BEFORE THE POP

Collectables analysis daily. Sharing our research. Focus on vintage Pokémon and 90s gaming IPs.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

Why I Believe Gaming Is the Biggest Opportunity in Collectibles Right Now

I think gaming is one of the biggest overlooked opportunities in collectibles right now.

I mean the best early collectibles attached to the characters and franchises that defined gaming culture. Mario. Zelda. Sonic. Final Fantasy. Street Fighter. Resident Evil. Tomb Raider. Pokémon. Once you start listing them, it becomes obvious how serious the underlying IP is.

What keeps pulling me back is the gap between the cultural importance of these characters and the size of the collectible markets around many of them. Some of the biggest names in gaming have been part of our lives for thirty or forty years, yet their early cardboard can still feel like a side market. Graded populations are tiny, serious supply is thin and entire sets receive a fraction of the attention given to much less culturally important material elsewhere in the hobby.

I have collected for long enough to be suspicious whenever I start thinking something is obviously undervalued. Collectors are excellent at building arguments around whatever they already own. Find a low population, add a famous character, look at a few sales and suddenly you have convinced yourself that everybody else is wrong.

I’ve done versions of that before. I’ve also been early on things that later became obvious, particularly in Pokémon. That experience is probably why this feels familiar.

The more I look across gaming, the more I think the mismatch is real. Gaming itself has already won. The generation that grew up with it is getting older and wealthier. Its most important characters have shown an extraordinary ability to survive, reinvent themselves and reach new audiences. Pokémon has already demonstrated exactly what can happen when gaming culture and card culture meet properly.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of gaming cardboard still looks several stages behind the culture it represents.

That is the opportunity I want to explore.

1. Gaming is already enormous

The first part of the argument requires very little imagination because we are not waiting for gaming to become mainstream.

It already is.

Newzoo estimated the global gaming audience at roughly 3.6 billion players in 2025, with the industry generating close to US$190 billion annually. The Entertainment Software Association’s 2026 research found that 212.3 million Americans play video games every week, and the average US player is now 37 years old.

The size of the industry is impressive, but that average age is far more interesting to me from a collecting perspective.

The people who grew up with Nintendo, Sega, the original PlayStation, Game Boy and Nintendo 64 are now approaching forty, or already well beyond it. We have careers, families and, in some cases, enough disposable income to buy the things we wanted when we were twelve.

Collectibles have always benefited from that cycle. People get older, life becomes a little more serious, and eventually they start looking backwards at the things that meant something before any of that happened. Sports cards have lived through multiple versions of it. Comics, toys, sneakers and countless other categories have done the same.

Gaming now has an enormous generation entering those years.

The difference is that the characters themselves never really went away. Someone who played Mario on the NES can now play Mario with their child on a Switch. Sonic belongs to the Mega Drive generation and also to kids who know him primarily from the films. Zelda keeps producing major new releases. Final Fantasy VII has been rebuilt for a generation that never owned the original PlayStation.

That gives gaming nostalgia an unusual quality. The old audience gets to remember while the IP continues creating new memories for someone else.

For collectibles, that feels powerful.

2. The characters are bigger than the markets around them

This is where the opportunity starts to feel strange.

Mario has been one of the defining characters in entertainment since the 1980s. Sonic was the face of Sega and survived long enough to become a successful modern film franchise. Zelda is one of the most celebrated series in gaming history. Final Fantasy VII helped define an entire console generation. Resident Evil and Tomb Raider became multimedia franchises that have been rebooted, remade and rediscovered repeatedly.

These are not forgotten properties waiting for someone to notice them.

They are already huge.

Yet look across the early card markets attached to many of them and the scale can feel completely disconnected from the cultural weight of the IP. There are cases where a major 1990s gaming character has only a small number of high-grade examples in a recognised early set, and perhaps only one or two serious copies available to buy at any given time.

Compare that with established sports or Pokémon markets, where thousands of collectors can be watching the same key issue and an enormous infrastructure exists around pricing, grading, auctions and historical importance.

That is the part I find difficult to ignore.

