Check out this Ebay stuff
 

http://www.ebaystores.com/crashof84videogames

I had no idea some of these rarer 2600 games went for so much money. I should have held on to more apparently :D

I don't know how they get to be sold for this much. If you go into the Atari section at eBay, most of the games are going for little to nothing. The only plus here is the original box and instructions, maybe that accounts for the price. If so, maybe I should scrounge up all my boxes and instructions and start selling some 2600 games ;).

The classic gaming market is no joke, though it might appear that way from the outside. Mostly it is predicated upon the idea that what many older games lacked in bells and whistles (sound and graphics) they more than made up for in gameplay.

Many classic gaming enthusiasts refuse to play newer games simply because they believe it's all been done, and all been done better (an arguable point, at least).

Consequently, this passion for classic gaming combined with collector's mentality leads to price guides, inflated values for cartidges thought to be rare and profiteering on the backs of collectors by people who view these cartridges as strange new offshoots of the baseball card.

You might want to take a look through your collections, being a collector myself I can tell you that a cartridge complete with box and manual and inserts will fetch you much more than a loose cartridge. But the likelihood of you finding something "valuable" is pretty unlikely - most of the carts you see on ebay were either released long after you stopped playing with your system or were released in such ridiculous quantities (like 50 copies total - compare that to DVD releases "limited" to 50,000 copies) that finding one is like finding a powerball ticket in the sewer.

But with that said, good luck. At least you haven't thrown your system out like many other people had. :)

I have Mr. Do's Castle for the 2600... Pretty rare. Worth $150 or so last time I checked.

Other than that, I have 30 or 40 rare games in my 200 or so cart collection. It was much easier to find the rare games a 4-5 years ago when I started collecting. Now it's hard to find even common games. I miss going out on weekends on cart hunts.