The £12 Game That Now Costs £65
I bought a PAL copy of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in early 2021 for £14. Loose cartridge, decent label, functioned perfectly. I remember thinking at the time that it was slightly underpriced — it was always a beloved game, always had a following — but £14 felt fair for something that wasn’t exactly flying off shelves. Last month I watched three copies sell on eBay UK within a single week. The average price across those sales? £68. Not a misprint. Sixty-eight pounds for a PAL N64 cartridge of a game that most British kids in 1998 walked straight past in WHSmith.
That’s not an isolated example. It’s not even the most dramatic one. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet — yes, an actual spreadsheet, because I am exactly that sort of person — tracking sold listings on eBay UK for around 40 PAL N64 titles since January 2022. What I’ve found is that across the board, average prices have roughly doubled. Some titles have tripled. A handful have gone up by a factor of four or five. And unlike the great retro gaming price surge of 2020–2021, which was largely driven by pandemic boredom and a wave of new collectors entering the market, this current inflation is quieter, slower, and in many ways more structurally concerning.
This article is my attempt to explain what’s actually happening. Not the surface-level “retro games are getting more expensive” observation — everyone knows that — but the specific mechanics driving PAL N64 prices in particular, why the PAL market behaves differently to NTSC, what the hidden gem premium means in practice, and what it all means if you’re trying to collect, or if you already have a collection and are wondering what it’s worth. I’ve bought and sold dozens of PAL N64 games over the past few years. I’ve spoken to other collectors. I’ve looked at the data. Here’s what I’ve found.
Why PAL N64 Is a Completely Different Market to NTSC
You can’t understand PAL N64 pricing without first understanding how fundamentally different the PAL release was from its NTSC counterpart. The Nintendo 64 launched in Japan in June 1996 and in North America in September 1996. European consumers didn’t get it until March 1997 — and when they did, they got a version of the console and its software that was, in several meaningful ways, inferior.
PAL games ran at 50Hz rather than 60Hz. On paper, that’s a technical footnote. In practice, it meant that most PAL N64 games ran at roughly 83% of the speed of their NTSC equivalents. Some titles were properly optimised — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time runs well in PAL, for instance — but many were simply slowed down and letterboxed, with black bars eating into the top and bottom of the screen. Super Mario 64 in PAL is noticeably more sluggish than its NTSC version. F-Zero X is slower. GoldenEye 007 is one of the better conversions but still not quite right. Anyone who grew up with a PAL N64 and later played NTSC versions of the same games usually has a moment of genuine shock at how much snappier everything feels.
This has two important consequences for the modern collector. First, serious players who want the authentic best-possible experience generally prefer NTSC carts, which keeps demand for PAL copies somewhat suppressed at the top end of the market — the hardcore player-collectors tend to gravitate toward Japanese or North American versions. Second, and this is the crucial bit, it means the PAL market has historically been priced lower than NTSC, which made it attractive to budget collectors and newcomers. That gap is now closing. Fast.
The Print Run Problem
PAL N64 cartridges were also produced in smaller quantities than their NTSC counterparts. Europe was simply a smaller market for the N64. Nintendo sold approximately 33 million N64 units worldwide; North America accounted for roughly 20.6 million of those, while Europe and Australia combined were closer to 6.75 million. The ratio of PAL software production to NTSC software production wasn’t linear — publishers didn’t simply produce proportionally fewer PAL copies, they often produced dramatically fewer, particularly for games that weren’t expected to be mainstream hits.
For the major titles — Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye — PAL print runs were still substantial because these were blockbusters. But for mid-tier and niche releases, PAL copies are genuinely scarcer than NTSC. Not scarce in a manufactured, artificial sense. Physically fewer of them exist. When a game with a limited PAL print run also happens to get rediscovered by a new generation of collectors, the ceiling on its price is low — because there simply aren’t enough copies to absorb demand.
