90's video game prices

[Jackolantern]

Does anyone else remember how corpse-explodingly expensive games were in the 16-bit era?

When I hear people complaining about the price of games today, I ask them if they remember how much games were on 16-bit systems, and most of the time they say something like "Around $35". Not even close. When Street Fighter II came out in 1992, the SNES game was $85 ($141 in 2013), simply because they knew it was going to be huge and people would pay for it. The most expensive 16-bit game I am aware of was Virtua Racing on the Sega Genesis. The cartridge was over-sized, as it contained an extra processor built in for 3D processing, and it clocked in at $110 in 1993, which would be a jaw-dropping $173 today. The price on games did not fall out until the PS1, when new games did actually drop down to the $35 - $40 range, and have climbed a bit behind inflation since then.

But after the industry dropped cartridges and moved to discs, the prices did drop drastically, and if you adjust the prices for inflation from each generation, you find the price has hovered around the $60 mark every since the PS1. The price drop was another one of the things that really pushed the PS1 over to be the most popular system by a landslide on the company's first console, something that hadn't been done before (the Atari 2600 was Atari's second system, and Atari Home Pong competed head-to-head with Magnavox and was not the clear favorite). It would have been like the Xbox One coming out and all the games were $30 today.

[KyleMassacre]

My mommy spent a fortune on my gaming habbits then haha, I feel bad for her now. Between my NES, SNES, N64, Sega Saturn, and PSX I had tons of games and probably totaling around 6-8k between the consoles and games. Granted this was over like 10 years or so which averages about 600-800/yr she spent on my gaming life. Yikes, I never put it into perspective until now

[Jackolantern]

One of my friends had about 80 SNES games, all purchased new. Looking back that was about $8k - $9k bought over just a couple of years

[vitinho444]

Nowadays prices are not that low either... In my country 95$ for a PS3 game.

[Jackolantern]

Whoa...after converting to USD?

[vitinho444]

Yeah... 70€
A PC game is usually 50€.

[MrDJK]

Taking a pre-order game: "Destiny" ( 09/09/14 )

PS3: after conversion and rounding $66. ( £40 )
Xbox 360: after conversion and rounding $66. ( £40 )
PS4: after conversion and rounding $82. ( £50 )
Xbox One: after conversion and rounding $82. ( £50 )

Not terribly expensive over here, however this is only from one retailer and a single game, not even sure if it's an anticipated game.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Ah yes Final Fantasy 3 cost me $70 I believe. Zelda 2 was around $80. We got about 2 games a year back then and played the crap out of them When a game was bad like Adams Family for NES or the worst game in history Back to the Future for NES it was a horrid thing as that was your only game for some time.

[Jackolantern]

Ah yes Final Fantasy 3 cost me $70 I believe. Zelda 2 was around $80. We got about 2 games a year back then and played the crap out of them When a game was bad like Adams Family for NES or the worst game in history Back to the Future for NES it was a horrid thing as that was your only game for some time.

Oh yes! The bad game was like a huge failure back then! I didn't have my own money to go out and buy another, so if you were lucky you had a good, privately-owned game trade-in place that would not rip you off too bad, and you could hopefully turn it into an older, used game for $5 or 10. If you didn't (I didn't have a used game store near me for my first few years playing games), you just sucked it up and played it and tried to have as much fun as possible with it. Movie tie-in games were the worst with that back in the day (and I assume they still are terrible about sucking kids in, since they are still being made). By the time I was 11 or 12, I had learned to avoid them like the plague. Kids would get excited about being able to "play the movie", only to find out it was a rushed piece of crap. One of the first NES games I owned was Robocop. It was terrible...

[KyleMassacre]

One of my first move2games games was total recall. I just remeber that game being super hard and couldn't past the second level. We also had Chip n Dale rescue rangers and that was one of our favorites back in the day