About NerdyScore

I used to track my collection on Nintendo Age. The checklist was fine, but the part that actually hooked me was the rarity system. A number next to a game told me something the box never did: whether I was going to have to work for it.

One of my earliest collecting memories is printing out Mike Etler's NES rarity guide and taking it everywhere with me. Game shops, flea markets, anywhere with a box of carts sitting on the floor. I would go down the list hunting for the ones I knew were hard to find. That printout is what made collecting feel like a hunt instead of shopping, and it is the feeling I wanted to build again here.

Etler put his list together in the mid 90s from what came through his store in Howell, New Jersey. He watched what showed up and what did not, and rated games against each other instead of trying to guess how many were made.

That is essentially what NerdyScore does. We watch what comes through the market rather than one shop, and we rate a game against the rest of its platform's library. The scale is bigger and the market is not the same one he was watching, since we are looking at resale decades later instead of retail stock at the time. But the approach is his, and it still holds up.

NerdyScore is not affiliated with Mike Etler or his guide. Credit where it is due.

Before NerdyScore I was the owner and creator of GameValueNow, a game pricing site that ran for years. I had a lot going on in my life at the time and ended up selling it, and I have not been involved with it since. Things have finally calmed down, and this is what I wanted to come back to.

I learned a lot building it, and I came away with a list of things I would do differently. NerdyScore is that list, built.

The biggest one is that a price on its own does not answer the question people are actually asking. Someone looks up a number, gets it, and still does not know whether the game is worth chasing or whether the copy in front of them is a good deal. That is why rarity came first here instead of last.

NerdyScore started as a rarity guide and nothing else. That was the whole idea.

Rarity on its own only answers half of it. Knowing a game is hard to find does not tell you whether the price someone is asking is fair, so pricing came next.

Then Fun Factor, because rarity and price together still leave out the reason I wanted these games at all. Plenty of scarce, expensive games are not much fun to play, and plenty of common ones are.

Collection tracking came last. Once all of that was in one place, people wanted somewhere to keep what they already owned. It is genuinely useful, and it is not the reason the site exists.

More platforms, better coverage, and more of the data that makes a game worth chasing. If something here looks wrong, I would rather hear about it than not: support@nerdyscore.com.