exactly want to load myself up with old game magazines, but a few were irresistible. The best of the bunch was Electronic Gaming Monthly issue #7, of a finely aged 1990 vintage. It's an odd issue, filled entirely with tips and tricks instead of editorial. But it is indeed the official seventh issue of the magazine. Sadly, it's severely water-damaged, as were a lot of the magazines – there are big brown stains in the lower right corner.
The other magazines are TurboForce #3, an issue of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment with an Arnie Katz piece about Ralph Baer that I wanted to read, and EGM's legendary 1992 year-end special, in which it gave Game of the Year to Sonic the Hedgehog over Super Mario World. (I think the fullness of time has proven me correct on that one.)
Here's a few more from actual thrift stores. You don't often see Genesis games outside of their boxes, but Rocket Knight Adventures and World of Illusion have been thrust out into the world unprotected. This definitely brings their values down, but they're certainly worth $2 and $1 respectively.
PGA Tour Golf II, meanwhile, is still in its box. Sealed, even. And worth so very, very little that I'd never ordinarily have bought it, let alone paid $6.99 for it. But here's the weird part. For a while, Electronic Arts was producing serially numbered copies of the first run of its games, probably in an attempt to get people to buy them as soon as they came out. This copy of PGA is #28, which considering where I live and the condition that it's in probably isn't a coincidence: I wouldn't be surprised if this originally belonged to someone at EA or Sega.
Meanwhile, Silver for the Dreamcast has no such exciting potential tale behind it. But man, if a game's boxart ever screamed DO NOT BUY ME...
I ventured even closer to my old university while I was at PAX, and found a consignment shop with stacks of old videogames in the back. While the vast majority of the stuff there was either ultracommon or priced higher than eBay, there was one exception: Ninja Five-O, a Game Boy Advance game from Konami that had a limited print run and is considered to be very good. At $15, it was a no-brainer, but I was able to haggle the guy down to $12. Hey, I had nothing else to do that day. The only issue was big, nasty stickers all over the instruction book. After I took this picture, I used some lighter fluid to (mostly) remove them – there's still some ancient residue on the instructions, but they look much nicer now.
Three of the Game Boy games – the ones that look like I'd actually pay money for them – were from PAX East. For just $5, I got Balloon Kid, Amazing Penguin, and the single worst copy of Gargoyle's Quest I am likely to ever find. Man, I can't even begin to imagine what happened to that label. Either way, these are three well-regarded GB games that I didn't own.
While I was telling a friend about this purchase, he told me he had some Game Boy games in his car. He didn't know how they got there and he didn't know why he had them, but I was welcome to them. Unfortunately they were just Golf and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but you can't beat free. This is why you tell people you collect old games, kids!
Here's a few more convention finds. There aren't many games at Wondercon, but they're scattered about if you care to look for them. Most of these came from one dealer: Godzilla 2 for the NES (no manual) and Tengen's version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (complete) for $10 each, and Gargoyle's Quest II (hey!) and the Atari 2600 game G.I. Joe Cobra Strike for about $7 each. Again: Definitely more than I'd usually pay, but Godzilla 2 is hard to find and now I have two-thirds of the Gargoyle trilogy.
Wrath of the Black Manta was from another PAX East dealer – it's probably worth the $3 I paid for it, but really I just remember renting it back in the day and wanted to play it again.
Finally, there's the truly bizarre find...
Probotector! Never heard of it? Why, it's the European version of Contra. To get around European censorship practices that often targeted games featuring realistic violence, Konami swapped out the sprites in this game. Now, Bill and Lance are robots. And the aliens are, uh, also robots! Everything else is apparently identical.
PAL NES games don't work in American consoles. Or so I thought. In fact, they do work in the redesigned "top-loader" Nintendo Entertainment System, so I was pleased to bring Probotector home and find that I hadn't just purchased a $7 useless brick. I can actually use it! Crazy. How it ended up on a Bay Area collectibles dealer's table, I have no idea.
Thus concludes this installment of Weekend Thrifting. Hey, so does anybody have a spare Godzilla 2 manual they're looking to unload?
Images: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
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