I’ve always been fascinated by collections of any kind; I guess it’s the 90s kid in me, that yearning to find new and exciting treasures everywhere from the local Post Office Window to second-hand stores and car boot sales. From opening packs of Pokémon Cards and hoping for rare picks to wondering whether you’ll stumble across a rare N64 game someone’s practically giving away – it’s something that never truly leaves you, and for Brent Scotchmer, it’s been a lucrative and exciting way of life.
Brent is a fascinating guy to speak to; he’s the kind of person who shares our love for pop culture and collecting and has acquired some truly amazing pieces over the years. You can end up speaking about one topic that suddenly reminds him of a piece of work he did or a figurine he found that ends up shooting the conversation in another nostalgic direction, and his stories about the rare items he’s discovered at swap meets or picked up from eagle-eyed postal workers (true story) never fail to blow me away – just wait till you get to the bit about the Star Wars figures!
This article takes snippets from the transcript of our Retrospect Podcast interview with Brent and focuses on the topic of the future of game collecting, with Brent giving his opinion on what might happen to our collections in the future as well as his thoughts on current and future collecting patterns. He also has some great tips about how to make yourself known as a collector in your area as well as lots more advice in the full podcast recording. But for now, let’s get to know the man with more Star Wars figurines than I’ve had hot dinners – take it away Brent!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Brent Scotchmer
RD: Thanks for joining us, Brent. If you could introduce yourself to the Retro Dodo readers then that would be great!
Brent: I’m Brent Scotchmer. I am an illustrator and a lifelong collector of many things. Born in 83, based in Australia. If you collected it between the 80s and the early 2000s, I probably collected it as well and have seen it. I work on things like Star Wars and Garbage Pail Kids doing artwork. I work with the company Pog, the milk cap game that you would remember from the 90s. And I’m just an all-round, you know, just engulfed in pop culture.
Brent: I’ve been collecting since I was six years old, and it’s been a weird little journey. I didn’t collect vintage Star Wars toys until I literally tripped over them while I was collecting video games and then just that one thing at a swap meet… it just changed everything because it led me to being in the Star Wars collecting community, which then got me into the Star Wars Topps artwork community and these things just roll on. Some kids picked up footballs, and I picked up trading cards.
Retro Dodo: So many people forget the magic of opening a set of Pokémon cards and the beauty of blowing an N64 cart and sticking it in and playing Mario Kart for the first time. I saw a video yesterday of somebody teaching their child how to blow a SNES cart to play it; 90s kids who are now parents showing their kids how to blow into game carts to get the games working… it’s amazing.
Brent: I literally did that I did that same thing the other week. I have this industrial paint finish place I’ve got special effects and stuff that I can do and I had this old Japanese Sega Saturn that I’d bought as junk. It was all yellowed and terrible looking so I themed it out. It’s all custom-painted to look like if Apple made the Sega Saturn. So everything’s all smoothed out and it’s all white and gray and that’s all lovely, and I took it home and showed my five-year-old Sega rally, you know, and just showed them that this was my game. You forget how small the TVs that you were playing on actually were!
RD: So what got you into collecting?
Brent: Yeah, I’d say, you know, born in 1983, I’m about six years old. So what’s that put me in like ’89? The first thing I’m collecting is probably trading cards, something that’s got a stick of bubble gum in it. For me, that was the garbage gang, which is the Australian version of the garbage pail kids that are known in the US. So, you know, five stickers and a stick of gum, it gives you something to stick on your school books and some terrible gum. We used to have all kinds of like candies and gums that you would unwrap and there’d be a temporary tattoo or there’d be some stickers in there.
Brent: I was a Sega kid; Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive, probably early 90s. I definitely remember having the Sega Master System, definitely remember getting a secondhand Sega Mega Drive too because at the time they were really expensive. We actually got one from a guy outside a pawn shop; they had lowballed him inside and he struck a deal with us. So yeah, I definitely remember that my favorite game on Mega Drive was Columns. I know that’s kind of super boring, but I love Columns.
Swap Meet Super Powers
RD: What are you collecting nowadays then and why? I think you’re a bit like us where you like to collect things that are nostalgic that you had a relationship with as a child, but also things that will be an investment in 10 to 20 years’ time.
Brent: Yeah… my collecting history sort of goes in waves because it’ll usually be all in on one thing and then it explodes and becomes huge. So like when I started collecting video games, it was just like exploded and I had 10, you know, 7,000 video games and 400 consoles and an entire room in my house built to house it all, display it all.