The Australian Factor
One thing that often gets overlooked in UK-centric discussions of PAL N64 collecting is Australia. Australian N64 games are PAL format and share the same region as European copies — they’ll play in a European N64 without any modification. Australian eBay sellers have been an important source of PAL stock for UK and European collectors for years, and vice versa. But as Australian collecting culture has grown and the Australian dollar’s fluctuations have affected cross-border economics, this pipeline has become less reliable and more expensive. Postage costs have risen sharply. What was once a reasonably cost-effective way to fill gaps in a European collection is now often more expensive than buying locally, once you account for shipping, potential customs fees, and the exchange rate. That reduction in available supply from Australia has quietly put additional upward pressure on UK prices.
What “Hidden Gem” Actually Means — and Why It’s Driving Prices
The phrase “hidden gem” gets used so liberally in retro gaming communities that it’s nearly lost all meaning. But for PAL N64 specifically, it describes a very real and very measurable phenomenon: a game that was commercially unsuccessful or overlooked at release, that exists in relatively small quantities, and that has subsequently been recognised as genuinely good. The combination of quality and scarcity is what creates price pressure. Quality alone doesn’t do it — there are plenty of rare games that are expensive purely because they’re rare, not because they’re good, and the collecting community has become reasonably good at distinguishing between the two. Hidden gems are different because demand is being driven by people who actually want to play the game, not just own it.
The N64’s library has a higher concentration of these than almost any other system of its era, and the reasons are interesting. The N64 had a relatively small total library compared to the PlayStation — around 387 games released in North America, with the PAL library even more restricted at roughly 230–250 titles depending on how you count regional exclusives. Within that smaller library, a disproportionate number of genuinely excellent games were released to little commercial fanfare. The N64 era was also a period of significant transition in gaming culture — 3D was new, the internet was nascent, word of mouth travelled slowly, and the PlayStation’s dominance in the UK meant that many brilliant N64 games simply didn’t reach the audience they deserved.
The YouTube Retrospective Effect
I want to be precise about when this current wave of price inflation began, because it maps almost exactly onto a particular type of content on YouTube. From roughly 2019 onwards, a wave of long-form retrospective videos about N64 games began accumulating enormous view counts. Videos with titles like “The N64’s Hidden Gems You Never Played” or “Every N64 Game Ranked” started pulling in millions of views. I’m not being dismissive of this content — some of it is genuinely excellent, and I’ve watched plenty of it myself. But the effect on the secondhand market has been direct and measurable.
When a YouTuber with 800,000 subscribers does a 45-minute video about Jet Force Gemini or Mischief Makers or Space Station Silicon Valley, and that video gets 1.2 million views, a meaningful percentage of those viewers are going to go straight to eBay and look up prices. Some will buy. Prices nudge upward. The video stays on YouTube forever, accumulating views indefinitely. The upward nudge becomes a sustained upward pressure. This isn’t a new observation — the “YouTube effect” on retro game prices has been documented across multiple platforms and generations. But it’s hit PAL N64 with particular force since 2022 because the content volume reached a tipping point around that time.
Specific Games Where This Is Most Visible
Let me be concrete about which games have been most dramatically affected, because specific examples are more useful than generalisations.
- Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon — PAL copies averaged around £15–20 in 2021. They’re now regularly selling for £60–75. The game is genuinely excellent, it was never widely distributed in PAL regions, and it’s had significant YouTube coverage. Every box has been ticked for a price explosion.
- Mischief Makers — This was already climbing before 2022, but the acceleration since then has been steep. PAL copies that were £25–30 are now routinely hitting £80–100. It has a devoted fanbase, it’s unique, and the PAL print run was tiny.
- Space Station Silicon Valley — Released by DMA Design (the studio that would become Rockstar North) in 1998, this was criminally overlooked at the time. PAL copies went from around £20 to £55–65. The game is brilliantly weird and creative, which makes it catnip for the retrospective video format.
- Beetle Adventure Racing — A racing game built around Volkswagen Beetles, licensed, and genuinely exceptional. PAL copies were £10–15 in 2021 and are now £35–50. Less dramatic than some others but still a clear doubling.
- Snowboard Kids — The original, not the sequel. PAL copies have gone from £18–25 to £55–70. This one gets brought up in every “underrated N64 games” video ever made.
- Rakuga Kids — A PAL-exclusive fighting game developed by Konami that was never released in North America. PAL exclusivity combined with genuine obscurity has pushed prices from around £30–40 to £90–120. This is one of the more extreme examples.
