The most expensive C64 games

With the recent news (that made the press worldwide) of the NES Family Fun Fitness: Stadium Events game that was bought for $8 at a thrift store and potentially reaching a staggering 30K on a GameGavel.com auction (it’s already at 12K!), I thought it would be a nice idea to find out which are the rarest and most expensive Commodore 64 games out there.

It turns out, it’ll be some time before any of those games make the same amount of money (after all, Commodore was the best selling computer of all time, so it’s only logical that a quadzillion copies of each game are out there), but still, there are some games that will make you a decent buck (if you can get a hold of one at a good price first that is).

To get my hands dirty and see what could be the price for those collectible games, I started with my own collection. Now I do not own such a big games collection (I prefer collecting the hardware on which to run them), but some of the games I have here, especially the SSI AD&D games do fetch quite some money on eBay. Expect to pay anywhere between Euro/Dollar 40-50 for a copy with a box in good shape and all contents complete.

But surely, these cannot be the top prices people pay for Commodore games, so on with the search to find the holy grail of Commodore games.

I remembered that in the 30th anniversary Commodore 64 special issue of Retro Gamer, they featured a listing of a couple of hundred C64 games and their rarity. A quick glance at this list shows that some games, that I know but have never seen in their original box (just copies or versions on the various emulators), are indeed high up on the rarity list (Avenger, Elvira 2, Gauntlet III, …)

So much so, that collectors are willing to go well above the Euro/Dollar 100 mark for a good copy. One other such notorious game is the Great Giana Sisters, that most of you will know, was pulled from the store shelves once Nintendo got wind of it being a bit too similar to their flagship plumber’s game: Mario.

I should point out though, that when looking at the rarity of the games, you have to take the PAL/NTSC split into consideration as well. Some games were initially released in the US in the NTSC format and then some time later repackaged and sold in their PAL versions in Europe (i.e. as did US Gold) and vice versa. This can make a PAL version (or NTSC version) that much rarer than its counterpart.

Now the next question is… what’s their worth. It all depends on what a potential buyer/collector is willing to pay but a good resource that can help you out with this is “The Rarity Guide”. According to this list, the highest valued C64 game (so far) is Castles of Dr. Creep (Broderbund), which has a “new in box” value of $280,00. Not bad… not bad at all.

Digging through some of the C64 forums (which is also a good idea to get some indication of the value of your games), there was mention of other C64 games that even went above the $500 mark!

These were a new sealed Ultima II in the early C64 only version (for $521) and a sealed Space Taxi (supposedly for roughly $600).

What strikes me though, is that Space Taxi in Europe was not that rare, so it just goes to show that the value of a game is not always related to its rarity. Nonetheless, for the time being, it takes 1st place in our “most expensive C64 games”.

Do you know of any other rare/highly priced C64 games? Post them in the comments at the bottom of this article!