Collectibles ultimately need people to care about what is represented on the object. Gaming has already solved that problem on a scale very few categories can match.

The cardboard market is much smaller.

3. Pokémon already gave us the blueprint

Pokémon is the most important analogue because it answers the obvious question before we even have to ask it.

Can gaming create a huge, sophisticated global card market?

Of course it can.

Pokémon began as a video game in 1996 and developed into one of the largest collectible-card ecosystems in history. More than 75 billion Pokémon cards have now been produced worldwide, yet collectors still make extraordinary distinctions between them. Set matters. Language matters. Artwork matters. Illustrator matters. Distribution matters. Condition matters. A trophy card and a mass-produced modern common might both contain Pikachu, but nobody serious about the hobby considers them remotely equivalent objects.

I watched smaller parts of that market develop over the years, and that experience changed how I think about collecting.

Japanese Vending cards were once the sort of thing you could become deeply obsessed with while most Pokémon collectors barely paid attention. E-Reader had its own group of diehards. Older Japanese material could sit in strange corners of the hobby because the information was harder to find and fewer people understood what they were looking at.

Then awareness grew. People learned the sets. Better information became available. More collectors started searching for the same material, and supply that once seemed easy suddenly wasn’t.

Nothing magical happened to the cards themselves. More people understood why they were interesting.

That is an important distinction because I am not arguing that every gaming card will somehow become another Pokémon card. I’m looking at the behaviour Pokémon has already proven exists. Gaming fans can become serious card collectors. They can obsess over history, condition, artwork, rarity, regional releases and the earliest appearances of characters they love.

Pokémon has already built that bridge between gaming and cardboard.

The question is why we assume the bridge stops there.

4. The first gaming generation is becoming the nostalgia generation

Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2019 sports-card thesis was interesting because he was looking at something larger than individual cards. He was looking at culture, demographics, nostalgia, supply and where attention might move next.

That same mechanism feels incredibly relevant to gaming now.

For my generation, games were not some small secondary hobby. They were part of childhood culture. We remember the Nintendo versus Sega arguments, getting a PlayStation for the first time, the jump from 2D to 3D, Pokémon taking over school playgrounds, Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Street Fighter II.

These were formative cultural experiences for millions of people.

Now those people are entering the age where nostalgia has purchasing power behind it.

That does not mean everyone who played Final Fantasy VII will decide they need an early Cloud card. Most people never become serious collectors of anything.

They don’t have to.

Collectible markets are always built from a small percentage of the underlying audience. What matters is how big that audience is and how strongly it cares.

Gaming starts with billions of players and some of the most recognisable characters in modern culture. If even a tiny percentage of that audience becomes interested in owning the best physical objects attached to those memories, the demand base does not need to be particularly large before small existing markets begin to feel very different.

That is where the imbalance starts to become interesting.

5. The 1980s and 1990s have a supply advantage modern collectibles can’t recreate

I am especially interested in the original era of these franchises because the supply dynamics are completely different from modern collecting.

Today, people know collectibles are collectibles. A limited card gets sleeved immediately. Boxes are stored unopened. Buyers order duplicates specifically because they think one may appreciate. Products are numbered, protected and marketed around scarcity from the moment they are released.

A lot of early gaming cardboard was simply stuff for kids.

Cards were handled. Scratch-offs were scratched. Stickers were stuck to things. Japanese vending products were pulled from machines and carried around. Promotional items disappeared into drawers. Nobody was thinking about PSA 10 populations in 1993.

That matters thirty years later.

There is something far more compelling to me about genuine condition scarcity created by time than scarcity manufactured in advance. A modern card can announce that only 500 copies exist. An old card can begin with thousands and quietly lose most of its high-grade supply because nobody knew they were supposed to preserve it.

By the time the character becomes historically important, whatever survived is what you have.

You cannot make another mint copy from 1996.

The deeper we have gone into certain gaming sets, the more surprising some of those surviving populations have been. I am deliberately not turning this into a catalogue of what we are buying because the individual investigations can come later. The broad picture is enough for now.