- Ogre Battle 64 — PAL copies of this strategy RPG have seen some of the most dramatic increases of any title on the platform. They were £40–50 in 2021 — already elevated — and have since hit £150–180 for clean copies. This is partly PAL scarcity and partly the broader RPG premium that exists across all retro platforms.
The Grading and Slabbing Spillover
Something else has been quietly reshaping the PAL N64 market since 2022, and it’s come from an unlikely direction: the graded cartridge market. In North America, WATA Games and VGA (Video Game Authority) have been grading and encasing retro games in plastic slabs since the late 2010s, and the results — both for better and worse — have been well documented. Auction records for graded copies of games like Super Mario Bros. or sealed Zelda copies reached genuinely absurd levels, attracting mainstream press coverage and, eventually, regulatory scrutiny.
The graded market in the UK and Europe has been slower to develop, but it’s been developing. UK-based grading services have emerged, and British collectors have increasingly been sending games to US services. The knock-on effect is subtle but real: as more high-grade copies of games get submitted for encasement — effectively being removed from the liquid secondhand market — the supply of ungrades, playable copies tightens slightly. It’s not a dominant factor in PAL N64 price movements, but it’s a contributing one, and it’s worth understanding because it represents a structural change to how the top end of the market works.
There’s also a psychological effect. When you see a graded PAL copy of Mischief Makers sell for £400 on an auction site, it recalibrates your sense of what an ungraded copy is worth. Even if you have no intention of grading your own copy, the headline number anchors your expectations upward. This is basic behavioural economics, and it’s been operating in the retro game market — consciously or not — for several years.
The Sealed Copy Arms Race
Sealed PAL N64 games deserve their own discussion because they’ve been behaving differently to loose cartridges, and the dynamics are worth understanding separately.
A sealed PAL N64 game in good condition is an increasingly rare object. The N64 era predates the modern collector’s habit of buying sealed copies specifically to preserve them — most people who bought N64 games in 1997 and 1998 simply opened them and played them. The ones that remain sealed have survived by accident: games that were purchased as gifts and never used, stock that sat unsold in warehouses, or games bought and set aside and simply never opened. These are genuinely uncommon, and unlike NTSC sealed copies — which have been the subject of significant controversy around authenticity and artificial scarcity — PAL sealed copies haven’t yet attracted the same level of scrutiny. That may change.
What I’ve noticed in the past two years is that sealed PAL N64 games have been attracting premiums that feel somewhat disconnected from the loose cart market. A sealed PAL copy of a game that’s £60 loose might fetch £250–300 if it’s in genuine sealed condition with a solid box. That’s not entirely irrational — sealed copies are genuinely rarer, genuinely more visually striking, and they appeal to a different type of collector. But the rate at which sealed premiums have grown since 2022 suggests that speculation is playing a role alongside genuine collector demand.
Box and Manual Premiums
Even below the sealed tier, boxed PAL N64 copies have been commanding increasingly dramatic premiums over loose cartridges. The N64 used relatively large cardboard boxes — bigger than SNES boxes, more prone to damage — and finding one in genuinely good condition is harder than it sounds. A clean, unscuffed PAL N64 box with the correct manual and any inserts can add 50–150% to the price of the loose cartridge, depending on the title. Three years ago, complete-in-box (CIB) copies commanded a premium, but it was more modest. That gap has widened considerably.
I spent about an hour last week going through completed eBay listings comparing CIB to loose prices across 15 PAL N64 titles. For the most sought-after games, the CIB premium was consistently above 100%. For Mystical Ninja, a loose cart averaged £65 while CIB copies averaged £145. For Mischief Makers, loose averaged £88 and CIB averaged £195. These aren’t cherry-picked outliers — they’re representative of the pattern across the data. The box and manual have become as much of a collector’s item as the game itself.
Who Is Actually Buying These Games?
This is the question I find most interesting, because the answer is more varied than you might expect, and understanding it helps explain the market dynamics.
