The Collector's Handbook, Part 1: What a Grade Really Means

Walk into any serious video-game collection today and you will spot them: cartridges and boxes sealed inside clear, hard plastic cases, each stamped with a certificate and a number. To a newcomer it can look a little strange, almost like putting a comic book behind museum glass. Yet those numbers carry a whole vocabulary, and once you learn to read it, a graded game tells you a surprising amount about the object inside.

This entry in The Collector's Handbook is a plain-language guide to how video-game grading works. It is educational and nothing more. We will not tell you what to buy, and we will not predict what anything is worth, because the market moves and grading always involves a degree of human judgement. The goal here is simply to help you read the label.

Why grade a game

Grading is the process of having an independent company inspect a game, judge its condition against a published standard, and seal it in a protective case. That case is usually called a slab: a tamper-evident, UV-resistant acrylic shell that protects the item and displays a printed label with the assigned grade. Once a game is slabbed, opening it breaks the certification, so from that point on the grade and the object travel together.

Collectors value this for a few reasons. A consistent grade gives two strangers a shared language for condition, which makes buying and selling far less of a guessing game. The sealed case also preserves fragile paper and plastic that would otherwise wear with every handling. Grading of this kind is still fairly young. The first dedicated company appeared around 2008, and interest grew sharply from 2018 onward, borrowing much of its visual style from the older world of comic-book grading.

There is also a documentary value to it. Every slab carries a unique certification number, and the grading company logs the item, so a graded game becomes a small recorded artefact rather than an anonymous copy. For a museum that quiet record-keeping is genuinely useful, because it ties an object to a date, a standard and an independent opinion.

The companies: WATA, CGC, VGA

Three names come up most often. WATA Games, founded in 2018, helped popularise the modern format and is widely associated with the headline auction sales that pulled grading into the mainstream. CGC, the Certified Guaranty Company, is a long-established grader of comics and other collectibles that extended its work to video games. VGA, the Video Game Authority, is the oldest of the three and is respected among long-term collectors for keeping its standards consistent over many years.

Their scales are not identical, which is worth knowing before you compare two slabs side by side. WATA and CGC both use a ten-point numeric scale, where a grade such as 9.0 sits high on that range without being a perfect 10. VGA has traditionally used a different scale, so a VGA number and a WATA number are not directly interchangeable. Each company also keeps its detailed methodology partly in-house, and none of them claims that grading is a pure science.

Choosing between them is less about which is best and more about what a collector values. Some prioritise the name recognition of the market leader, others the long consistency of an older grader. Turnaround times, fees and even the look of the case all differ, and preferences shift as the field matures. For our purposes the important point is simpler: a grade only means something once you know which company issued it and on what scale.

Reading the label

Most graded games fall into one of three broad categories, and the label reflects which one you are looking at. A sealed game is still in its original factory shrink-wrap and has never been opened. A complete-in-box game, often shortened to CIB, has been opened but still has its box, manual and inserts. A loose game is the cartridge or disc on its own, without the packaging.

Sealed games carry an extra piece of information: a separate seal rating. Because the wrap itself can be original, resealed or damaged, graders assess it on its own scale, commonly running from lower letters up to marks like A++ for a near-perfect original seal. So a sealed title can show two things at once: a numeric grade for the box and contents, and a letter grade for the seal. Reading both together tells you more than either mark alone.

Beyond the category and the grade, a label also records the basics: the game's title, the platform it ran on, and that unique certification number. It is designed to be read at a glance and verified in detail, which is exactly what you want from a small paper record sealed next to the object it describes.

The museum's graded pieces

The museum keeps a small number of graded pieces, and they make useful, real examples. One is a complete-in-box copy of Super Mario Land, graded CGC 9.0. The 9.0 places it high on CGC's ten-point scale, with the box at 9.0, the cartridge at 9.8 and the manual at 8.0, which is a neat illustration of how a single overall grade can sit on top of several component grades. The slab lets us display the game while keeping the original box and cartridge protected.

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  Mario, sealed for posterity and slightly overdressed for a plumber.

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  Somewhere in this acrylic shell is a cartridge nobody is ever going to use

Another is the InfoGenius Personal Organizer, graded by WATA. It is a good reminder that grading is not only for famous games. This was a productivity accessory for the Game Boy rather than a blockbuster title, yet it sits in a WATA slab all the same. Together the two pieces show the same idea from two angles: an independent grade and a sealed case, applied to very different objects.

The case for and against

Grading has clear benefits. It protects delicate items, it creates a shared standard that strangers can trust, and it makes an object's condition and provenance easier to document. For a collection meant to be preserved and shown rather than played, those are real advantages.

It also has honest limits. Grading is partly subjective: two experienced graders can look at the same box and land a fraction apart, and published standards can shift over time. The market for graded games has been volatile as well, with prices rising and falling in ways that nobody reliably predicts. None of this is financial advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. A grade describes condition. It does not promise value.

That is the short version of what a grade really means: a careful, independent read of condition, sealed alongside the object so the two can never drift apart. If you would like to see how these pieces sit next to the rest of the collection, you are always welcome to explore the Game Boy Museum. We are always glad to share what we have learned along the way.