That's because most of this is market manipulation through Wata Games and Heritage Auctions.
Long ass video but like it's bad (what Wata and Heritage Auctions are doing, not this video)
And Wata and Heritage Auctions are also currently outright being sued for market manipulation too btw:
Wata operates a fairly straightforward service where retro game collectors can ship their games in to be graded and encased in a protective hard-shell plastic for display purposes. Wata charges customers based on the game’s market value – for example, a game valued at $10,000 costs $400 to be...
www.spokesman.com
I'm not saying 'every video game ever made is actually worthless' (because that's certainly not true) but I am saying that this fairly recent rise in prices in the retrogaming market, especially for loose copies of games that literally sold millions and millions of copies, is blatantly bullshit and a bubble that hopefully will burst soon. (IIRC apparently Heritage Auctions did the same jive with coin collecting back in the 1980s too?)
I mean if you have idiots trying to sell games at this price:
Yeah something is really fucked up. (Of course I know there would still be idiots who think 'this game is "old", therefore it must be worth a lot of money', but I feel a lot of it is people thinking 'That copie of Super Mario sold for like $2 million! My old games I got lying around must be worth a pretty penny too!')
You can literally buy Turok loose for like $20 btw