How much did games cost back in the day?

I remember paying something like $100 for Pokemon Snap on my N64.

I just remember that Chrono Trigger cost in excess of $90 brand new when it was first released.
 
Ah, the joys of cartridge-based game media.

I remember buying Donkey Kong 2 or the SNES back when it came out. It cost me 800 Norwegian kroner, which would be 120 dollars back in 96. 

I dunno what you guys are talking about. Chrono Trigger cost me $60.

i remember paying $50 for n64 games. i would go to a toystore back in the day. good times going there. i don't know about the snes or nes games because i never bought them. my cousin gave me their snes.

In Canada N64 games were 60 sometimes 70 and the big hits could be 80-90$. Snes were even more but I was to young to buy more own so hard to say.

" @cstrang said:

"  NES games ranged from around $30 to $45, SNES games were usually $50 (barring some exceptions, like Chrono Trigger), and N64 games were $50-ish, IRC. "

Really? Where did I hear that N64 games would cost 80 bucks? "

n64 games were like $30.00-$40.00 new.

yea but its important to remember the dollar is worth way less now. so like 50 bucks in 1991 was like 70 bucks today. also there was rarely uniform pricing as there seems to be now industry wide.  

I remember spending $50 for Mario Party 1... worth every penny.

Didn't GBA games cost $30 and they bumped DS games up to $35?

I distinctly remember in my younger days seeing a copy of Cruis'n USA going for 80 dollars at a local department store.
 
80 dollars for Cruis'n USA? Come on now. Cruis'n World however...I would've paid 90 dollars for that game.

" @ThePhantomnaut: those fuckin' things were as much as some consoles, like $300. In their defense though they were huge (HUGE) cartridges that were as good as their arcade versions. 

"

I remember saving up my allowance and buying the ninja turtles arcade game for the Nes for $50 from Toys R Us. Kind of crazy that prices haven't changed much in 20 years.

My Dad bought A Legend of Zelda for me at Toys R Us back in 1988 for $80. NES games at Toys R Us were ridiculously expensive, even in the 80's.

I remember soon after the U.K. N64 launch paying £79.99 for new copies of International Superstar Soccer 64 and the original Turok from Currys. Thankfully those prices didn't last too long.

atari 800 and spectrum games were sometimes only about £3 or something if i remember correctly .

Too young to have bought many games in the 90s. I do remember playstation games being a couple of hundred Marks.

I remember buying C64 cassettes for 50Kr (9$).

I also had the Amiga 500 but I never bought anything for that. It was way too easy copy your friends games, which he had copied from another friend etc.

I distinctly remember SNES games being $59.99. There were even some SNES games that were 64.99, games like Super Pitfall and Sim Ant come to mind immediately. N64 games were 59.99 at launch and came down to 49.99 eventually. PS1 games were 29.99 to 39.99, and PS2 were anywhere from 49.99 to 54.99.

I remember my Dad buying me a copy of Super Mario 64 at Wal-mart and it being around $70.

@cstrang said:

NES games ranged from around $30 to $45, SNES games were usually $50 (barring some exceptions, like Chrono Trigger), and N64 games were $50-ish, IRC.

How much was Chrono Trigger when it came out?

Nintendo launch prices for Germany (1EUR ~ 2DM):
 
NES: ~100DM
SNES: 100-150DM
N64: 100-150DM
Gamecube: 50EUR-60EUR
Wii: 40-60EUR 
Gameboy: ~50DM
GBA: 40-50EUR
NintendoDS: 30-40EUR
 
First party Nintendo titles where most of the time 10EUR cheaper then third party stuff, except for modules with special chips, included walkthrough or other unusual stuff.
 
On the PC home computer side prices where a good bit more variable, going essentially from 30-150DM, depending on if it was some cheap stuff from a local distributor or some big import title, i.e. LucasArts adventures used to be around 130DM, Microsoft Flightsimulator also was always rather expensive.
 
