The fact that some video games are worth a lot of money isn’t too surprising when you think about it. As with any medium, something is bound to reach collector status and inevitably become highly sought after. Whenever this does happen, it’s usually with the pinnacles of the genre. That’s why the original Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man comics are so highly valued. They are all classic characters, and some people are willing to pay an incredible amount of money for a mint condition copy of their origins.

But what about the games that are utter crap? The games that internet celebrities like the Angry Video Game Nerd have spent years tearing apart for our own amusement. For the most part, they’re worth exactly what you’d expect, nothing. Pac-Man for the Atari, long considered one of the worst ports of all time, only goes for a penny on Amazon.com. LJN, known for their terrible movie-licensed games, are all essentially worthless in resale. Wolverine is only worth $4, True Lies and The Uncanny X-Men are worth $3, and The Karate Kid is worth a pathetic 47 cents. None of this is surprising in the least since no one, outside the masochists, wants to go back and play these black holes of non-entertainment.

And yet, not all of these games are completely worthless…monetarily speaking. If they’re in a used condition, you won’t get much more than $10, but if they are brand new, you may be surprised how much you can sell it for. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, the complete failure of a reboot for the franchise is actually worth $20 new. It’s honestly not a lot, but certainly more than you might expect. The same can be said for Bubsy 3D ($43), Back to the Future on NES ($47), Friday the 13th ($58), and Jaws ($75). None of these games are worth playing yet if you happened to get one as a gift and refused to open it, consider yourself a smart investor.

Of course no article regarding bad games is complete without mentioning the infamous examples that every gamer knows about such as ET for the Atari 2600. Famously buried in junkyards across the country, a used copy will set you back a measly 66 cents. However, if someone saved their new copy from the mass grave, it’s worth a respectable $60, enough for you to get a much better game from this generation. Many of the other notoriously bad games can actually net you a profit without the need of a new copy. The incredibly offensive (and historically inaccurate) Custer’s Revenge is actually worth $100. Another famously tasteless game, Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em, is actually worth more at $200 used and a new copy costing up to $380. That is a ridiculous amount to pay for pixilated smut.

Then there are the Phillips CDi games. The games that Nintendo would prefer the world forgot about. That’s not going to happen anytime soon especially when curious gamers want to see just how bad these games are for themselves. The cheapest is Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, which is $90 for a used copy and $130 for a factory sealed one. Next is Link: The Faces of Evil which is $125 used on Amazon. The other notorious Nintendo games can’t even be found on Amazon. Instead I turned my search to eBay where Hotel Mario averages to about $100 for a used copy and an incredible $250 for one that’s factory sealed. However, even this is overshadowed by Zelda’s Adventure with used copies ranging between $500 and $600. For games that are considered complete failures, that is an incredibly high asking price.

Finally, there is perhaps the worst game of all, Action 52. Released as an unlicensed title in 1991 for the NES, the game advertised 52 different games on one cartridge with the laughable asking price of $200 (or less than $4 per game as they tried to convince gamers). What they didn’t tell gamers is that all the games were complete and utter crap with no redeemable value whatsoever. The games were filled with glitches that would cause the cartridge to freeze or loop entire sections of levels endlessly. None of the games were worth playing and even the instruction manual didn’t help players, often seemingly describing a completely different game. Action 52 is still worth $75 used, but it’s hard to deny that it is a far cry from its original $200 asking price. However, the story of Action 52 doesn’t end there.

The supposed premiere game of the collection was supposed to be Cheetahmen, a platformer with 3 characters designed to capitalize on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze. The game even came with a comic book detailing the Cheetahmen’s history and plans were made to begin a line of merchandise including action figures and a television series. That all ended when it became apparent that the game was a complete flop and word of mouth warned players from touching the game. Before everything went under Cheetahmen 2 was in development, designed to be released as its own title. The game was actually finished but never released due to the previous game’s poor reception. Then, in 1996, 1500 copies of the game were found in a warehouse and put on sale on the secondary market. The game is every bit of bad as the original with glitches preventing players from getting past a certain point in the game. Despite all this, the game is now considered quite rare and is valued at around $1000. Without a doubt, it is the most expensive bad game I found when researching for this article.

Every gamer knows a bad game when they see one. It’s fun to make jokes about them and the history behind what created them can be interesting. But no one expects these games to be worth anything. In most cases, that’s the way it is, but there are those few rare exceptions when the game is considered a hidden treasure, worth far more than it has any right to be. Who knows? Maybe ten or twenty years from now, Jurassic: The Hunted will be worth hundreds of dollars. When it comes to collecting, you never know what will become an unexpected gem.