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Symbolic
5 Everyday 90s Collectibles Now Worth A Small Fortune
If only we had held onto some of these, we’d probably be glad about it.
Nostalgia
— A word associated not just with retrospective emotional value (or a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky), but also with money. Below is a list of things I or others in my peer group collected, casually. In those days they seemed valuable mostly to kids. Now, many adults would get excited to hear about their salability.
There are some clues that a childhood hobby was bound to explode in value. During the time, was it relatively coveted and beginning to appreciate? Were some items rarer and more sought after than others, leading to attention and craze about collecting? Was it still relatively new, and not proven to be more than just a fad then?
Maybe this was right around the time you decided to sell or trade your collection. In that case, you could’ve made a big mistake.
1. Comic Books
It’s no surprise that some comic-book related memorabilia have become exponentially more valuable. Just think about how much all the comic book movies make, and how popular they are. By the time I was a child of collecting age, comics were nothing to sneer at.
Many vintage comic books were already deemed high in value. But even of those that were new and mundane during the time I was collecting, the most expensive are now worth up into the hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of dollars. Not too bad for something that used to cost $1–5 off the shelf.
The Spawn #1 from 1997 with a misprinted black and white cover now goes for about $1500.
2. Video Games
My brothers and I were avid gamers in the 90s. This was during the time that consoles like the Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo 64 were being released. We personally owned a number of games now worth many times their original shelf price.