The Nostalgia Collector
The most obvious buyer is the person who owned these games as a child and wants to own them again as an adult with disposable income. This cohort — roughly people born between 1984 and 1993, who were 4–14 years old when the N64 launched in Europe — is now in their mid-30s to early 40s. Many are at or approaching their peak earning years. They’re buying childhood memories, and they’re less price-sensitive than you might expect because the purchase is emotional, not purely economic. This group drives demand for the common titles — the Zeldas, the Marios, GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie — but they’re not the primary force behind hidden gem pricing.
The Player-Collector
More interesting to me is the player-collector: someone who genuinely wants to play the game on original hardware, on a real CRT or through a proper upscaler, and who wants the PAL cartridge specifically for authenticity or completeness reasons. These buyers have driven a lot of the hidden gem demand. They’ve watched the YouTube retrospectives, they’ve decided that Space Station Silicon Valley is worth £50 of their money to actually play properly, and they’re willing to pay market rate because they’re getting genuine use out of the purchase. This is healthy collector behaviour, and I have a lot of sympathy for it — I am, essentially, this person.
The Speculator
Less sympathetically, there are speculators. People who aren’t particularly interested in playing the games but who have identified the PAL N64 market as an asset class with upward momentum. They buy multiple copies of the same title, hold them, and sell when prices rise. This is legal, obviously. It’s also been happening in retro gaming for as long as retro gaming has existed as a hobby. But speculative buying genuinely does affect market prices — it removes copies from circulation, concentrating stock in fewer hands, and it creates artificial scarcity on top of the genuine scarcity that already exists. The speculator’s fingerprints are visible in the data: spikes in sold listings for particular titles that don’t correspond to any obvious YouTube coverage or cultural moment, followed by periods of relative inactivity.
The International Buyer
One underappreciated driver of PAL N64 prices is international demand from buyers who aren’t in PAL regions. North American collectors interested in PAL-exclusive titles, or Japanese collectors interested in European box art and packaging, have increasingly been buying from UK eBay sellers. The strength of the dollar against the pound over the past few years has made British-listed items relatively attractive to American buyers — they’re effectively shopping at a discount once the exchange rate is factored in. This cross-border demand has added a layer of buying pressure that the PAL market didn’t previously have to contend with at scale.
The PAL Exclusives: A Special Case
Within the PAL N64 market, a small number of games were released exclusively in PAL regions — never in North America or Japan. These deserve separate consideration because they’re the most extreme examples of what the “hidden gem tax” can do to a game’s price.
Rakuga Kids, mentioned above, is the most famous example. A 2D fighting game published by Konami in 1998, featuring characters drawn in a crayon-like art style. It’s not an objectively brilliant game — it’s enjoyable, charming, and visually distinctive, but it’s not Street Fighter III. Its prices have gone completely haywire because the combination of PAL exclusivity, small print run, visual appeal, and YouTube coverage has created a perfect storm of collector interest. The fact that North American collectors genuinely cannot play it without a PAL N64 or a flash cart makes it interesting to them in a way that standard PAL games aren’t.
Other PAL-exclusive or PAL-notable titles include Jet Force Gemini (not exclusive, but the PAL version’s slower speed actually resulted in some interesting community analysis), Blues Brothers 2000 (rare in PAL regions, fascinating in a car-crash sort of way), and several localised European titles that never made it to North American shelves. Each of these occupies a niche where PAL scarcity and the curiosity of collectors from outside the region interact to push prices higher than they’d otherwise be.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day: The Special Exception
I want to spend a moment on Conker’s Bad Fur Day because it’s instructive in a different way. The PAL version of Conker’s — released in 2001, late in the N64’s life — has always been expensive. It was a small print run on a platform that was already in decline. But the price trajectory since 2022 has been particularly steep. Loose PAL copies are now regularly hitting £200–250. Complete copies occasionally exceed £400.
What makes Conker interesting is that it’s not really a hidden gem — it was reasonably well-known at the time, and it’s been remade and re-released. The price isn’t being driven by rediscovery so much as by a combination of genuine late-era scarcity, celebrity status within the N64 community, and what I’d call the “famous final game” premium — collectors who want a complete PAL N64 library need it, and its position at the end of the timeline means it’s always the hardest to find. It’s a useful reminder that not everything expensive in the PAL N64 market is being driven by the hidden gem effect specifically.
