In July 2021 a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sold at auction for over 1.5 million dollars. Whatever you make of that number, it marked the moment game collecting stopped being a niche and became a market. The boom cooled, but it left something permanent behind: old games are now treated as artifacts, graded, sleeved and priced, and that includes the PC era this site comes from.
Quake 2 shipped in 1997 in a cardboard box the size of a hardcover book, because every PC game did. Boxes competed on shelf presence: thick manuals, reference cards, posters, registration slips. Then the early 2000s flattened everything into jewel cases, DVD keep cases and finally digital storefronts, and the physical artifact of PC gaming quietly went extinct. Extinction is what makes collectibles. Nobody saved these boxes on purpose, which is exactly why the surviving ones matter now.
The logic is the same everywhere collecting exists. Scarcity: how many were printed and how many survived flat, unfaded and complete. Condition: a crushed box is a different object from a square one. Completeness: the manual, the reference card, the disc sleeve, all the paper nobody kept. And cultural weight: the games people actually loved appreciate, and the shovelware next to them stays worthless. A complete Quake 2 big box is a solid shelf piece today. The mission pack boxes are better. The unlicensed 1998 expansions, printed small and sold badly, are the genuinely rare ones.
None of this framework is new. It was built by card collectors decades ago: baseball cards invented population thinking, condition grading and the sealed-versus-opened divide long before games had a secondary market. The grading companies that certify games today are running the playbook card grading wrote, slabs and population reports included. Trading card people and game people keep converging on the same hobby from different directions, which is why this section covers both sides of that line.
If you have original boxes in the attic: do not tape them, do not let sun reach them, keep the paper inside, and resist the urge to clean discs with anything abrasive. Complete beats mint-but-gutted. And photograph what you have; half the value of a collection is knowing what is in it.
Next in this series: what happened every time video games tried to become trading card games, from the late 90s attempts through to the current wave.