Every time I pass a boarded up Blockbuster Video I’m not going to lie I contemplate breaking in to search for this game. Before Little Samson got a bunch of attention as the ultimate hidden gem game, Dinosaur Peak was the yearly reigning champion of rare NES games because there just weren’t that many copies available to the public. FLINTSTONES: SURPRISE AT DINOSAUR PEAKįlintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak was allegedly a Blockbuster exclusive and was never actually sold in stores. There are a lot of great hidden gems for the NES worth checking out. It’s just that those qualifiers describe many superior classic NES games and you don’t have to shell out a month’s rent to get Super Mario 3 or Kirby’s Adventure. I’m not trying to dog it entirely, it’s a fun game with good controls, great graphics, and catchy music.
Is it one of the best games made on the NES? Naw, not really.Įven discarding my own nostalgia and attempting to remain objective, I can easily think of 50 games better than Little Samson. Is it worth the $1000 you’re going to spend on it? Of course not, go invest in a mutual fund or something. There’s absolutely more copies of Little Samson then there are copies of Flintsones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, but the overwhelming acclaim for Samson made it more sought after and currently I see it selling for just a bit more overall. It ranked #48 on the aggregate list, even going as far as #9 on Satoshi Matrix’s Top 100 list (if you want to read in detail about LS check out those links.) Little Samson has become pretty well known in the retro-collecting community because unlike most rare games it’s pretty damn good. North American Release Date: November 1992
So I decided to give each of them a whirl in the old top-loader and see what all the fuss is about. These are games not the Dead Sea Scrolls, they’re meant to be played, not handled with gloves and shelved away from natural sunlight. Seriously, what the fuck is the point of that? After that, straight onto the shelf with the other artifacts. After a lot of Ebay diligence, I’ve finally acquired them all and the first thing I did was put them in hard plastic cases to protect my stupid, stupid, obsessions. That’s wild!Īnyway, when I started getting heavy into collecting NES games, the list below were all titles I never thought I’d own. According to Nintendo Age, in 2007 you could grab a copy of Zombie Nation for $10 whereas in 2017 that same game goes for over $300. Why are they so expensive? Because in recent years collecting these games has become increasingly popular as the kids that grew up on them are now in their nostalgic 30’s with disposable income to burn. Why are the games in this Top 10 list so rare and expensive? Most of them are rare because they were released after 1991, the year the Super Nintendo was released, and so a lot of these games went completely unnoticed at the time. As I got deeper and deeper into collecting the NES library, the rare games made themselves known: Nintendo World Championships, Bubble Bath Babes, Myriad 6 in 1 y’know the kinds of games CNN is doing reports on these days (and if you don’t know by now, those cartridges go for shit tons of money.) Well those are certainly very rare but this site is only dedicated to official games released in North America, so not only have I not collected the aforementioned titles but at this point I have zero interest in doing so. It’s the same with any collectible I suppose, no one knows it’s valuable until years later when nostalgia becomes coupled with demand. Growing up playing the NES, I would’ve never guessed that in the future there would be value attached to these games let alone the cardboard boxes that they came in.