$63.99
This is an ad from Electronics Boutique, a store not known for low prices, so it may have been cheaper elsewhere. It's also worth a mention that this game was among the first ever to have 8 mbit carts on a home console. These made the cart themselves significantly more costly, an element the publisher could not control.
36 Comments
What
Punch that number into an inflation calculator.
$63.99 in 1991 is almost $150 today.
i feel like this is a direct-reply post because OP saw a “did you know Starlight cost $80 in 1991” …
weird post. but cool thing to know anyway.
$63.99 in 1991 is about $150 in 2025, when adjusting for inflation however.
We would also need to see what the tax on it would be yeah at base its not 80
In 2025 how do people not understand inflation? It’s been ruining our lives the past few years.
Catalog you linked was Fall 1991.
The game launched in the US may 15, 1991
Not sure what you are trying to prove here
Phantasy Star IV was $80 on the SEGA Genesis
Not the argument-winning flex that OP thinks it is.
That manual is fucking nuts. Like 150 pages.
And this is in USD not Canadian?
Can we also talk about how ‘Road Rash’ is practically a steal at $47.99? That’s a lot of road rage savings right there!
Virtua racing was 90.
That tracks for about the right price point for 91.
Down here in NZ sega master system games were between $80-100 and sega mega drive (genesis) games were between $100-150 nzd at the time.
By about 94/95 most of the master system games were down to around $20-50 and most genesis ones were around $99 still.
Mates and I used to swap the price stickers on the games from the genesis ones to the master system ones so we could get them cheaper.
Couldn’t get away with that these days with fully integrated electronic inventory and pos systems, but in the old days when they just put the label price in you could.
I dislike comparing old prices with new. The audience is larger, and they’ve effectively cut out physical materials. Inflation is also a poorly used metric all around. People didn’t nickel and dime themselves with different services and fees in 1991. I had an easier time spending $150 like 10 years ago than I do spending $70-$80 now. My parents bought me everything in the 90s because I was a child, and they’ve said multiple times that it was way easier to afford games for me when I was a kid because they had significantly lower bills overall.
I thought the internet was going to make kids smarter, not be a place to just display their stupidity publicly.
Road Rash was 🔥
They were selling more than a piece of code but hardware in the form of ROM chips also in each cartridge.
Another thing people completely neglect in this argument isn’t inflation…but rather speciality retailer prices. Department stores always had obscene pricing over other retailers. Prices were all over the place. I remember trying to find Street Fighter II on SNES and Sears was selling it for $80 at the time. Toys R Us had it for $50.
This was the nature of shopping for games in the 80’s and 90’s. For every $60-80 game, there was always another store willing to sell it for half that. Hell, me and my friends used to make day trips just to hop around stores and find the best price.
Road Rash! That game and its sequel were awesome. Does anybody know a similar game with updated graphics/gameplay?
Endirium, the Ancients
Final Fantasy 3 for SNES was $79.99. Chrono Trigger was the same. Same for Ogre Battle. This was in the early to mid 90s. We saved all summer doing lawn mowing to buy the first Pokemon game for our Gameboys. Sure there were some cheaper games, but games used to cost A LOT. That’s why rental services were so popular.
I just laugh at kids losing their minds that some studio wants $20-40 for a game
My dad used to buy us sega games from the flea market for almost half the prices they went for in stores. I was shocked a few years ago when I saw a someone post an ad catalog showing Sega and Nintendo games being $60 – $70.
That isn’t proof of anything.
Phantasy Star 4 was $100 in 1993. According to a few calculators I saw, that’s $220 today. Admittedly, the memory was a huge portion of the cost. First-generation PS1 cd-rom games are probably a more fair indicator of price change.
It doesn’t say that this is a new game here, could be 6 months out from release and discounted.
Me wandering around having no clue to the context for any of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is no one going to mention how great StarFlight was. Man that game was epic for its time.
I remember seeing Neo Geo games for like $200-$300 in the mid 90’s at the game store. I know they were a niche product, but it’s hilarious seeing people complain about game prices when cartridges were often the equivalent of $120+++ now.
Lol, everyone going on Google and that one guy on bing to search the inflation of $64 to today.
How long after release was this?
Also that’s still extremely expensive
Is this about the $80 for borderlands 4? Are people saying it’s not awful because strarflight in 1991 was $80!!!
This was such an amazing game for its time. I remember playing it on the genesis
I think the argument misses a very important point: market size.
Let’s say it was 80 bucks in 1991. How do you buy it? Gotta drive to the game store. How do you hear about it? Gotta pick up a magazine and see it in an advertisement. The market exposure and access is limited.
Today? Steam- digital downloads, ads on your feed, sponsored content creators, worldwide delivery, etc. the market is MASSIVE in comparison to the yesteryear. The drop in relative price is nothing in comparison to the increase in market size. Making 50 percent less but the market exposure, delivery, and access is several thousand times if not larger?
This argument that games should cost more because they were relatively more expensive in the past just falls apart when you consider this, but that’s just my opinion.
I hope people dont forget that it was a physical copy we used to buy, with a booklet, cd, guide, sometimes a map.