How the prices and 'value' are determined within comic collecting is understandable. The sealed and graded videogame collecting community is trying to force the same logic onto a different media that doesn't really hold up to even vaguely similar criteria... it's as logical as conspiring to initiate a sealed and graded breakfast cereal collecting community... I guarantee that a still sealed box of Coco-pops, in "straight from the factory" quality, from '97 is more rare than anything mass produced for the N64.
Cereal might be tricky owing to the very limited shelf life but drinks collecting (as in cans) is very much a thing, never mind wine and spirits which has long been accepted to be in the same realms as any other collecting despite any number of blind taste tests and similar such testing trickery having it be undetectable over a cheap bottle of plonk (the usual thing to note is no undergrad research project is going to have thousands for a bottle of the fancy stuff, will have $50 and a dropper of food dye though).
As far as comics or cards or watches or shoes that otherwise get graded, rarity and other factors play into crazy second hand markets to games I reckon I could happily draw a direct line -- you can go after quality (and even without that faded box, no instructions, loose cart vs not that have been a thing since... I don't necessarily know about the N64 but when I was collecting NES games when the NES was still current), rarity, desirability (not necessarily the same as rarity -- devs going on to make other things, certain bugs, quality of base game, story of that particular cart*). Have no idea of the volume of the market, stability (the comics crash was largely seen to happen after the kids that normally bought them got priced out of the market) or other factors that some of the other things are subject to at this point but it is still a rare item no longer produced, subject to aesthetic desirability across a wide range of demographics (including the nostalgia driven "cash to burn" types), is small enough to be trivially transported (paintings are generally a bastard to ship, this comes with its own nice case already), subject to damage and degradation (and pretty commonly at that, and in this case be long before anybody took collecting seriously enough to keep it in air conditioned vault like many more do today**) and thus very happily could be seen among the same types of things more established.
Now I can't imagine going to a convention, museum or show to see this behind glass like I might a painting, a sculpture, that SNES-PS1 prototype, a wine collection or similar, or indeed some of the other weird and wonderful collectible things people have had over the years but eh.
*jewellery is often this if owned by some royalty, high society types (especially notable mistresses thereof) or whatever and have values far higher than a similar piece made from metals and gems dug up yesterday/without the story. I don't know what will go for games here -- signed by the maker is obvious but we have already seen some fashion design types do one off models (
https://www.flickr.com/photos/travis_l/633693734 -- a rhinestone DS made for Nintendo's shop somewhere), and that whole nonsense with the Wii intended for the queen the other month might not have been a thing in that instance but easily could have been. Don't know if controller/game copy owned by esports/competition/speedrun champion will ever be a thing, more likely to see some unrelated celebrity having owned it be more of a thing before then, that or film prop (nes power gloves might get a bit of something today thanks to rare and silly so good for the shelf of interesting things/conversation starters, should you find the power glove(s) used for The Wizard, aka the reason most know what it is today, and have provenance then different matter entirely).
**we are what, 20 years now and 15 at worst since this retro games lark became a notable thing (I was doing it before it was cool, mainly as it was cheap and the games were/are still good, it somewhat rapidly became not cheap and I wandered off) so we see enough people buy collections of what they think will be notable games to match the prices they saw various other things hit. I imagine a few of those will have ended up with a box that was not chucked on the wire frame shelf by a minimum wage teenager, after the palette it came in on was used as a step, whilst also being compressed with shrink wrap and subsequently fumbled by a bunch of children. There is doubtless some investor with the equivalent of
https://towardsdatascience.com/what...o-games-compared-to-global-sales-bdf7a395e064 https://towardsdatascience.com/predicting-hit-video-games-with-ml-1341bd9b86b0 but for later years sales prices going on. Indeed most reading this could probably hash out the main rules/variables of such a thing; sales volume, quality, hidden gem status, lawsuits/recall, RPG vs not, sports game rarity in region, bundle games, on Nintendo console or not, kiddy game on xbox and thus hard for set completionists to source, speedrun potential including specific bugs in version, only sold out the back of a given shop... with the only hard variable being whether the 6/10 game will be by a dev that later goes on to rock the world (see prices of king's field before and after dark souls, or generally albums and books by artists and authors that later became super popular) or the game itself is seen as a fundamental stepping stone in innovation.
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