Some genuinely important gaming IP is represented by very little high-grade early cardboard.

That feels unusual relative to the size of the audience behind it.

6. Other collectible markets show what happens when the object catches up with the culture

There is nothing inherently more collectible about an athlete printed on a card than a fictional character printed on one.

Sports simply had a much longer head start.

Decades of collector behaviour established which rookie cards matter, which sets are important, what scarcity looks like and how condition should be valued. Once that framework exists, everybody entering the category learns roughly the same hierarchy.

Entertainment collectibles have followed similar paths. Early Marvel and Star Wars cards were initially inexpensive products made for children. Their historical significance became clearer later, as the franchises grew and collectors started looking backwards.

A 1977 Star Wars card did not become physically different because several decades passed. The cultural context around it changed. The audience developed a better understanding of what that object represented.

That pattern interests me far more than any individual price comparison.

Gaming already has the cultural significance. Many of its original characters have now survived long enough to be genuinely historic. The audience that grew up with them is old enough to care about original-era material.

The collectible infrastructure around large parts of gaming simply has not developed to the same level yet.

That is why I think the opportunity is broader than finding a few cheap cards on eBay. We may be watching a category move from merchandise into recognised collectibles.

Pokémon has already completed much of that transition.

The rest of gaming is still catching up.

7. That does not mean every old gaming card is valuable

This is the part where enthusiasm needs some discipline.

Old does not automatically mean important. Neither does rare. Neither does a low population report.

Gaming has an enormous amount of obscure merchandise, and plenty of it will remain obscure forever. A Pop 2 card nobody wants is still a card nobody wants. There are probably thousands of old gaming items that are genuinely difficult to find and will never become meaningful collectibles.

The interesting material sits at the intersection of several things: a major character or franchise, an important period, a card or set with genuine historical relevance, real scarcity, strong condition and something collectors would actually want to own.

That is a much smaller universe.

Good.

I want it to be.

I would rather own one card that genuinely represents an important piece of gaming history than twenty random population-report curiosities.

I also expect to get individual calls wrong. That is unavoidable if you are actually participating in a market before everything has been neatly catalogued and priced. I have already changed my mind on cards after learning more. Sometimes you like something enough that you want the research to confirm the purchase. That is human, and it is exactly why the research has to keep going.

A bad purchase does not automatically destroy a wider thesis, just as a good purchase does not prove one.

The wider question is whether gaming culture and the current market for its best early collectibles are proportionate.

I don’t think they are.

8. Why I think the timing is right

Several things appear to be lining up at once.

The first mass gaming generation is moving through its prime nostalgia years. The biggest franchises have had enough time to prove they can survive across decades. Grading has taught collectors to think in terms of condition, population and preservation. Pokémon has normalised the idea of gaming characters on serious cardboard. International marketplaces have made Japanese and regional material dramatically easier to discover. Collectors are also increasingly comfortable moving beyond traditional sports and treating entertainment history as collectible history.

None of those forces guarantees that gaming cards suddenly explode next month.

I don’t think that is how these things work anyway.

Categories build gradually until, in hindsight, the move looks obvious.

That is the part that interests me.

I have spent enough time collecting to know what it feels like to look at something after the market has already understood it. The articles are written. The population reports are watched. The big collectors are competing. Prices have moved and everybody can explain why the object was always important.

There is very little edge left by then.

Gaming feels different to me right now. The cultural argument is already obvious, yet the collectible market still feels small enough that you can look at certain major franchises and wonder how the two numbers belong in the same category.

Maybe the gap closes quickly. Maybe it takes a decade. Some areas might never close at all.

I don’t need to know the exact timing.

I care that the conditions are there.

Before the Pop

That is what I want this project to follow.

Gaming will be a major part of Before the Pop because I think there is far more happening here than the wider hobby currently recognises. We are going to look at individual characters, forgotten sets, Japanese releases, artwork, populations, grading, sales and the actual history behind the cardboard.

Sometimes that will mean something we own. Sometimes it will be something I wish I owned. Sometimes the research will kill an idea I liked.

