Game Gear
The listing says "tested – powers on." The photo shows Sonic frozen on the title screen, and the description never once mentions sound. Experienced Game Gear collectors read that silence the same way: the capacitors are going, and the seller either doesn't know or doesn't
Master System
Switch on an early Master System with no cartridge in the slot, hold Up and both buttons, and Snail Maze appears – a complete little game Sega tucked into the console's BIOS. That's the Master System in a single gesture: generous, slightly odd, and hiding more than
Saturn
Pick up a Japanese Saturn game in a second-hand shop and watch what the collector next to you checks first. Not the disc. Not the manual. The spine card – the slim paper strip hugging the left edge of the jewel case. If it's gone, the price conversation
Dreamcast
That indignant double-beep when you flip the power switch isn't a fault. It's the VMU in port A announcing that its two CR2032 batteries died years ago, and it's the perfect introduction to Sega's last console: on a Dreamcast, almost nothing
Mega Drive
Pick up a PAL copy of Streets of Rage 2 and the case still snaps shut the way it did in 1992. That one detail – Sega shipping games in hard plastic clamshells while Nintendo was still using cardboard – is half the argument for the Mega Drive as your first serious
PS Vita
Every Vita collector has the same origin story: the console arrives, a copy of Persona 4 Golden clicks into the card slot – and the screen asks for a memory card you don't own, that hasn't been manufactured in years, and that costs silly money for the
PSP
Pop the battery cover before you pay for any secondhand PSP. If the door sits proud of the shell, or the cell inside has puffed up like a tiny pillow, you're looking at a swollen lithium battery – and no amount of "tested, works great" in a
PS5
Collectors who hunt first-generation PlayStation hardware don't ask about colours or bundles – they ask for a model number. The one they want is the SCPH-1001, the early US PlayStation with RCA jacks on the back that audiophiles later discovered made a genuinely lovely CD player. Nobody
PS4
Sony built exactly 12,300 units of the 20th Anniversary PlayStation 4, painted them the same grey as the 1994 original, and watched them evaporate. That was December 2014 – barely a year into the generation. The PS4 announced it would be a collector's console almost immediately. Most of
PlayStation 3
Flip a fat PS3 over and read the sticker before you even glance at the disc tray. Those five characters – CECHA, CECHB, CECHC – decide what your library even is, because the PS3 is the rare console where the hardware revision matters more than most of the games it plays. Why
PS2
Take a blue-bottomed disc with you to the next retro fair. A worn PS2 laser will keep reading silver DVD games for months after it starts failing on the blue CD pressings, so a console that boots the seller's copy of a big DVD-era title can
PS1
Ask anyone who owned a launch-era PlayStation why it ended up sitting upside down on the carpet, and you'll get the same sheepish grin. The optical drive in early units wore with age, and flipping the console over was the folk remedy that kept your cutscenes from