RD: What? Wow! Are they actual figures or is that an exaggeration?
Brent: No real figures. When I sold the collection I had 6,500 video games with no doubles.
RD: That’s incredible! Were they boxed?
Brent: If I could get them boxed, they’d be boxed, but that would be no double. So there wouldn’t be a loose one and a boxed one. I just had the best almost complete version of each one… so near complete Yeah, near complete collections of like Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive, and some others… and then like virtually complete collections of stuff like Neo Geo CD and stuff that I could get in from Japan. So I’m talking about the year 2000, and I want to say 2009 through to 2015. This is a time when I could go to a garage sale, swap meet, gumtree, or anything like that, and you could pick up consoles for 20 bucks.
Brent: I could drive to a swap meet and I could fill my whole car up with retro games for a couple hundred bucks. 99% of my collection I found in Perth, Western Australia in person, in my hands. None of it was bought on eBay, not a single thing bought on eBay unless it was a Japanese import console. So the only things I ever bought on eBay were a Virtual Boy, a Neo Geo CD and a Panasonic 3DO. They were the only three things that and the games for them were the only ones I’d ever bought on eBay. Everything else I found here, and I found some incredibly rare and unusual things over that time. I got to the point where people knew me… like where people would know, ‘Hey, I’m a guy who’s got cash’ and so we’d have roadside collections where if you had trash, you just put it out on the verge and we had… I knew guys who were postal workers who would go and just dig up consoles, and then every four months they’d get me around to the house and I’d give them five grand for an entire living room full of video games. And that happened. That happened many, many, many times.
Brent: One time when I was at a swap meet, somebody opened up a trash bag and all these toys came out of it that still had Toy World stickers on them, which is our toy franchise. And they’re from the 80s and 90s. So I went up and they had these four Star Wars figures that were from 1985. They wanted $5 each for them, so $20 for four still brand-new Star Wars toys from 1985. Turns out two of them were Yak Face and Anakin Skywalker. These are Power of the Force toys, and they turned out to be some of the most pristine and rarest figures on Earth. That $20 I spent, when I sold them, I made $20,000
RD: I know you touched on the Donkey Kong 64 crate when we spoke to you before the POG episode we recorded, tell us a little more about that.
Brent: So I had an N64 in Jungle Green and it was in a wooden crate, and the crate was filled with hay. It looked like it had come from the jungle and it had DK64 burned into the side, and the only way you could get that, there were only 50 of them made… and the only way you could get it was to submit you completing Donkey Kong Country on the Super NES via VHS tape and then they would send you an N64 which was obviously the next-gen console at the time, and I found one.
Brent: It was advertised as a Nintendo 64 console, but it just happened to still be in the crate and everything, and I just went and picked it up for 50 bucks and I ended up being worth like a thousand dollars. But in essence, it’s still just a regular Jungle Green 64. It’s worth a couple of hundred bucks, but it was worth more because of the story behind it.
The Future Of Collecting
RD: So where are all these big collections going? There are only a certain amount of people in this world who are going to pay a certain price for these things. And I just worry that eventually, these things are going to be so highly collectible and so sought after that nobody’s going to be able to experience these things again unless they’re emulated. Is it just going to end up in the hands of 200 game collectors in the world and that’s it?
Brent: So, how many people have Castlevania for PS1, which is one of the rarer games, right? The reason it’s rare is probably because they didn’t make many of them. So that’s number one. Two, you know, a bunch of them ended up in the trash. And then what’s left over, which is still probably thousands of copies, right? If you talk about rare publicly released games, even the rarer end of ‘rare’, there are still probably hundreds or thousands of copies of them. Pick a GameCube game… Pokemon XD. It’s maybe a hundred-dollar game or maybe more. But even that as being a rare game, there are still thousands of copies of that floating around.
Brent: They can’t all end up in the hands of a couple of people because it means those couple of people would need to have hundreds or even thousands of copies of the identical duplicates of everything, right? So in Australia, like when retro games became really hot again in sort of 2016/2017, our wealthiest sector, which is our mining sector, people would come back from their trip to the mines and then go and buy an N64 with a couple of games. So they go into a game store and pay 300 bucks for a 64 with a few games. And now they’re back in some 30-year-old guy’s cupboard and then who knows, it might sit there for another 20 years. So I don’t know, I think that the stuff is around.
