N64
Grip the analogue stick and rotate it slowly before you look at anything else. If it wobbles in its socket like a loose tooth, sits low, or crawls back to centre like it's exhausted, you've just learned more about that console's life than any
Game Boy
Slide the battery cover off before you talk price. On an original Game Boy – the grey DMG-01 brick Nintendo shipped in 1989 – those four AA terminals will tell you more about the machine's last few decades than any glamour shot in the listing. By spec-sheet logic,
Games
Ape Escape wouldn't even start without a DualShock. Sony's Japan Studio shipped it in 1999 as the first PlayStation game to require both analog sticks – left stick steers Spike, right stick swings the Stun Club and the Time Net – and the original digital pad got politely
Nintendo DS
Every flea market has a shoebox of loose Nintendo DS carts priced like chewing gum, and somewhere in that box there's usually one cart worth more than everything else on the table. That's the DS in miniature: one of the biggest handheld libraries ever assembled, with
Wii U
Nintendo shipped roughly 13.5 million Wii U consoles across the machine's entire life. The Wii before it cleared 100 million. That gulf – the hardest faceplant in Nintendo's home-console history – is exactly why the Wii U has quietly become one of the most collectable Nintendo
Wii
Somewhere in a drawer near you, a white Wii is resting under a tangle of cables, its sensor bar wrapped around a remote with a slightly chewed silicone jacket. Nintendo shipped over 100 million of these things, and it sometimes feels like half of them were donated, boot-saled or
Xbox
Flip over an original Xbox that's been sitting in a loft since 2003 and there's a fair chance its clock capacitor is quietly leaking onto the motherboard. That's the odd spot Microsoft's first console occupies: young enough that flea markets still price
Sega
The same 1992 Sonic cartridge wears two names depending on where you bought it: Mega Drive in Europe and Japan, Genesis in North America, because Sega couldn't secure the Mega Drive trademark in the US. That one quirk tells you almost everything about collecting Sega – this is a
PlayStation
Flip a PlayStation disc over and look at the colour. If the underside is black, you're holding one of the era's best details: Sony pressed PS1 discs on black-tinted polycarbonate, and that quirk is still the quickest authenticity check in the hobby. Bootlegs burned to
Nintendo
Try to destroy a loose N64 cartridge. Short of power tools, you'll struggle – Nintendo moulded that grey plastic like it fully expected the thing to be hurled down a staircase, which, in the average 1997 living room, it was. Now look at the cardboard box the cartridge originally
Glossary
Two copies of the same PlayStation 2 game, side by side on a shop shelf. Same disc, same manual, same everything – except one spine is black and the other wears a red stripe. To a casual buyer they're interchangeable. To a collector, only one of them is the
Glossary
A seller somewhere is asking a serious premium for a GameCube because of one square port on the back panel – and if you can't explain why, the listing was written in a language you don't speak yet. Retro hardware descriptions are dense with jargon: RGB, recapped,