That is fine.

The wider thesis comes first.

Gaming has billions of players. The average player is now old enough to have real nostalgia and real spending power. The characters that defined the 1980s and 1990s have survived, and many are still reaching new generations today.

Pokémon showed us what happens when gaming culture and collecting culture fully collide.

Now look at the rest of gaming.

Look at the scale of the franchises, the age of the audience and the importance these characters already hold in popular culture. Then look at how small some of their early collectible markets still are.

That gap is the reason I’m here.

And for once in my collecting life, I would rather spend my time looking at something before everyone agrees it was obvious.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@themachoboggs You’ve made great progress!
Yeah the base 10s all got swept too. Much higher floor now

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

1990 Simpsons rookies on fire.

All American Family PSA 10 stickers gone at $1.8k

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@themachoboggs Love it! How far along are you? 10s just evaporated in the last few weeks

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@JoeSchmoe_Co Doh!

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@CanadianClctr Lift off

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@johnnydunn777 Sheesh 🔥

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

We like the 1990 Simpsons rookies. Didn’t expect such explosive growth this week.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

1990 TOPPS SIMPSONS: LIKE

But only the stickers.

I’ve gone properly through this set now, and I think there’s a very specific way I’d play it.

The 1990 Topps release has a lot going for it straight away. It’s the first Simpsons trading-card set, released right as the show was exploding into culture. Some of the imagery even reaches back into the Tracey Ullman-era Simpsons, which is cool historically, but the 88-card base set still doesn’t really do it for me as something I’d want to accumulate.

The stickers are different.

There are only 22, and Topps put one sticker in every pack. A normal wax pack gave you 8 cards and 1 sticker. The jumbo pack doubled the cards to 16 and still only gave you one sticker.

So the stickers were always the tighter part of the product.

And the artwork is better for what I actually want to own. Bart, Homer, the whole family, proper standalone character art rather than another scene pulled from the show.

Then there’s Bartman #1.

That one makes sense immediately.

First Simpsons card release. Sticker #1. Bart at the absolute peak of early Simpsons mania. Matt Groening art. It actually looks like the card you’d want to show someone if you were trying to explain why this set matters.

A PSA 10 sold for US$990 in 2025 when there were only six at that grade.

That’s the sort of population number I care about because the object already works without it. I’m not starting with “Pop 6” and desperately trying to reverse-engineer a reason to care.

And Bartman isn’t the only one.

#18 The All-American Family is probably my next favourite because you get the whole family on one sticker from the first release. We’d seen PSA 10s trading much lower than Bartman, roughly in the $200–300 range, which made it look like a genuinely interesting entry point rather than another trophy card already priced like everyone knows about it.

Then something happened that got my attention.

We were watching four of the better graded sticker listings.

They got swept.

One after another.

Now when I go back through the market, the cheap high-grade copies we were looking at are gone and the remaining sellers are asking materially more.

That doesn’t mean those new asking prices are suddenly the market. Thin collectibles can look ridiculous very quickly when one seller decides their card is worth triple.

But it does show how little good supply is actually sitting there.

A few buyers arrive and suddenly the available PSA 10s disappear.

That’s much more interesting to me than staring at a population report in isolation.

There are weaknesses here too.

These stickers weren’t numbered. One came in every pack, and unopened Simpsons product still exists, so I’m not pretending the original supply was tiny. The scarcity I’m betting on is much more about the right sticker surviving in the right condition than some artificially limited print run.

Liquidity is thin as well. The same thing that lets four purchases wipe out the good inventory means there may not be twenty buyers waiting when you eventually want to sell.

And while The Simpsons has incredible longevity, it doesn’t have the same current reinvention flywheel as something like Mario, Sonic or Pokémon. The show never disappeared, but it isn’t suddenly recruiting an entire new generation through a massive gaming release or blockbuster movie franchise either.

So this isn’t flawless.

It still gets through for me because enough things line up at once: enormous IP, genuinely important first release, right era, a real subset that was harder to pull than the base cards, obvious character-driven targets, strong artwork and genuinely small high-grade supply on the cards I actually want.

