i understand those circumstances, in a rush, no space but why in general do americans throw out (literally) their games/consoles? why not donate? are there donation centres in each town? give it to a family member, friend, neighbour, stranger walking down the street! they can use it, donate it, sell it.

you could have kept the cart at least!

i traded a donkey kong game n watch when i was barely 6 years old (didn't know any better) for another 3rd party lcd game because dk was too difficult at that age.

left an atari lynx 2 at familys place when i moved on.

Im sure some lucky kid picked up the n64 it was sitting in a box on a chair next to the dumpster

i suppose it is free at a dumpster but you can have more pride going to a goodwill than a dumpster. on the other hand, goodwill and other donation places often charge too much, and people with money enter the doors and buy everything so i can see why prices are up a bit. they should have scanners at goodwills where if you earn too much you're denied entry.

Up until about 1995 I was a hardcore "current gen" gamer and didn't hang on to old games. I traded-in a lot of NES and Genesis games that 10 years later I tracked down again. The only game I traded-in that I want to replace and still haven't been able to find is King's Quest V for the NES. Yeah the PC version is 100x better but I really want to get the NES version again. Last year I asked every single vendor at the Midwest Gaming Classic whether they had a copy and none did. I'll try again next year and if I strike out again then I'll just bite the bullet and pay ebay prices for it.


I got a free Atari 7800 this way - I was living in a large apartment complex so there was someone moving about once a week. When I was taking out our trash there was a shiny 7800 sitting next to the dumpster. I'm glad they realized that someone would want it and left it out in the open.

When I got out of my Pokemon phase, I sold off most of my Poke-possessions, including the original three Gameboy games complete in box with a player's guide. Considering the relatively measly profits I got, I still kick myself for giving up those memories.

Yeah man its awesome. All my friends kept falling off the pokemon boat but i kept on sailing and they would be like "hey man you want this game" or cards or movies or anything pokemon really.

I used to, but not so much anymore. There's so many ways to play old games now, and if you've got a Wii the virtual console's packed to the gills with them for cheap. Meanwhile I don't like having to dig up cartridges and disks. To top it off action figure scalpers really, really put me off collecting in general. I think the final straw was when the Gundam Seed figures first hit and the scalpers bought all of them. The ironic thing was it sorta killed the market since you couldn't get the figures (retail: $10) for less than $50 bucks, people lost interest, and they all ended up at K-B toys for $3/each.

The first and only time this happened for me, was when I sold my original Turbografx back in 90. I have to admit it was a move made by peer pressure at the time, and I regretted it ever since. Luckily, some years later, I managed to not only buy another Turbo, but also managed to buy back some of the very same games I had owned at the time. But it's influenced my collecting to this day. I never sell or give away any of the games I own. Never know when you'll get the itch to play them once again...

you may come to a stage where you have accumulated so much stuff that you don't have the time/motivation to play it all so then it becomes more of a collectors stash rather than a functional collection, if u are not displaying games as collector pieces it might be worth considering selling off some of the games and systems you are not too attatched to.

the suitable size of ones game collection will no doubt vary, depending on how much space and time one has. for me the limit is about 300 total retro games but i'm looking to downsize this to about 250.

think of what system u want to sell, it's been mentioned elsewhere 1 system per generation. then sit on your decision for a while. hard to predict the future and whether you will regret the decision in the future.