From a young age, gaming has been an important part of my life. I spent my early years playing Super Mario Bros. on a borrowed NES, Sonic the Hedgehog on my first console, the Sega Genesis, and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time a few years later on the N64. I spent as much time as I could engrossed in these masterpieces, playing them start to finish, inside and out.
As kids, we innately understood what made these games great — they were challenging, engaging, and exciting. As I grew older, I started to think critically about how great games were designed and what made them so fun to play. The more I studied, the more I came to appreciate the deep artistry of game development. Music, visuals, and storytelling has always been a core part of the artistry of games, and in recent year has evolved to rival the quality of cinema. However, it has always been new and inventive gameplay that has unified the experience. It is the gameplay itself that provides a truly unique artistic perspective through which developers can communicate with the player. Through gameplay, a developer can stoke a player’s curiosity. Breath of the Wild offers a myriad of examples — hidden shrines, distant mountains, and hundreds of offshore islands call out to be explored. A game like Metroid makes you feel powerless at first, so that the strength gained with each power-up provides a sense of growth and progression. A good game can even have the power to make you feel like Batman.
Super Mario Bros., like a lot of classic NES games, has a way of being difficult without being unfair. It compels you to try again, try harder and improve so that time after time you progess a little bit further until you eventually complete the game. Playing through these games in my youth instilled in me the value of persistence in achieving my goals; a mindset that has stuck with me throughout my adult life.
It’s because of deep experiences like this that I have such a passion for gaming, and retro games in particular. Over the years I have continued to play and collect these games, often going after the rare or obscure gems that I missed as a kid. As I started to trade some of my games online however, I became increasingly frustrated with the poor options available to our community. Popular websites, such as eBay, are stuck in the 90s, offering an outdated user experience that makes buying and selling slow and challenging. Furthermore, the overhead costs of selling on these platforms is prohibitive for individuals looking to trade and share experiences with others. Although niche, I think that the retro game community deserves better.
This is why I decided to build Replay Value, an online marketplace built for gamers by gamers, dedicated to trading the games, consoles and accessories that shaped our lives. With Replay Value I’ve set out to create a platform that addresses the issues with existing marketplaces by:
- Making it quick and easy to list the games you want to sell, and even easier to browse and buy new ones
- Reducing the overhead cost of trading your games with others
- Building deep knowledge of the retro game market directly into the application
If you are interested in retro games or game collecting, I invite you to come checkout Replay Value at https://getreplayvalue.com, and let me know in the comments what you think! I hope to see you on Replay Value so we can trade together.