In essence: Prices, if you ignore inflation, haven't changed much at all. Going from modules to CD lowered them, going from Xbox1 to Xbox360 raised them a little bit again. PC is always 10EUR cheaper then consoles.

I think you could get a NES game from between 30 to 45 bucks, but with inflation that's still more than today. In some regions (Europe...) though, games got ridiculously expensive. I know that sometimes you had to pay double what you paid in US, not to mention some weird localization issues and late releases. And they wonder why piracy was/is a big problem in Europe...
 
Edit: I meant NES game of course, not the whole console.

Back in the day I had found a used neo geo for cheap enough I could trade in my 3do for, but new games for it cost a fortune. I decided I would pick the best one and go for it, then not buy any other games for the system until I could get them super cheap. I paid $299 for Samurai Showdown2 brand new. It's still one my favorites today and a treasured part of my collection.

Remember back in 1987 Speccy tapes could be got for about £3. Also remember seeing in the back of CVG that certain Neo-Geo game cost up to £199!!

Not to revive a dead thread, but EGM is wrong.

Maybe in certain places those were the prices, but Toys R Us, and different places that carried games when I was a kid all had high prices. N64 I definitely remember paying $60+ (USD) on the regular. On NES I remember seeing a game in a Sears Christmas catalog costing $80-90. I think we ordered a Mega Man game out of there for $80. Prices shifted a bit towards middle/end of psx/n64. I don't remember the cost of genesis (I didn't have snes) games but they weren't cheap.

Lots of people in here verifying that they had high prices as well.

Take inflation into account and back then people were paying over $100 for games. And you sometimes spent that much money just to try something out since maybe you couldn't really find out if anyone had played it. Big gamble back then.

I remember buying Paper Mario for 60 bucks when it came out, that game was worth it though, i had a blast that summer.

I am fairly certain that the Toys R Us by my house wanted $80 for Donkey Kong 64. A lot of the prices quoted in this thread seem lower than I remember.

Two haypennies and a thith of pine straw.

N64 games were a motherfucker.

$50 was pretty much the standard until the 360/ps3 generation. there were exceptions of course. A lot of JRPGs were $70 at times, do to the battery pack that was included inside the cartridge that made saving possible.

The only price I really remember back in the day was Street Fighter II for the SNES was $80-85.

EDIT: Oh yeah, PS1 games were $40 because they were on disc and it was a big selling point for the system.

This is what I remember here in Canada, per game systems and sometimes eras. I unfortunately didn't follow prices until 1994, so I can't tell how much games costed beforehand. But this is what I remember for brand new games:

Mid SNES/Sega Genesis era: $30-$90 (Games on Sega were usually slightly cheaper than their SNES counterparts)

Late SNES/Sega Genesis era: $40-$150 (Yes, you read that right. Most big titles were $100, but some stores like Zellers and Sears charged up to $150 for Final Fantasy III, even 2 years after it came out)

Entire N64 era: $30-80 (The only exception being Gauntlet Legends, which was $90)

Early PS1: $80-85 (This only lasted until the N64 came out)

Mid-Late PS1: $20-60

Early PS2/Xbox era: $30-70

Early GameCube era: $30-80 (yes, they charged as much as $79.99 for early GameCube games, but the price would usually go down very fast)

Rest of PS2/GC/Xbox era: $20-60 (Player choices titles were usually cheap)

Early Wii/PS3/360 era: $20-70 (Most games launched at $59.99, but there were exceptions like Star Ocean and Halo Reach)

Since the 2008-09 economic crisis, you can often run into $5-10 games and if you get them used, you can get them for as low as $2 at EB Games.

This is a PDF version of the 1995-96 video game catalogue from Consumers Distributing (Canadian version): http://www.cdarchive.ca/UltimateVideo1996.pdf

That said, I kinda miss the days where an Earthbound cart only costed $95. But I'm glad that sports games now costs $5 one year after launch rather than $100.