How rare is my favourite game?
Here are a few rules of thumb that you can use to determine whether or not your favourite game is rare: • If several instances of your game are at an auction, chances are it isn’t very rare. • If your game had a huge production run, it probably isn’t rare. • The older your game is, the more rare it is likely to be. Anything from the early 1980s, for instance, is likely to be quite rare. For example, if you’re interested in black-and-white vector games, the following paragraph may illustrate what we’re getting at. On one hand, the games haven’t been in arcades for a long time and are practically worthless to operators, so they’ll tend to be rare. On the other hand, Asteroids had a huge production run, and there are still a lot of games out there. If you see an Asteroids machine at an auction, you’d know not to bid very high because the game is relatively common. It’ll show up at another auction sometime soon. (the authors of this FAQ, for instance, have seen dozens of these machines in
