Sometimes people say games are too expensive these days and little do they know how wrong they are, with digital and frequent sales, it's never been cheaper really.

Now I am basically as old as Mario himself and when I was young, video games were always a big purchase, a birthday or Xmas type of deal, you'd have to swap games with people, or rent from Blockbuster for some variety.

So I decided to have a look at the historic prices of games and then adjust them for inflation to see where we're at. A nostalgia check, if you will.

So I thought I would look at the prices of all the mainline Mario games (I chose Mario because they have consistently been putting out a mainline game per console for like 40 years).

So we can see, the average price was about 50 dollars, until about a decade ago (apart from Mario 64 that was 60, presumably because of all the 3d wizard magic)

So in 40 years, we've only seen a price increase of ten dollars, pretty fucking deflationary if you ask me.

But, 50 and 60 dollars today are not the same as they were back in the day.

So using the USA inflation calculator for inflation adjustment, we get

Or in an easier-to-read format

Now, just imagine paying the equivalent of $134 USD for Mario 2, a game that wasn't even a real Mario game (in the West at least), but a shitty reskin of something called Toki Doki Panic

And that was $134 when the median wage was apparently just over 19k in the US.

So there we go, my childhood memories were correct and games were, proportionally, more expensive back then by a fair bit.

When people complain about game costs now, I will send this to them!