RD: Right, I guess it depends on people who are collecting them and not using them. I mean, underneath my bed for years, there’s been a humongous collection that I’ve been slowly getting out into different rooms in my house, and I play them all. So I guess it depends if you’re somebody who just wants to collect them so you can look at them. Obviously, there’s people like the three of us who like playing these things and still like that nostalgia. And then you do get someone who’s going to create a museum inside their house. There’s also the Embracer Archive, and we are planning a trip to go at some point, who are collecting one of every single console and game to try and keep them alive for new generations, which is admirable because if people don’t do that then they might fall into obscurity or the trash heap.
Brent: It depends on the mindset. I’m not a huge video game player these days, but you know, my kids play games, but they don’t really know… they didn’t really grow up with that. My kids play Steam, PS5, or Switch. You know, the oldest console they played was a Nintendo DS. And they just don’t… they don’t have any collectible attachment to that console. So there’s no real attachment to keeping them.
Retro Gaming & The Younger Generation
RD: Do you think that generation will have an interest in collecting the older consoles? Because I always wonder what happens when our generation passes on and we’ve got all these collectibles and games? Are the generations younger than us, the ones born in 2010, and 2020… are they going to want to snag all of our collection or just see it as junk?
Brent: Occasionally my kids will say ‘Dad, do you have a PS2 lying around because I heard that Metal Gear Solid is a great game’ or ‘Do you have a GameCube lying around because I want to play Luigi’s Mansion’. That’s probably because they watched a YouTube video where somebody talked about the origins of this type of game or that type of game and every now and then they’ll ask me to rip out a GameCube or a PS2. But I don’t know that they’ll collect stuff. Kids seem to be pretty throw-away these days. I mean my youngest for sure, she’s five. She… everything is an iPad for her. She doesn’t know anything that’s not an iPad. She’s never like… maybe a Nintendo Switch she’s played a little bit. I mean time… space is limited.
Brent: I don’t know. I don’t know where or if the kids will be into it. I mean, it would suck if they ended up as junk. The hard thing is… is I don’t know whether it can end up as junk just because it has such a value today. Like have we started when retro games took off in the late 2010s; did that then cement them as being collectibles? Not many things become like a collectible and then, then don’t become a collectible again, even if no one wants them.
Brent: Even if my kids don’t want old video games, I don’t think that that means that they’re junk and they get thrown out. But I also don’t really know where they end up. You know, do they end up at pubs and stuff where like they set up as a bit of a fun, nostalgic thing, just like how now you would go into a pub and play an old Donkey Kong arcade game? I can’t see my kids saying ‘I’ve got to get the TV and then find out how to hook AV cables up to this thing because TVs don’t have that anymore. And then I’ve got to get the cartridges and then I’ve got to like set it all up and then I might play it.’
A Final Tip For New Collectors
RD: Where are you putting your money now in terms of collectibles and more of a focus on investment, I guess, like what are you buying now that, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 years you think will be a good investment?
Brent: You’ve given me a second to think here. You’re asking me where I would put my money now in investment, right? The honest truth is that I would invest time. I’ve probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last 15 years, buying and selling video games, action figures, trading cards, you name it. Sometimes I just run across random stuff and I’ll just go like, ‘That’s worth more than I’m gonna pay for it.’ I’d invest your time.
Brent: If you take the time to sort of like hit garage sales, swap meets, flea markets, whatever, just start and ask. It’s not about what they’ve got there; just because someone doesn’t have what you’re looking for there doesn’t mean that it’s not sitting in the cupboard. And I’m a testament to that – it works a lot of the time. Even now, when I see someone who’s selling some VHS tapes and I go, ‘No video games?’ And they go, ‘We’ve got this old Sega thing at home. We didn’t bring it out.’ This happened like two weeks ago, so that is still the case now, and if you can invest anything I would say like take the time to hit the ground running. I own a business, I would have no shame and no problem in printing a bunch of flyers and putting them in people’s letter boxes in my local area and just going, ‘Hey I buy these things. I’ll buy any old toys, old video games, this, that, whatever off of you.’ Yeah, why not, why not?
Thanks to Brent for joining us on the Retrospect Podcast to chat about all things collecting and leaving us with hundreds of things on our eBay wishlists. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read in this article, then you can listen to the full interview on Spotify below!
