Flea Market Gold: The $20 Game Collection

As mentioned before, I find a lot of my vintage games from unconventional places. This is mostly because places like Walmart, Target and GameStop don’t carry games for Atari, NES, Genesis and SNES. Not that you can blame them. Those stores cater to the newest trends and can’t dedicate the space in their store for 30 year old games.

That being said, Saturday means one thing for me: The Super Flea in Cheektowaga, NY. It’s a large flea market with various stands both inside and out. Wedged between the head shops, junk stores and cologne shops are several shops with a glut of old video games. Everything from Colecovision to Xbox 360. There is one no-name stand that I particularly like, mainly because it has about 1000 NES games, most for less than 5 bucks, plus stacks of SNES, Sega Genesis and Playstation games also at about the lowest price around. They also sell vintage systems (I bought my original NES here.) Behind the stand they have the “less popular” things like Atari games at $1-$2 each. Another great thing is they give a 2 week warranty on everything they sell. That might not sound like a lot, but if your 25 year old game doesn’t fail in 2 weeks, you will have gotten your moneys worth!

Today I returned a defective copy of Super Mario Brothers 2 (the first game I have ever had to take back to that stand) and was given more then I paid as a trade. I think I paid $10 and he gave me $15 in trade. That plus $15 of my own allowed me to acquire Friday the 13^th, Airwolf, Iron Tank and Back to the Future all for NES as well as 688 Attack Sub, Clue, and Young Indiana Jones for Genesis.

On my way back to the truck I spotted some games and game systems at a small stand so I stopped to take a peak. I negotiated for a few minutes and was able to get Galaga and Super Mario Brothers 2 for NES in their sleeves, Primal Rage for Genesis plus an original Genesis remote all for $5!

But wait! There’s more! There was another stand outside that sold various junk and I was about to pass it by when my eyes landed on the familiar ATARI logo on a box. They had 4 game boxes, sadly all but one were empty! So I picked up Vanguard for Atari 2600 for $2. He was about to just throw away the empty Yars’ Revenge box when I asked if I could have it, I already had the game but thought the box would make a nice addition. When I got home I found the original manual and a Yars Revenge comic in the box!

So for $20, plus a defective game, I was able to get 11 games, a Genesis remote, a vintage game box with instruction manual and a mini-comic book! Try to beat that!

I also secured a deal to trade my Nintendo NES (I don't use it now that I have the RetroN 3) for 20 Atari 2600 games next week! I write an update then to let everyone know what I got! I KNOW I CAN'T WAIT!

So my advice for the fledgling vintage gamer, or for the old pro looking to expand his collection: Be creative. Try flea markets, garage sales, thrift stores, etc. It beats paying for shipping from eBay and you get a little bigger thrill out of finding what you want yourself rather than typing it into a search engine.