Cheapest game or console you ever bought?

[gngtiger]

And more importantly, did it work?
I have Super Breakout for the Atari 2600, which I found in a dollar bin at my local retro gaming store. I do not know if it works, as I do not own the console.

[david0mario]

I've gotten at least 3 games for 99 cents at my local game store, being Madden 2003, Hannah Montana: Music Jam, and Hannah Montana: The Movie. All of them work just fine 

[wolff242]

Bought? Ive bought several games for .50 each, and there used a store here that would sell games like Rock Band (And Hannah Montana, lol) for 2 for .99. I was at a game store the other day and found a 15 year old PC game in the free bin. Don't know if that works though.

Best though was around 2001-2002 a guy I met on the internet offered me his dreamcast and all the games he had for it...for free. Met him in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night.
(We knew each other awhile and we had mutual real life friends, so even though he was a relative stranger I felt comfortable) Ah to be young an invincible. Anyway, he wasn't a serial killer and I still have said dreamcast and all the games

Around 2005 or so someone I worked with offered me a free SNES with a stack of games. Still have all them too

[telekill]

When my brother and I were kids... early teens... he stated he would sell me an Atari 2600 with 20 games and 4 controllers for whatever I had in my wallet. Being about 12... I had $3. I enjoyed Dig Dug and Pitfall the most.

[bikingjahuty]

I've bought many games for a buck each or less. While I never bought any, a local game store used to sell sports titles that were 10-years old or older for a quarter since no one would buy them for more than that. As far as consoles go I bought a black Gamecube from the flea market years ago for $10. Ended up working great and I still use it to this day.

[bizzgeburt]

It's one of the most joyful things collecting retro video games, when you're able to get an item way below it's actual value/price.

I guess one of the most cost-efficient buys I ever made was buying two GB color coming with about 18 Games from a mother selling of her kids' old stuff not knowing what it was worth. I paid 30,- euro for everything, and those games included PokéMon Silver. Nice catch!

Another good buy was a PAL region SEGA Saturn (2nd. edition controller included) for about 70,- euro ... seller said it wasn't working properly, but he just didn't know that you can revive the internal memory by simply changing a litte battery in the back of the console ^^

Properly the cheapest - not even a buy - was that Wii console a friend of mine found between garbage that someone left at the sidewalk ^^ he gifted it to me and it ended up working flawlessly until this day, heehee ... only the foot was missing, but lookahere: exactly one year after that incident, he found the foot between garbage in front of the same house where he found that console! Life writes best comedy - I ended up owning a complete, working Nintendo Wii without paying anything.

Guess I'm quite good at profiting from the lack of knowledge of others, but hey, they got the amount of money they wanted 

[turf]

I’ve gone all the way to FREE.99 on some games, but those aren’t that fun of stories.

I bought a PS3 back when it was the current console for $5 at a yard sale. It had been pulled off a cabinet and the hard drive had come loose and it needed an A/V reset.
30 min after I got home, she worked like a champ.

I’ve also bought several (close to 10) Wiis for $5. I’ll never not buy a $5 Wii. I buy them and sell them for about $50 after I clean them up. It’s actually kinda hard not to end up with too many of them.

[brothertuc]

I've bought several PS2 games for 20 DKR, which is around $3 ... And they all worked fine. A bit scratched but worked fine.
That's probably my cheapest game purchase.
The cheapest console was my PS1 for 300 DKR, around $44. It also works like a charm.

[sworddude]

50 cents for a snes console with controllers as cheapest.

Although my favourite cheap console deal was a broken saturn lot with 20 cib games including keio flying squadron, the console also was still boxed for 50$. and since it was sold as broken even though the set included allot of cool games not much interest at the time, fun stuff.

in reality only 1 of the 2 controllers had a broken cable, console still working fine till this very day same for the games discs which where in nice shape that was one heck of a deal to start of saturn collecting. I have no clue why the guy said it was broken, perhaps he couldn't hook it up to his modern tv.

I bought plenty of rare games for 50 cents or 1$

But it where talking cheapest. I got some freebies on a huge sega deal quite some years ago it was when amiibo scalping was at it's peak in wich even most retro resellers where ignoring retro deals it was a hell lot easier to score good deals when allot of other players left the playing ground. I remember scoring a cheap cib hagane back than golden times really. the deal initself was already insanity. But the guy said he found some extra games and added them to the lot at no costs. valued it the same as the rest cheap.

