I don't like that everything is a speculative asset now, nor do I like that every hobby seems to involve gambling on unregulated securities. However, my opinion does not change reality, and the reality is that I've been sitting on over a thousand dollars worth of old Game Boy and DS games for years. "Sitting on," she says, as if she even realized there were such an extensive secondary market for her childhood games until recently or that it makes sense that some of the most common, least rare video games are worth the most money.

Retro gaming and retro game collecting are two hobbies that are almost entirely disjoint and only overlap in the most infuriating way: retro gamers must either resort to unofficial means to play the damn games—emulation, flash carts, bootleg reproduction copies—or pony up way too much money for the privilege of doing it all "right" because the retro game collectors drove up the prices on everything.

For the privilege of purchasing a used copy of Pokémon Emerald for quadruple its inflation-adjusted retail price, a retro gamer gets to trust their save file to a decades-old flash chip with a dwindling number of write cycles available, and they get to trust a quartz crystal that loses a sliver of accuracy with every tick to keep time, powered by a lithium coin cell that gets closer to leaking chemicals with every electron produced. Ironically, these old cartridges are probably worse off in the hands of a retro game collector. The collector will never see a warning that the clock battery has run dry and should be replaced, and the flash cells storing the save data will eventually lose all charge without being periodically refreshed when progress is saved. (socram8888 2021)

Playing retro games officially or, uh, legally is the authentic way to play, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, but it's pretty much the worst way in terms of convenience despite the price tag because "authentic" is a different word than "ideal." While I've clocked about 700 hours in total in my copy of Emerald that's old enough to drink this May, I believe I've only done two playthroughs. The Pokémon franchise is particularly bad about discouraging players from restarting their games. I spent a lot of time as a kid building teams for the Battle Frontier, and it's a pain to trade Pokémon to a different game so they're safe when starting a new game. It's not difficult, but it's needlessly tedious. (Trade)

Pokémon games since the beginning have featured some Pokémon that can only be legitimately obtained via time-limited real-world in-person events. Pokémon Emerald has four special items—the Eon Ticket, Aurora Ticket, Mystic Ticket, and Old Sea Map—that cannot be unlocked in normal gameplay and cannot be traded to another game for safekeeping. Each of these allows the player to travel to a special island and catch an otherwise-unobtainable legendary Pokémon. Because none of these events have occured in close to twenty years, it's no longer possible to legitimately play all of Emerald or any other old Pokémon game anymore. The legendary Pokémon on those islands have almost certainly been captured already on the extant save files that still have them unlocked. Practically speaking, though, it never was possible to play all of the game in the first place. The Old Sea Map, for instance, was distributed during summer 2005 in Japan and summer 2006 in Taiwan. (Old Sea Map) An entire area of the game was quite literally gated behind international borders for the majority of players.

I paid somebody twenty bucks when I was a kid to hack my save to unlock all four of those tickets, and that made me hesitant to restart my game for a long time in no small part because I would lose access to these areas and have no way to regain it, ever. That decision would have been easier had I been able to back up that save file, but backing up and restoring GBA saves requires specialty hardware. Nintendo doesn't want you to; there's a reason they started encrypting saves as of the 3DS. This sucks, but this is how you're forced to play the game if you do play on a cartridge: you can lose access to features forever, or you can cheat to unlock them, defeating the point of the authentic experience. (Wish)

I have some memories surrounding these events for the DS Pokémon games because I actually got to attend some of the in-person ones. I missed most of the ones distributed via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, though. We got my DS set up successfully with a crappy old Linksys router after banging our heads against a wall long enough, but my dad replaced it at some point and I was never able to get online again.

I remember getting in the car one day (Toys R Us) and being told that, surprise! We're going to an amusement park because my dad called in to a radio show and won free tickets! My first instinct was to ask if we were going to Toys Я Us before leaving town because they were distributing a special Darkrai that knew two special moves that day and the following day only. I'm sure there was a marketing deal between Nintendo/Game Freak and Toys Я Us to get kids into the store, but the signal made it past the walls and into the parking lot, so we just had to stop in the fire lane for a moment to let me download my Darkrai that I have no recollection of ever using. I don't even remember the trip. I assume I had fun. I probably rode roller coasters. Puberty hadn't ruined my body image yet so I probably felt ok running around a water park shirtless. My stomach and pancreas could still handle unlimited free soda. I dunno.

I can't get nostalgic about any of these events because it was so damn frustrating at the time that even as a child I recognized that it was unfair for purely arbitrary reasons. Had we not stopped at Toys Я Us, the anxiety from FOMO probably would've outweighed the excitement of the day trip. But that FOMO was a core part of my authentic experience.

That's why I'm not sure I can get nostalgic about any of these game cartridges either. The software within, sure, but the physical objects when played as intended are designed to, intentionally or not, keep the player emotionally tethered to the save files within. Even now after not touching some of these games for more than a decade, the save files evoke memories and it's impossible to legitimately replicate one in the future because the powers that be have decided that features should be restricted by both time and space. Ultimately the only thing that makes them unique is the save data, and since this is digital data, the only reason that they can't be exactly copied is because they're not designed to be exactly copied.

It's 2026. We have homebrew software and $5 microcontrollers now. I solved that problem.

I backed up all of my GBA and DS games' saves last week. My Game Boy and Game Boy Color games' saves vanished years ago, (Hoppip) so I replaced their replacement save batteries instead. I fired up my save backups in an emulator for a couple minutes apiece. All the data was still there, safe indefinitely like any other file on my computer. The part of my brain responsible for my anxiety and hoarding tendencies was satisfied, and she'll finally let me sell the games now. Odds are good that I'll never touch any of those files again, but simply having them is enough to untether my emotions from the games.

As soon as I verified my backups were following the 3-2-1 rule, I wiped all my games' saves without hesitation for the first time in my life.

Somebody thinks that the sliver of green in the GBA SP on the right is worth $250. I can't understand why anymore.

Footnotes