But I’d stay narrow.

I’m not buying random 1990 Simpsons because PSA says Pop 3.

Bartman #1. The All-American Family. The strongest Bart/family stickers. PSA 10 where possible. And only at prices that still leave room for the market to mature.

That’s the play.

BTP VERDICT: LIKE.

The base set is great history.

The stickers are what I’d actually put money into.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@johnnydunn777 Thoughts here, Johnny? Why so much

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@iamlynchy @MattGroening4 Seriously ?? 🤯

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@DrewAustin Following

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

Collector Twitter > Stock Twitter, Crypto Twitter, NFT Twitter

IYKYK

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@shinshinart Nice alpha! Will check it out

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

60s & 70s rookie IPs cooking.

I'm accumulating 90s cards now. It's only a matter of time.

[Grazzo_99 @GSausionis]

The bats started flying 🦇 🦇 💥

Even the low grade ones

1966 Batman Series are going places 🙌💪💥

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@HORHEAD_Sales Yeah 1:48 packs for the 3ds! I just bought the only psa 9 listed.

The foils are 1:18 packs but you’d need to open 162 packs to get all 9, making any particular foil even rarer.

Picked up a few of those recently too

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@AAPLputs Huge on Zelda 💯💯

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@JoeSchmoe_Co Love the 80s, Joe! Definitely some legendary IPs. Focussing on 90s as it was so transformative for gaming and animation. And there’s still a lot of opportunity.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@elcaptiiin Gaming and Cartoon IPs are still early given their cultural significance IMO

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@shinshinart Which set? 1966 or 1974?

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@HORHEAD_Sales Yes! Meets all the criteria. We’re playing it a little differently with the overlooked foils and 3d rares from the set

https://t.co/5lBgkXYRqI

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

Alpha: Buy

We got Toy Story wrong.

I looked at the 1995 SkyBox set yesterday and passed. Huge IP, perfect year, but the regular cards looked like standard 90s movie cardboard and I couldn't see the alpha.

Then we checked the market.

Buzz #32 PSA 10s have sold for $999.99, $1,234.56 and $1,499.99. Woody #31 PSA 10 has sold for $1,149 and $1,250.

So collectors have clearly found 1995 Toy Story.

What I hadn't done was look properly at the hierarchy inside the set.

The regular Woody and Buzz cards are base cards. A 36-pack hobby box contained enough base cards that you'd expect roughly four copies of each per box.

The Foil Embossed inserts were 1:18 packs and there were nine different foils.

That means you'd average only two foils of any kind per box, and roughly one particular foil every 162 packs, or every 4.5 boxes.

Then above those were just two 3-D Motion cards at 1:48 packs. A specific 3-D Motion card works out at roughly one every 96 packs.

That's the bit that changed the whole set for us.

Collectors are already paying four figures for PSA 10 copies of Woody and Buzz cards that were likely sitting multiple times in every hobby box, while the actual foil and 3-D chase cards were dramatically harder to pull and have barely been graded.

So we bought the chase layer instead.

We now own PSA 9 copies of the F9 Woody Foil Embossed, Mr. Potato Head Foil Embossed and #1 Mr. Potato Head 3-D Motion.

The Woody foil has only two PSA 10s above ours. The Potato Head 3-D had no PSA 10 above ours when we checked.

This is the alpha for us.

We're not betting that people eventually discover 1995 Toy Story cards. They already have. The Woody and Buzz sales prove that.

We're betting that the market hasn't properly worked through the set yet.

If collectors are willing to spend $1,000+ on PSA 10 base cards that appeared several times per box, what happens when they start looking at the cards that were actually difficult to pull?

Maybe nothing. That's always possible.

But we just swept three PSA 9s from the premium chase layers while most of the money is still chasing the regular cardboard.

That's a setup I like.

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

Monster sale just now on this Vending Series frog. Low pop cookin 🔥

[BEFORE THE POP @beforethepop]

@garyvee Someone has to be the voice of reason 😅