Retro [Nintendolife] ‘Tricks of the Trade-in’ (soapbox piece)

[PixelKnight]

Soapbox: Tricks Of The Trade-In - Chronicles Of An Ex-GAME Employee

Skylanders, disc burns, and lethal charity boxes

www.nintendolife.com

I thought this was fun, as back in the PS360/Wii/DS/PSP days I spent a lot of time browsing second hand games and trading them in. I used to love flipping through the racks, looking for hidden gems.

A few anecdotes of my own:

I was often amazed at how bad a condition the games were in, like people had used them for a coaster or trod on them and tried to sand the floor with them.

I was in CEX around 2009 and someone dumped on the counter for trade a load of 12, mint condition, still-cellophane-wrapped copies of an Xbox game that had only been out for 3 days. I distinctly remember the weary tone of the staffers reply- ‘fall off the back of a lorry, did they? Out.’

In Game, I remember a staffer looking at me like I was being difficult when, as he dropped the game I wanted to buy into its case (the discs were stored in a drawer behind the counter), I asked if I could have a look at the disc. Sure enough, it was in terrible condition. I asked for another, and it turned out they had a few in the drawer. I’ll give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn’t just trying to palm the worst copy off as soon as he could.

Anyway, what trade-in adventures did you have?

 

[ITSMILNER]

I really don’t get how people let their games get in such awful states, like you say it’s like they’ve used them as coasters and kicked the boxes around a dirt track. I’ve actually sold off a lot of my older stuff recently, mostly to CEX, used the drop and go service and it’s been relatively painless.

I never really used to trade much in but I do have a memory of when I was younger, my dad took me to a Video Game shop in East London and I traded in my Gameboy towards a SNES. Fantastic day that was haha.

With the move to digital and the rise of EBay you don’t really see many hidden gems in regular GAME or CEX these days. I remember walking past a GameStation and they had the whole Steel Battilion set and a copy of SNES Chrono Trigger in the window.

 

[ceres15]

The days of cheap, common, and abundant second hand games were the best. I remember one game shop nearby that had permanent Buy 2-Get 1 sales - I bought so many GBA and DS games that way. I remember picking up Melee for about $12 at a retro game store, and Paper Mario TTYD for $5 at a garage sale. I also got a GBA with a broken battery cover for about $10. I would never trade in games personally though - I would usually sell games I didn't want with a garage sale for more $$ than a trade in would be.

 

[PixelKnight]

I really don’t get how people let their games get in such awful states, like you say it’s like they’ve used them as coasters and kicked the boxes around a dirt track. I’ve actually sold off a lot of my older stuff recently, mostly to CEX, used the drop and go service and it’s been relatively painless.

I never really used to trade much in but I do have a memory of when I was younger, my dad took me to a Video Game shop in East London and I traded in my Gameboy towards a SNES. Fantastic day that was haha.

With the move to digital and the rise of EBay you don’t really see many hidden gems in regular GAME or CEX these days. I remember walking past a GameStation and they had the whole Steel Battilion set and a copy of SNES Chrono Trigger in the window.

Yeah this is true. They both match the price across all their stores and vs eBay now so there arent any bargains any more. To be fair I also rarely trade in on the high street and tend to sell on eBay too.

 

[grobla123]

We still have cash converters, cash fx and cex where I live and they have decent collections. But pre owned games are lucky to get down to 20 to 40 dollars after years there now. If I want my old 5 to 7 dollar fix I need to use Facebook marketplace. Which is a little more inconvenient but gets the job done.

 

[Concernt]

My best and only good memory of buying a used game was Twilight Princess, which cost just €16, and was my favourite game ever in the end. I remember so distinctly asking for it over the counter and them pulling out a drawer with a few hundred disks wrapped in paper, finding a matching box in another drawer, putting them together, and handing it over. I remember I had just come from my swimming lessons at the pool by the canal and that afterwards I went to the Saturday market and was offered pigeon pâté by a vendor, and absolutely despising it, and how the taste lingered in my mouth as I played through the first few hours of my first home console Zelda game.

 

[SeafoamGaming]

My job basically has me going through used games and consoles and bundling them together so they look all nice and dandy. For me, we get so many Xbox 360 Consoles in it's not even funny. Same with PS3 systems. Twice I've seen a Series S, and never an X or PS5. A few PS4/XBOs came in tho as did switches, even a TOTK OLED.

I dunno which I hate dealing with more: the stanky awful 360s that have a skunk smell on them that never goes away (almost always associated with a RROD and usually being the 2005 launch style, rather than a S or E, the latter of which is way more reliable and I've only had one of those come in bad), or the Xbox One systems that are fine in every way except needing the fucking internet to format them/deleting user info off it for selling the console. Jesus christ I thought DF was overhyping Xbox DRM to an extent but no, the XBO-onwards really are that anal about you being online for almost anything. You can't even turn off the system post format without connecting to the internet for validation, or else it'll corrupt and make you redo it all over again. Such a huge PITA and e-Waste magnet right there, but at least most of em come in clean, better than that horrid skunk smell the 360s often have which makes me ill at times.

Oh, and yeah, going through the used games I'm amazed by how much disc media got better with the PS3 and onward. Sooooo many 360 games come in with scratches or cracked middles or other damages to the point i can't bundle it or even find a way to clean it to work on the system, yet PS3 games take extreme effort to become unreadable. When A bunch of 360 games come in, a good chunk of them are almost always damaged beyond repair, and it's usually GTAV/COD/AC/NBA games at that. I can't imagine why people would handle their games or systems so poorly when donating them.

As for my personal experiences as a buyer, well... Kid me basically got to experience tons of N64 games I never got to play new due to my birth mom frequenting a pawn shop all the time. Bad news, she'd steal most of my collection to buy shady stuff there when making those trips, so I'd almost always lose something in exchange for a "new game", and then be blamed for me "misplacing it."

Per my grandma's diary, when I visited her for a hoilday back in 05, apparently my birth mom tried selling my Pokemon Emerald at one point while I was away for that, to which I got so enraged I caused extreme damage to the inside of my mom's apartment when I got back looking for it (since it was the first thing i'd play on the thing if I wasn't busy with another game). Hastily, she went back to the pawn shop, got the game again, and took it back in the nick of time (and tried to pin it on my grandma so I'd end up hating her for what my mom was actually doing). Considering how much those games were everything to me (and how much they go for now), I'm very glad I kept all the Gen 3 mainline games at least, as when I got relocated away from my mom, pretty much everything not yoshi's Island GBA or Pokemon Gen III got pawned off by her en masse, including some pretty darn rare gamecube games (RIP Double Dash, Melee and Harry Potter Sorcerer Stone for some reason)

Luckily my used game experience got much better post relocation as my grandparents would take me to blockbuster and I'd buy a bunch of their used GCN stock if I liked a rented game well enough, so I had a nice collection of that growing up. Same for the GB/Wii for a while, though nothing too crazy deal wise. My biggest score from a used store was like back in 2019 and DQIV DS was on a gamestop shelf for $10 with nobody caring about it. I nabbed it CIB and to see how much it shot up over the years is astonishing.

 

[freedomseekr]

I remember trading in Final Fantasy XIII for the PS3 for Shadow Hearts: Covenant on the PS2 without paying extra.

Most accurate way of turning lead into gold, heh.