Classic 80's Home Video Games: Identification and Value Guide

by Jason W. Brassard and Robert P. Wicker

The early 80s was a pioneering time for home video games. Consoles from Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and others dominated many American living rooms. This guide takes an in-depth look at the classic... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1574325736
• ISBN13: 9781574325737
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Collector Books
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.5" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Classic 80s Home Video Games: Identification & Value Guide

I purchased this book because I am a huge collector. I love the in depth info and bright color pictures. Great info on all systems and games leading up to the 1984 crash. In fact that is the only thing I find wrong with this book...it is titled "video games of the 80's" but it stops before NES/SEGA and the climb of 1985...If you are looking for info/$$$ on the 70's-early 80's products, this price guide is for you. It even breaks down price info for the different versions of carts and how much a cart, or booklet, or boxed complete...also the pictures help out a lot when you are looking at different versions of the same game....

Great price guide

This is the only book being sold as of October 2008 that has prices listed with the descriptions of the classic era vidio games.

clearing up confusion about this title - direct from the author's mouth

There has been some confusion about this book, caused by what I can only hope are unintentional misstatements concerning the book's content, so I'm here to clear up as much as I can. There are 7 systems featured in this book: Atari 2600 VCS, Atari 5200 SuperSystem, Atari 7800 ProSystem, Coleco Vision, Intellivision, Odyssey2 and Vectrex. The book does provide a comprehensive overview and visual guide to all the games listed. As boxes, manuals and cartridges usually all feature the same artwork during this period, we made sure we showed at least one of the three for every title, so you could see what you should be looking for (usually the box and/or cartridge). This first version of this book focuses only on U.S. production releases. As we did not have an unlimited page count, we chose to focus only on the material most American consumers would have come in contact with at the typical U.S. retail store in the 1980s. There are 1059 boxes shown, 934 cartridges, 154 overlays, 163 photos of merchandise (some photos show more than one item), and another 154 assorted photos, such as: magazines, Activision patches, catalogs and other supplemental material. That's 2435 painstakingly selected photos for those keeping track (I could be off by a handful, I kept losing my place!) The introduction does contain an offer to purchase collections in the section that lists our contact information. However, the book is not littered with solicitations as has been suggested. There are several rare items where we note "If you have this item, please contact us." This notation is for research purposes. Because there is so little sales history for some items, we need more information on them. How did you acquire the item? Is it from your childhood collection? If so, what materials were included with the game? How much did you pay for the item? And so on. Each chapter is color coded to visually separate the sections for each console. The title of the console also appears in the margin to make it easy to find the chapter you are looking for. Each console has an introduction that explains more about the console's history, followed by cartridge variation listings. Cartridges are listed in alphabetical order, by manufacturer, so they are easy to locate. Listings feature prices for the cartridge, manual, additional inserts, and a boxed, complete value, and list specific visual markers to help identify variations. At the end of each chapter are merchandise listings, with console listings first, followed by related merchandise. All of the related merchandise is listed in alphabetical order so you can locate them by the name printed on the item or package. As the majority of collectors focus on the games, not the joysticks, we chose to maximize the photos in the cartridge sections, and show a representative sampling of pictured items in the merchandise listings. The layouts vary by chapter because the size of boxes and cartridges vary by console, so it's

Awesome book

These two guys really did a good book. It has lots of pictures to go with it. The book does not describe each game as this is not it's purpose. This is solely a selling guide.

An excellent pictorial collector guide

Classic 80's Home Video Games is a fantastic pictorial guide of all things the classic video game collector could ever want. Full color photos, prices for loose game, manual and box, along with descriptions of all known variations of said games. This guide doesn't bog down in text descriptions like other guides seem to do, rather, Jason and Robert let the large, beautiful, full-color photos speak for themselves. The guide also includes some items either glossed over or completely ignored by other guides. Peripherals, patches, posters, catalogs, they are all in there, and all in full color photographs. I highly recommend this guide, whether you are a new collector just starting out, or a longtime pack rat such as myself. For the price, it really can't be beat.