Joe Santulli’s basement might as well be a museum of video game history.
Santulli, a 38-year-old Pompton Lakes, N.J., resident, loves the new game systems, with their increasingly advanced graphics and sound effects. But among his collection of 10,000 video games are plenty of old-timers–the original Nintendo, Coleco-vision and the Atari 2600, which made its debut when Jimmy Carter was president.
Despite the blocky images and lack of anything approaching a third dimension on the screen, Santulli still finds a lot of charm in the antique games.
“There’s a simplicity to the games that make them really fun,” said Santulli, an employee of a pharmaceutical company who in his spare time works with a number of classic game publications and organizations. “Anybody can jump into them.”
Collecting old video games has been a hobby since the first generations to play them started to become adults. The Internet fueled its growth in the mid-1990s, as it provided an easy forum for collectors to get together to find, sell and trade games and systems long out of production.
EBay is a major source for such games today. It is difficult to determine how many serious collectors such as Santulli there are, but estimates range in the thousands.
Nostalgia is a big part of the popularity of old games, collectors and fans say.
“As the people who grew up on these systems get to a point in their life where they have expendable income, they want to recapture a part of their youth,” said Andy Slaven, a 26-year-old Houston resident who works as an engineer but also is editor in chief of the Video Game Bible.
Old video games are generally not very expensive, but prices vary widely depending on a game’s rarity. Slaven said most vintage titles range from $2 to $5, but some are considerably more expensive and can be worth up to several thousand dollars.
Though collectors lament that there are few companies that specialize in their hobby, there are still stores that carry games for systems such as Atari.
The old systems are definitely simple. The Atari 2600 controller consists of a single button and a joystick. Being good at a game such as Pac-Man mainly means developing a quick wrist.
But many enthusiasts say the old games were more creative .
R.W. Bivins, 25, longs for the pioneering days of video games when many new games were developed, quite literally, out of people’s garages. A co-founder and creative director of OlderGames in Riverside County, Calif., Bivins said the large corporations that dominate video game production today have quashed the creativity of the previous era.
“It used to be about being creative,” Bivins said. “Now it’s about having the best blockbuster and having the best movie tie-in.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Drew Sottardi (dsottardi@tribune.com)
