There’s little denying that video gaming is an expensive hobby. Individual games can cost $70 brand new and there are dozens released every single week. While services like PlayStation Premium Plus and Xbox Game Pass can help you save money, their recurring subscription cost can add up after a while. And the prices of games are dwarfed by the price of the hardware needed to play them, with modern consoles all costing hundreds of dollars. In fact, your gaming consoles could well be the most expensive gadgets in your home. However, this isn’t exactly a new reality.
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Some of the retro gaming machines that are still worth buying today were incredibly expensive when they first launched. Although the prices might seem relatively low, when you adjust for inflation, many were just as expensive as what’s in stores today. For example, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was priced at $199 in 1991, but that would be the same as $459 after adjusting the figures for inflation. With that in mind, what console is really the most expensive? Let’s take a look.
For this article, we’ve taken inflation figures from both the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inflation Station to get accurate data regarding how the console prices would translate if they were released today.
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