There’s this funny little Nintendo DS RPG called Contact, developed by Grasshopper and inspired heavily by Earthbound. Its Metacritic score is hmm, and most people I speak to have never heard of it. But I have profoundly fond memories of this silly little game, and it’s all thanks to a jumbled-up used video game bargain bin at a GameStop where I found it at random one day over a decade ago. It cost $5.
Man, I miss those big, disorganized bins of unbelievably cheap, usually mediocre, used video games.
For no reason whatsoever, I’ve been thinking a lot about physical media since yesterday. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my own physical game collection, and how I’ve slowly moved away from physical games to digital over the years. There are a lot of reasons for that, most of them related to sheer convenience, but it occurred to me that one factor which has contributed to the dwindling of my physical game collection is the decreasingly frequency with which I encounter such bins out in the wild.
They’re not gone entirely. A few GameStops still have used video game racks, and local game stores are often far more fruitful. But as our consumption of everything has slowly become more digital, there is a growing scarcity of the kind of bargain bin I really love: a big, square vat that just has a bunch of stuff thrown in seemingly at random. I used to love digging through these. You’ll start at the top, which is mostly all the sports games no one wants and whatever Call of Dutys are oldest/least popular at the moment. But the deeper you dig, the more interesting things you’ll find. Treasures I manifested from such bins in the past include Evolution Worlds, Ar Tonelico, and several different Art Academy games. I’m pretty sure this is also how I ended up playing the most underrated Tales game, Tales of Legendia. I have incredibly fond memories of all of these, I definitely paid less than $20 for each one back when their respective systems were still relatively current, and I probably never would have encountered them if not for the bargain bin.
With Sony ditching disc games in 2028, I can only assume that the good ol’ used game bargain bin will only continue to fade into memory. Not only will physical games be a far more precious commodity, but deep discounts like GameStop’s classic 4 for $20 are almost certainly gone for good. It hurts my heart to know that the next generation will never have the joy of sifting through about 100 copies of a several-year-old Madden game just to, surprise! find the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game and experience its joys for themselves.
Anyone find any good bargain bin games back in the day? Or even now? Tell me about them, please. Let’s keep the memories alive.