Flash Carts, MiSTer, and the Price Ceiling Question
There’s a reasonable argument — one I hear regularly from people who think the current price levels are unsustainable — that flash carts and FPGA emulation put a natural ceiling on how high physical game prices can go. If you can buy an EverDrive 64 for around £100–120 and play every N64 game ever made on original hardware, why would you spend £65 on a single copy of Mystical Ninja?
It’s a good question, and I think the honest answer is: for some collectors it does create a ceiling, but for others it’s irrelevant. The EverDrive argument has been made about virtually every retro platform for a decade, and prices have continued to rise anyway. The segment of collectors who want physical carts isn’t primarily motivated by cost-per-hour-of-play calculations. They want the object. They want the original cartridge, the original label, the feel of inserting the cart and hearing the N64’s satisfying clunk. For that cohort — which is, observationally, the dominant force in the secondhand PAL N64 market — the EverDrive is a supplement, not a substitute.
That said, I do think flash carts have had a genuine effect at the very top of the price range. Games that are astronomically rare and expensive — the sort of title that would cost £300+ for a loose cart — are almost certainly seeing their price growth limited by the fact that most people would simply use an EverDrive at that point. The floor gets lifted by collector demand; the ceiling is constrained somewhat by alternatives. It’s a compression effect, pushing prices upward from the middle range while limiting the absolute extremes.
The MiSTer FPGA platform is a slightly different consideration. MiSTer with the N64 core — which has been improving significantly since 2022 — offers what is arguably a better-than-original experience for many titles: 60Hz output, improved resolution handling, lag reduction. For players primarily motivated by game quality, this is a genuine alternative. But again, the player-collector who wants PAL carts isn’t necessarily the same person as the player who’s optimising their N64 experience. They’re partially overlapping groups, not identical ones.
The Data: What My Spreadsheet Actually Shows
I’ve been somewhat vague about my methodology so far, so let me be more precise. I’ve been tracking sold eBay UK listings — not asking prices, sold prices — for 40 PAL N64 titles at three-month intervals since January 2022. I record loose cart prices only, to keep the comparison consistent. I exclude obvious outliers (a single suspiciously high sale, or a “for parts” listing dragging the average down). For each title I take a rolling average of the five most recent sold listings at each data point.
Across the 40 titles, the average price increase from January 2022 to the time of writing is 118%. That’s the mean. The median is slightly lower at 97%, which suggests that a relatively small number of dramatic outliers are pulling the mean upward — but even the median showing an approximate doubling is significant. Only three of the 40 titles I track showed price increases below 40%. Twenty-two showed increases above 100%. Nine showed increases above 150%.
The three lowest-growth titles in my data are: Super Mario 64 (up 38%), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (up 41%), and GoldenEye 007 (up 44%). These are the big mainstream titles, and they tell an interesting story: the blockbusters have grown more slowly than the hidden gems, both in percentage terms and in absolute pound amounts relative to their starting prices. They started from a higher base and have grown more modestly. The hidden gem acceleration is real and measurable.
The Acceleration Timeline
Looking at the data over time, the price growth hasn’t been linear. There was a period of relative stability from mid-2022 to early 2023 — possibly a hangover from the 2020–2021 pandemic surge, when prices had gone up quickly and then partially corrected as the most motivated new collectors either found what they wanted or ran out of budget. Then from roughly Q2 2023 onward, a second wave of acceleration began. This second wave has been more selective than the first — it’s been concentrated in the hidden gem category specifically, rather than the broad market. The mainstream titles have not seen the same re-acceleration. The targeted nature of this second wave is what makes me think it’s primarily being driven by YouTube retrospective content and player-collectors, rather than by broad-based speculative buying or a new wave of nostalgic adults entering the market.
Practical Advice: Buying, Selling, and Collecting in This Market
I want to be practical here, because this article is ultimately meant to be useful as well as analytical.
