Some fans of the Neo Geo, a vintage video-game console, are willing to spend huge sums indulging their nostalgia. Photograph by Frédéric Bisson / Flickr

Seven years ago, Shawn McCleskey, a dealer of rare video games, trading cards, and vintage machine guns in Memphis, Tennessee, made one of the biggest sales of his career. It unfolded like a Robert Ludlum novel. A man calling himself Wolf wired McCleskey fifty-five thousand dollars, then showed up a few days later at Memphis International Airport carrying a metallic briefcase. The two men met in the crowded arrivals hall and, after a brief stop at a local Chinese restaurant, proceeded to McCleskey’s house, where Wolf inspected the merchandise—a pair of video games released in 1996 for the Neo Geo, a Japanese-made console. Satisfied with each game’s condition and authenticity, Wolf opened his briefcase, which had been specially designed to house the foot-long cartridges, and locked them inside. “It was as if the deal was for a bag of diamonds,” McCleskey told me recently. As a condition of the sale, he agreed to keep Wolf’s identity private.

Most video games, like most of everything else, depreciate in monetary value the longer they’re in the world. But the Neo Geo has proved an exception, probably because its games possess the collector’s trifecta: quality, rarity, and expense. Launched in 1991 at a shelf price of six hundred and fifty dollars—more than eleven hundred dollars in today’s money—the console was a kind of generous afterthought on the part of its Osaka-based manufacturer, SNK, whose primary focus was its thriving arcade business. Unlike rival consoles of the time, which presented watered-down versions of contemporary arcade hits, the Neo Geo was true to its origins, right down to its circuitry. The chunky cartridges came in fat plastic cases and cost an average of two hundred and fifty dollars. As a result, the market was limited, and many of the games were produced in small numbers—perhaps as few as a hundred. (The launch of the final official title, Samurai Spirits Zero, took place in 2003, though third-party developers continue to release new games for the system today.)

When McCleskey was nineteen, he inherited a few hundred thousand dollars from his father. He invested half of the money in the stock market and spent the rest on Neo Geo cartridges and Magic: The Gathering cards. “At the time, I was living in my mom’s basement,” he said. “My friends and family saw me pouring my inheritance into video games. They saw it as no better than buying magic beans.” In recent years, his stock portfolio has dwindled, but Neo-Geo.com, the Web site and online store he runs, has become steadily more profitable. Last spring, McCleskey sold three cartridges to a buyer in South Korea for forty-five thousand dollars. “The Neo Geo attracts collectors because, compared with coins, stamps, and comics, you can go years and not find what you’re looking for,” he said.

The majority of the Neo Geo game library is freely (if unofficially) available to play online, and SNK has ported many of the best-known and most expensive titles to modern consoles, offering them for a fraction of their original price. This new ubiquity, however, has had no apparent effect on the collectors’ market. Digital distribution has freed video games from their physical hosts, just as it did with music, films, and books, but the craving for tangibility remains. “There is obviously something special about playing those games on the original systems,” Yasuyuki Oda, a veteran game designer at SNK, told me. “And they look great when they’re lined up on a bookshelf.” Still, despite a vibrant collecting scene, no more than five people in the world own a full collection. One of them, Mahesak Puttirungsriwong, a forty-year-old mathematics tutor from Thailand, estimates that he has spent around two hundred thousand dollars on Neo Geo games in the past twenty-six years. “I don’t know the exact figure,” he told me. “Because of my wife, it is better to forget.” Puttirungsriwong completed his collection last April with a European copy of Kizuna Encounter, a fighting game, which he bought from a friend in Italy for thirty thousand euros. (There are fewer than ten cartridges in existence.) “People who grew up hearing about the Neo Geo are now grown up and earning enough to chase their childhood dream,” Puttirungsriwong said. “They are willing to pay for it. The demand is increasing, and the prices with it.”

Inevitably, the disparity between demand and supply has lured counterfeiters. The first widespread Neo Geo fakes surfaced in the mid-two-thousands. Bootleggers would buy the cheaper arcade version of a game, pry the chips from the circuit board, and affix them to a blank Neo Geo cartridge. High-quality reproductions of the paper inserts and instruction booklets were then used to deceive unwitting buyers. In recent years, counterfeit Neo Geo games have become so widespread, and the fidelity so high, that one collector, a graphic designer from Palm Beach County, Florida, who goes by the name 8man—he requested anonymity, saying that he didn’t “need anyone stopping by, if you know what I mean”—has begun offering authentication services to other buyers. So far, he has inspected more than fifty cartridges, and has found many to be complete or partial fakes. “The bootleggers have ruined it all,” he told me. “I guess that’s what happens when a million subscribers of some retro YouTube channel run to eBay to buy that gem they just saw in a video.”

As collectors have become savvier about counterfeits, the bootleggers, the majority of whom are based in France and Germany, have become more up-front about their wares. Demand for rare titles is such that many players will knowingly spend hundreds of dollars on a fake grail, just to plug a gap in their collection. Today, most bootleggers don’t bother to use original chips. They simply use modern off-the-shelf parts, onto which the game’s files are loaded. “The experience is identical,” one French bootlegger told me. When I spoke with Puttirungsriwong, he seemed sympathetic to the completist impulse, but Oda was mortified. “I do hate the people making these pirate versions,” he said.

Whenever a rare game becomes available, hundreds of posts appear on McCleskey’s forum. “I’ve seen relatively new collectors enter the market to hoard multiples of the big rares,” McCleskey said. “That’s classic speculative investor behavior, and contributes to this seemingly never-ending appreciation.” Some, however, view the endeavor with the skeptical, skewering eye of the self-aware hoarder. “This is not the stock market,” one Neo-Geo.com user wrote in a recent thread. “It’s plastic clutter lowlife and we’re all casualties of nostalgia.”