You may have something valuable locked in the garage.
Condition, rarity, and even model number can turn old hardware into something surprisingly valuable.
That old console buried in your closet might be worth more than you expected. Or, it might still be worth about what you thought it was when you placed it behind a box of cables 15 years ago.
Age alone is a pretty poor guide to pricing. The exact model, whether it still works, its cosmetic condition, and what has survived alongside it can all affect the value. Special editions and desirable hardware revisions can drive prices much higher, while prototypes operate in a market where normal rules politely leave the room.
Condition can cause price to vary by hundreds
Old doesn’t automatically mean valuable, and the price of a standard Nintendo entertainment system makes that painfully clear. PriceCharting currently values an NES at around $82 loose, around $295 complete, and around $1,209 new, using completed sales rather than the wildly optimistic asking prices that anyone who’s spent five minutes on eBay has probably encountered.
An NES Action Set boxed set with two controllers and a Zapper, for example, sold for $395 on eBay. So controllers, power supplies, cables, manuals, packaging and especially original boxes deserve a second look before throwing anything away. And if the presence of original accessories and packaging matters a lot, functionality matters even more.
A clean console that boots reliably is much easier to evaluate than an untested machine that the seller swears worked the last time he used it. PriceCharting does not guarantee that your particular console will actually achieve its stated market estimate. Recent sales of comparable equipment therefore constitute a better reality check.
Rarity helps, but exact version may matter more
Rarity can drive up prices when collectors still want the hardware, which is why a North American Sega Saturn is currently estimated at around $185 in bulk and $270 full, compared to around $56 and $99 for an original PlayStation.
There were simply a lot fewer Saturns, but that doesn’t mean every broken console ends up becoming a retirement plan. Two machines with essentially the same console name may have very different values due to their color, region, internal components, ports, or model number. A Hello Kitty Japanese Dreamcast, for example, is currently estimated at around $232 loose and $644 full.
Early PlayStation 3 hardware provides another good example. The 60GB CECHA-01 model is currently estimated at around $374 in bulk and $650 full, in part because its hardware can play PlayStation 2 games in a way that later revisions cannot. So check the sticker on the back before listing anything.
Prototypes are a different market
Then there’s the hardware that was never meant to reach regular store shelves.
Development systems, pre-production machines and prototypes can command huge prices, as surviving examples can be in the single digits and, in extreme cases, there may be only one known unit, turning what looks like an unusually ugly old console into a piece of gaming history.
The popular Nintendo PlayStation is the obvious example (and, unfortunately, it’s probably not under your spare HDMI cables). The surviving prototype came from Nintendo’s abandoned collaboration with Sony on CD-ROM, and it received a winning bid of $300,000 at auction in 2020. With buyer’s premium, the Nintendo PlayStation cost $360,000.
