What is the first video game you remember playing?

If it's any consolation, I think only the old games and systems that were never opened are worth a ton of money, and even then it's mostly the rare ones. The ones that were well-used are just stuff.
You can probably find a used game store in your town with an old NES, or an emulator that has most of the games you'd ever want. Or if you just want to play them, a lot of the all-time classics have been collected and ported onto newer systems in one form or another. I paid $5 for a collection of about a dozen old Contra games on the Playstation Store just because I had a hankering to play the original NES version. I also have an old Wii that's got a bunch of the NES classics downloaded to it.

 

I sold my entire NES collection in 93 or 94 to one of my high school teachers. I think I sold it for like $100. The console itself was shit and it was a crap shoot if it would turn on, but all the games and accessories were fine. I think about that every now and then.

I too went Sega for a good while before getting a PS2. Then got back into Nintendo with the Wii and have built up my NES collection again, albeit virtually. I don't know if I would have made use of that old collection or not but given my new collection that's built up, both modern and old, physical and digital, I bet I would have figured something out.

But at the time it cleared some space and I'm sure I used the money on something important!

 

Actually, "Me and Sarah Jane" was a much better track on that album ...

 

Five or six years after I moved out of the house I let my mom sell my NES and all the games to some store. Can't remember what she got for it, but it was less than $100. I think she turned around and bought me Madden 2004 as a Christmas present with the money.
I always took care of my stuff, but given the aging equipment, like you said, who knows if any of that would have been worth anything today. I can't even remember all the games I had, but I'm pretty certain I've replaced most of them (or at least the ones I cared about and might have occasionally played again) by buying them again when the Wii's Virtual Console was active. So it's a wash in the nostalgia department.

Now my SNES, PS2 and original XBox are a whole other matter. I still have all of those and will never get rid of them because of some games that would be pretty much irreplaceable at this point. Nothing fancy, just some war strategy games (Super Conflict for the SNES, Dai Senryaku VII and Shattered Union for the XBox) and even old sports games (the NCAA football games on PS2, Tecmo Basketball for the SNES, NCAA Baseball for the XBox) that aren't likely to be re-released or remade, and are rare enough that they'd be hard to track down in used form at this point.

One thing with my SNES games, though. I'm a packrat who had a weird bit of OCD as a kid. I also made several cross-country moves over a span of about 15 years and quickly discovered that the best way to pack my video games was to save the packaging and then repack them into their original boxes. It kept everything together and saved a lot of space. So somewhere in my closet I still have what should be a functioning SNES (assuming it still works with modern TVs and after not being plugged in for almost 20 years), with all of the cords, controllers and accessories, plus a bunch of games with their original boxes. Opened boxes, but original boxes with instruction books and everything else.

 

I still have my Sega and everything since. All in working order. Everything is hooked up too and even turned on from time to time.

I got lucky and got a PS5 at release and my wife asked if I was going to sell the PS4, which makes sense considering it all transfered over to the PS5, and I'm like, collection!

Kind of funny how things change in that regard. Maybe it's because of the getting rid of the NES stuff so long ago. I don't know how valuable any of it will be down the road. Maybe the PS2, it's an original. But it's important to me..

The PS4 is being sort of used as a DVD player in our room too!

 

I remember overhearing someone say Mike Tyson's cheat code and reciting it to my friend over the phone while they were saying it. Just happened to be within earshot.

 

To be the bearer of bad news on the video game value talk... ALL of that shit is now worth money, if you have the boxes and manuals. Like, even REALLY common stuff like "Super Tennis" can go for $20. If it's a Nintendo first party or cherished game - Kart, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid - you're easily in the $50 to $200 range, depending on condition. If you have SNES or Genesis era RPGs, with boxes and manuals, they're easily $100+ each.

I get annoyed about it because my mom and dad were aware of the value of baseball cards by then, but so was everyone's parents. As a result, most of the stuff from the 80s and 90s is overproduced trash. They made me throw out the boxes for video games and condense into game carriers though, and plenty of that is now valuable. At least by the time of N64 and beyond, I kept all of the stuff, and selling it in the early 2010s kept me afloat at times. (Thanks, lucrative journalism career!) You could also have a lucrative side hustle back then, buying games up at yard sales and flea markets.

 

From memory — 007 373 5963

Beating Tyson (or Mr. Dream, his albino brother who came in after they lost the license to use Tyson, like Ted McGinley swooping in on Season 4 of a fading sitcom) in the first round remains one of my top video game accomplishments.

 

I can't believe we're seven pages in and no one has mentioned River Raid, the best Atari 2600 game.

 

Pong, the original Atari game, probably mid-70s

 

Posting this here since it's the current video game thread. And because it's a sign we might have reached peak video game.

Lawn Mowing Simulator - Launch Trailer - IGN

 

Ha, you should look into the vast world of idle clickers, of which I dabble in.