If You’re Building a PAL N64 Collection
The first thing I’d say is: prioritise ruthlessly. The days of building a broad PAL N64 collection on a modest budget are essentially over. If you want to own 80+ PAL N64 carts, you’re now looking at serious money — several thousand pounds — and you need to decide whether that’s genuinely worth it to you. If you’re doing it because you love the games and want to play them, I’d gently suggest that an EverDrive 64 and a handful of truly meaningful physical copies is a better use of your money than trying to own everything.
If you’re committed to physical collecting, here’s what I’d actually do right now:
- Buy the games you want to play first. Don’t buy investment targets or things you think will go up — buy the games you’ll actually put in the console. The hidden gem tax is at its most brutal when it’s someone else’s definition of a hidden gem, not yours.
- Watch completed eBay listings rather than active ones. Active listings tell you what people are asking; completed ones tell you what people are actually paying. There’s often a significant gap, and it will save you money.
- Consider Facebook Marketplace and car boot sales seriously. These remain genuine sources of reasonably priced stock because sellers there often don’t know or don’t care about current eBay values. I picked up a PAL copy of Beetle Adventure Racing at a car boot last summer for £8. That same copy would have been £40+ on eBay. These opportunities still exist; they’re just less common than they were.
- Check CEX prices but don’t necessarily buy from CEX. CEX’s prices are publicly listed and frequently updated, making them a useful reference point for fair market value. They’re not always the cheapest option, but they’re a reasonable check against paying over the odds on eBay.
- Buy complete where the premium is reasonable. I know I said CIB premiums have widened, and they have — but if you’re going to own the game long-term, a complete copy is almost always a better purchase than a loose one. The premium has grown, but the underlying logic — more complete equals more durable value — hasn’t changed.
If You’re Selling PAL N64 Games
The obvious point is that now is a good time to sell, particularly if you have hidden gems or PAL exclusives. But I’d be thoughtful about it. If you actually love the games and want to play them, selling now means either paying significantly more to rebuy later or losing access to them. The market could continue to rise, in which case selling and rebuying later would be expensive. It could plateau or correct, in which case selling now and waiting could be sensible. I genuinely don’t know which of those will happen, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing.
What I would say is this: if you have duplicates, or games you’ve never played and don’t expect to, selling now is straightforward good sense. The market is active, prices are high, and liquidity is good. eBay remains the best venue for maximising sale price on individual items. If you’re selling a collection in bulk, specialist retro game dealers will offer lower per-item prices but save you the hassle of individual listings.
The Insurance Question
Something most collectors don’t think about until it’s too late: if your PAL N64 collection has doubled in value since 2022, your home contents insurance almost certainly hasn’t kept up. Standard home contents policies typically don’t cover individual high-value collectables at full replacement cost, and “replacement cost” for a rare game now means something quite different to what it meant three years ago. If you have a collection worth more than a few hundred pounds, it’s worth having a specific conversation with your insurer about declared values and specialist collector’s insurance. This isn’t something I’m flagging because it makes for interesting content — I had a friend lose a significant portion of his SNES collection in a house fire and discovered the hard way that his insurance payout was based on 2019 prices. Don’t let that happen to you.
Will Prices Keep Rising — or Is This a Bubble?
Everyone wants to know this, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. But I can lay out the competing arguments.
The case for continued growth is straightforward: the fundamental drivers haven’t changed. The cohort of adults with nostalgia for N64 games continues to age into higher disposable income. YouTube retrospective content continues to accumulate. Physical supply is fixed and slowly depleting — carts get lost, damaged, binned. The global collector market for retro games has been growing steadily for fifteen years, not in a straight line but in a consistent upward trend with periodic corrections. PAL N64 in particular remains significantly cheaper than its NTSC equivalent for most titles, which means there’s potentially a ceiling well above current prices before the two markets converge.
The case for a correction is also real. Economic conditions in the UK are not straightforwardly positive — cost-of-living pressures have been genuine and significant, and discretionary spending on collectables is exactly the kind of thing that gets cut when household finances are squeezed. The generation of buyers most actively purchasing PAL N64 games right now — roughly late-30s to mid-40s adults — are also the people most likely to be taking on mortgages, having children, and generally facing competing demands on their money. If we see a significant economic downturn, the retro game market will not be immune.
