This is probably one of the most anticipated sections on the site. In case you didn't know, many NES games out there are rarer than others. Why? Because companies limited their production counts of games since they weren't sure if a big game was going to be a hit. For example, a low-incomed company liked AVE (American Video Entertainment) often produced small amounts of their games because they weren't sure if there games were going to be a hit. On the other hand, many Nintendo sponsored games had plenty of copies since Nintendo expected them to be hits. Alright, so you get the point.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE UPDATED NES RARITY GUIDE

Progress

01/03/03 - Finished all NES games. Guide is 100% complete. Prices are updated (with the exception of a few unknowns). I'll explain how I determined the rarity and so on in a few days.

10/27/02 - Finished 40 games. Guide is about 65% complete. Release date is still the same. I will not be putting the accessory rarities in the guide. I'm going to make a seperate guide for the rarity of the accessories.

10/23/02 - Finished 15 games or so. I'm going to be posting my method of determining the rarity after the guide is released.

10/22/02 - Finished about 45 games. All the way up to G.

10/19/02 - Finished 80 games today. Mainly from C-D. Prices are much more accurate too.

10/17/02 - Finshed about 30 more games. Mainly after B.

10/15/02 - Finished games from A-B. Also, 150 random games completed. Still bulk of games to do. Accessory section will be at the end of the guide.

Where can I get a NES Rarity Guide?

A while back, an owner of a small video game store decided to come up with his own rarity list for NES games. After he released it to the public, it became a smash hit and was a must-have item for collectors. This man's name is Mike Etler. Click here to view the old NES rarity guide.

How is your updated NES Rarity Guide coming along?

It's finished. Future updates will happen to update prices, and possible rarity changes.

How did you update Etler's NES Rarity Guide?

I'm going to try and not get too advanced, but I basically did a few key things to determined updates rarities/prices on each game. To start off, in order to update rarities, I had to figure out how many copies on average there would be on eBay at one time for a particular rarity rating. For example, D is a common game according to the guide. So I looked at many 'D' rated games, determined an average of how many were on eBay at once, and this amount came to around 20 games. D was determined to be at or around 20 games. I did the same for the other rarities each giving them a general range of what they could be equal to. For example, B to B+ usually had 4 or less copies on at any given time. I also took into account the amount of completed auctions for that game, to make sure that there wasn't a dry spell of games on or whatever. Also, certain games are deemed "popular", meaning that there are more copies than there should actually be on eBay at any given time. So I also had to take this into account when determining the rarities.

After determining average rarity ratios, I went through each and every game. Any rating that was off by a great amount was changed modestly. Some games were not changed at all because a difference between the original guide, and my new rating was minimal. Certain games had discrepencies and had to be confirmed with numerous price guides, and online message boards. The rarities were the easy part, however, determining prices was even harder. As you all know, games can increase in value based on whether or not they have instructions, boxes, maps, and so on. Even sealed ones can insanely cause a change in price. I decided to use Mike's original % system, and applied that to my pricing.

I would search all completed auctions from the past 30 days, and would determine the demand/average price for each game. I would then apply this average price to the guide, and would usually round up if the amount was above the minimum. So for example, if a game sold for $3.50 on average, I'd display it as $4. It was quite a task trying to search for some games that are rarely put on eBay. This was the case for super rare games, although I did catch a few along the four month period. Any game with a question mark was one that I didn't have time to do since people wanted the guide, and the fact that there wasn't enough data to determine it. So there ya go, that's how I determined it. Yes, you can call it a buyer's guide if you want, but I used ratios of live auctions to determine my results. Aagh, I need a drink.

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