
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of five old basketball games that have shot up in price on the collectors’ market in recent years.
When it comes to sourcing copies of old NBA Live and NBA 2K releases, you won’t end up paying too much. Got your hands on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and feel like taking a trip down memory lane with NBA Live 10? Even on eBay, you’ll likely pay less than ten dollars, Australian or US. Even games from the 90s – such as the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis/Mega Drive version of NBA Live 95 – are generally cheap, as there are quite a number of copies in circulation. You might pay a little more for complete-in-box, but they’re mostly very affordable to collect.
And then, there are the old basketball games that have shot up in price. Last year I took a look at five old basketball games that are very expensive to collect, and there’s some overlap with this article. However, I’ve been made aware of some other titles that are tough to affordably source, at least through a market like eBay. Old basketball games are somewhat of a niche genre when it comes to video game collecting, and as I noted, many of them are too common to fetch a high price just because of their age. They’re still affected by the same trends as retro game collecting in general though, especially if they’re legitimately rare and highly sought after, as some of these are.