Another option is to collect a specific
game series. Long-running multiplatform series such as Ultima could
keep you busy for a while (not to mention drain your wallet)--but
remember that Ultima games were created for the NES, Sega, and Game
Boy as well. Of course, if you really want to be creative, you could
even collect oddities such as weird copy protection schemes.
Gamers who started playing within the past few years should
consider themselves lucky and give thanks for the advent of CD-ROMs.
Before then, most games (especially those for non-Intel computers)
were copy protected in some way. This generally meant you couldn't
copy the floppy disk by normal means; however, other, more bizarre
forms of copy protection were attempted. Code wheels, dongles,
decoder filters, and page-line-word counts were some of the
standards. The worst copy protection scheme of all time? Chrono
Quest by Psygnosis. Players had to take a semitransparent grid and
place it over the box cover, which had an ornate design. The game
would then give you a coordinate on the grid and ask you to name the
color seen there. Unfortunately, there were often multiple colors in
the square and starting the game was often harder than playing it.
By far, the most collectable computer games today come from the
Ultima series. Originally written by Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord
British), Ultima was published by the California Pacific Computer
Company in 1980 for the Apple II. A copy of this game could easily
fetch more than $500 at auction. The original was published in
relatively small numbers, but the next batch of Ultima games (II
through V, published by either Sierra On-Line or Origin) can still
be bought for about $30 to $150 if complete and in good condition.
Perhaps the most expensive Ultima purchase you could ever make
isn't really of an actual Ultima game. Garriott's 1979 game,
Akalabeth, is considered the precursor to the Ultima series. Expect
it to sell for $700 or more. There is a Holy Grail of Ultima
collecting: Ultima: Escape From Mt. Drash for the VIC-20. The game,
which was not written by Garriott, was published in 1983, but nobody
claims to own a working copy. In today's market, a copy of Escape
From Mt. Drash could sell for more than $2,000. So if you find one
in your attic, hold onto it.
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