Rarity: Retro Video Game Collecting in the Modern Era

I never knew about the people who collects old / older video games. This movie documents behind the popular video games and go deeper on people collecting games. It's funny, educational and also eye opening. Highly recommended it.

Look, I have no issues with collectors. I have a (modest) video game collection myself.

I do think the time spent on sealed games and the hype on their importance was a bit of a waste.

BTW, I am far from jealous of sealed games. I've owned them and simply opened them because I think these things are meant to be played (but this is just my opinion).

The assumption (and insistence) that anyone that has issues with WATA (and their practices) and the overhype on sealed games is simply "being jealous" was certainly overplayed in the doco. I think they could have balanced the opinions by addressing the fact that this hobby was available to all, but due to people buying up huge swathes of copies, it has pretty much cut people from the hobby. Once again, not my jealousy as I'm good with what I have, but I know many others that are now locked out. It's just a shame is all. Most hobbies end up as rich people time wasters, so I guess it was inevitable.

There are some interesting things here (rare consoles and one-offs) and some good personalities, just skip the ad in the middle and it's far more enjoyable.

I really enjoyed this documentary about the video game industry. As a child who grew up in the 80s/90s spending all my free time playing Nintendo and later sega- this was a really fun walk down memory lane. I really sympathized with all of the collectors and liked the different viewpoints and styles of collecting. Made me want to go home and hookup my N64, which is the oldest system i still own lol.

It's flashy and well edited but it's essentially a rip off of all those retro VHS collecting films that are getting dumped on Tubi, each of them is basically the same film over and over. The filmmaker interviews wealthy and often annoying YouTube personalities who collect video games. An entire segment is devoted to video game grading and winds up being a big commercial for the company WataGames, another segment features a couple of the more bigoted personality's making fun of Christians and Christian video games. It's well put together and at times interesting but overall, it's sadly nothing new.

Look, this "movie" was just put together with self-filmed clips by youtubers and liberal stock footage inserts so technically it's awful, but what makes it a real slog is the need to aggrandize WATA games and that whole scam. They literally just wave off valid criticism of WATA by saying it's all jealousy which is really something else. Then you have the fact that the key faces in this movie are simply showing off their stuff and talking about how valuable it is and how they turn down offers, etc. The actual "real" people like Metal Jesus, Riggs, Hancock, etc are barely in it while the hoarder scammers of the WATA crowd get to wave their proverbial dicks in your face with their rare stuff. Get a life! And no how many times someone says that preserving a sealed game etc is preserving history, pop-culture, or art, doesn't make it true. These things were commodities. You are celebrating plastic and cardboard. The game exists outside of those things. A part of me wishes disc rot on all their rare games, but being somewhat of a collector myself (albeit with way stronger boundaries than these people) I will admit it's neat to see what they have, but the smugness of them really gets me.