There’s also the question of what happens when the current generation of retrotubers moves on to different platforms, or when the algorithm stops feeding N64 content to new viewers. The YouTube effect isn’t permanent — it’s created by a specific wave of content, and when that wave passes, the upward demand pressure it generates will ease. We’ve seen this happen on other platforms: SNES prices went through a similar YouTube-driven surge around 2018–2020 and have since levelled off for many titles, with some actually softening.
My honest assessment: I don’t think we’re in a classic bubble, where prices are entirely disconnected from underlying value and will collapse spectacularly. But I do think the current rate of appreciation is unsustainable, and I expect to see a period of stabilisation — possibly even modest decline for some titles — in the next two to three years. The games that will hold or grow their value are the ones with genuine, enduring quality and genuinely limited supply: Mystical Ninja, Mischief Makers, Rakuga Kids. The ones where price appreciation has been driven more by hype than by actual scarcity or quality may soften.
A Personal Reckoning
I should be honest about my own position here. I own a PAL N64 collection of around 55 loose cartridges, accumulated over roughly six years. I bought most of them between 2018 and 2022, which means I’ve benefited directly from the price increases I’ve been describing. My collection is worth approximately three times what I paid for it in aggregate. That’s financially pleasing. It’s also somewhat uncomfortable, because I didn’t buy any of these games as investments. I bought them to play them.
The thing that bothers me most about the current market isn’t that my existing collection is worth more money. It’s that the hobby has become significantly less accessible to people who are where I was six years ago: curious about the N64, wanting to build a small collection of games they loved or missed, working with a modest budget. Six years ago, you could get a PAL N64 console in reasonable condition for £25–30, and you could build a solid collection of 20 genuinely good games for another £100–150. That same exercise today would cost you £60–70 for the console and probably £400–500 for 20 good games, depending on your choices. That’s a meaningful barrier. Some people will clear it without difficulty; others will bounce off it and either go digital or simply not engage with the hobby at all.
I’m not making a political argument about who should be allowed to profit from secondhand goods. I’m just saying that something is lost when a hobby becomes an asset class, and I notice that loss. The happiest collecting experiences I’ve had — the car boot finds, the charity shop discoveries, the trades between friends — all happened in a market where things weren’t priced at maximum efficiency. That market still exists in corners and edges, but it’s smaller than it was, and it’s getting smaller.
Verdict: What You Should Actually Do Right Now
If you already own PAL N64 games, you’re sitting on significantly more value than you had three years ago. Whether that matters to you depends entirely on whether you see your collection as an asset or as something you use and enjoy. I’d encourage you to think carefully before selling based purely on current market conditions — the games don’t become less enjoyable because they’ve become more expensive, and reentry costs if you change your mind will be steep.
If you’re looking to start collecting, my practical advice is to focus your budget on two or three games you genuinely love and are committed to owning physically, get an EverDrive 64 for everything else, and don’t try to fight the market by buying broadly. The broad-collection approach made sense five years ago. Today, it’s a path to spending far more than you planned on games you may never actually play.
If you’re primarily interested in the games as games — you want to play them, experience them, form opinions about them — then honestly, MiSTer or a flash cart is the more rational choice at 2024–25 prices. I say this as someone who genuinely loves physical media and owns a lot of it. The physical experience has value. But the premium you’re now paying for PAL N64 physical media has grown well beyond what most players can justify on gaming merit alone.
The hidden gem tax is real. It’s documented. It’s been approximately doubling PAL N64 prices since 2022 in a way that’s driven by a specific, traceable set of factors. Some of those factors — genuine scarcity, genuine quality, growing collector culture — are structural and here to stay. Others — YouTube cycles, speculative accumulation, cross-border exchange rate effects — are more contingent and will eventually ease. The market will settle somewhere, and my bet is that it settles considerably higher than 2021 prices but somewhat lower than where the most aggressively appreciated titles sit today. In the meantime: buy what you love, don’t over-extend, and for goodness’ sake check your home insurance.
Tom Hargreaves is a hardware reviewer at RetroInHand. He owns a PAL N64 with 55 loose cartridges and two EverDrives, and he has absolutely no regrets about either of those things simultaneously being true.