These where however not your common sega games. the guy added a dozen of cib megadrive games with titles including phelios and a pretty rare one in aero the acrobat 2. Favourite freebies of all time. just the cherry on top of an already crazy deal.

[tripredacus]

Have gotten many games for free, I'm not sure I could list them out. Have gotten many games for very cheap due to being part of bulk deals such as that time I bought 150 PS2 games on Ebay.

Consoles I have gotten for free:
- Commodore VIC-20
- Commodore 64
- Sega Dreamcast
- Wii

Consoles I have gotten for less than $10
- Game Boy $4
- Nomad $5

[chexmixbreath]

It's one of the most joyful things collecting retro video games, when you're able to get an item way below it's actual value/price.

It sure is. The worst (or best??) case of a mispricing I've personally encountered was in 2018 at Book Off in Torrance, CA. They had a sealed copy of Golden Sun: The Lost Age with its original $19.99 price sticker still on it. I brought it to the register expecting them to reveal the actual ludicrous price, instead they rang it up for that amount and I walked out of there as fast I could with a giant grin on my face.

Not quite the same thing as a mispricing, but every once in a while on auction sites like eBay you'll score on something just because nobody else bid on an item. In 2020, I scored an authentic PAL Metal Gear Solid for GBC for 20 dollars (the minimum starting bid) and somehow nobody else bid on it. The cart alone regularly goes for $100+...

[undertakerprime]

Shortly after EBay became a thing, on a whim I bid $500 on a full size TMNT arcade cabinet, having no question I would end up outbid by quite a lot…. I unexpectedly won the auction. Still have the game in my parents’ basement but it doesn’t work anymore…one of these days I’ll see about getting it fixed.

Not sure if this counts since this was only a few years after it came out and I wasn’t really a collector yet, but I borrowed Final Fantasy II (IV) for SNES from my high school friend around ‘94 or so. He could tell I loved it and he hardly ever played it anyway, so he let me keep it. Even though I didn’t actually finish it until maybe 15 years later, FFIV ignited my passion for RPGs after I absolutely could not get into the first FF on NES.

It's one of the most joyful things collecting retro video games, when you're able to get an item way below it's actual value/price.

It sure is. The worst (or best??) case of a mispricing I've personally encountered was in 2018 at Book Off in Torrance, CA. They had a sealed copy of Golden Sun: The Lost Age with its original $19.99 price sticker still on it. I brought it to the register expecting them to reveal the actual ludicrous price, instead they rang it up for that amount and I walked out of there as fast I could with a giant grin on my face.

Not a game, but I did encounter a case of mispricing.
In the early 2000’s I was big into Marvel Legends figures and I had a number of the rare variants.
One day I’m looking through the figures at a comic shop and see a Marvel Legends Cable variant. Normally this store would WAY overprice any variant or less common figures (typical for a comic shop), so I assumed it would be expensive…apparently whoever priced the figures totally missed that this was a variant and it was like $17, not hugely over retail. I quickly snapped it up and hoped no one would notice while I checked out (the store owner was nearby and if she saw the error I can guarantee she would NOT have honored the price tag and would have immediately upcharged me).

[oldgamerz]

A vary dirty used N64 from Gamestop for $20USD it worked barley, I later sold it but just needed to clean it for it to work better


A SEGA Saturn for free just traded some of my things from my apartment

[Reckoning]

I got my black Wii for $1.  No cords or peripherals, but can't beat $1. 

It was a bundle deal at a garage sale, stack of games and the console for $20.  I don't remember the games, but I know there was 19 of them and I was not impressed with the games themselves, but just about any pickup is worth a dollar.

[mrkonasoni]

A baseball SNES game for FREE, because for some reason someone sent me a copy that I never ordered it.

I was curious about what happened but it was never clear, I assume it was a gift by a grateful ebay seller or someone made a mistake and accidentally sent it.

Either way, I am thankful for it and if it was intended as a thanks gift, I appreciate it, regardless I can't play it.