Let me introduce you to one of them — we’ll call him Player One. He’s a WAX client who’s insured some serious heat over the years — art, watches, even a couple of ultra-rare sports cards — but the crown jewel of his vault? Video games. Not the ones you or I tossed in a shoebox back in college. We’re talking museum-grade, VGA-graded cartridges in vacuum-sealed slabs. Titles that defined a generation, preserved like they belong in the Smithsonian.
It started innocently enough. A few years ago, Player One was scrolling an online auction platform late at night — the collector's equivalent of drunk texting your ex — when he spotted a sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda for NES. “I remember holding this in my hands at Toys R Us,” he told me. “I never owned it as a kid. I had to borrow it from my neighbor and return it before I could finish.”
He bought it. Not to play — to reclaim a feeling.
And that’s the thing. For some, collecting is about flexing. For others, it’s about preserving. But for guys like Player One? It’s about time travel. About revisiting the part of yourself that still believed blowing into a cartridge fixed everything. A simpler world, where the biggest threat to your day was Bowser — not a conference call or quarterly earnings.
Turns out, he’s not alone. The video game collectibles market has exploded over the past five years. In 2021, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million at auction. A year before that? That same game in the same condition would’ve barely cracked $100K. According to market data from Rally and Heritage Auctions, high-grade vintage games have appreciated at an annualized rate north of 20% since 2018. That’s not nostalgia — that’s asset class behavior.
Still, for Player One, it's not just about the ROI. “I don’t even display them all. Some of my favorites are just for me. I open the vault and there they are. Perfect. Untouched. Like the day they left the factory.” That quiet reverence? It’s what makes a collector a collector. You could slap an NFT on it, but it wouldn’t smell like the ‘80s or come with a thumbprint smudge on the instruction manual.
Over the past two years, Player One’s collection has ballooned — both in volume and value. When he first joined WAX, we insured a few grails, mostly art and watches. Then the retro boxes started appearing in his vault: Castlevania III, Metroid, Mega Man II, even obscure imports like EarthBound in its oversized SNES box. And here’s what’s wild — he’s not alone. We've seen a 2x uptick in insured retro video game portfolios since 2023, with the average policy value per collector exceeding $100K. Let that sink in: The cartridges you tossed into a garage bin in 2002 could now be insurable assets on par with fine art and rare whisky.
Of course, once the stakes go up, so does the anxiety. Player One now vaults most of his collection off-site — climate controlled, security monitored, barcode tagged, and digitally managed through WAX. He tracks every title like it’s a private equity position. And just like with watches or wine, we’ve seen the same pattern play out: buy, vault, insure… and occasionally, sell.
In fact, he’s now actively pruning. “I’ve realized I’m a Nintendo guy,” he told me. “Genesis never really clicked. So I’m offloading those to go deeper into what I love.” That’s not just emotional clarity — it’s curatorial discipline.
The best part? He’s started passing it on. His daughter recently beat Kirby’s Adventure on an old CRT they keep in the den. “She asked if we could open one of the sealed copies to play it together,” he said. “I told her we’d play the loose one — the sealed one stays in the vault. But I let her hold it. I told her, ‘This is what magic looks like sealed in plastic.’”
That’s the thing about grails. They’re not always expensive. They’re just irreplaceable.
And for Player One — like many collectors — the real treasure isn’t the game. It’s the memory it holds. The moment it unlocks. The piece of himself it gives back, level by level.
Game over? Nah. He’s just getting started.
