Collectible Cartridges

My original plan for this blog was to start with a monthly post cadence, but, you know, life. New plan: make up for a bit of the lost time over the next few weeks with some quicker posts, try to maintain a monthly schedule going forward, and don't beat self up if it doesn't happen.

For this viz, I grabbed data (the old-fashioned CTRL+C/V way) from RarityGuide.com (http://www.rarityguide.com/) - they have a TON of information on all sorts of collectibles, but I focused on an 8-bit soft spot of mine: Nintendo Entertainment System games. I built the viz to explore price and rarity data by year released, published, and individual title, but after looking at the data, I wanted to include additional layers to add some further context. I've included parameters to call out IGN's top 100 list (http://www.ign.com/top-100-nes-games/), best-sellers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#Nintendo_Entertainment_System), and games with an appearance by a particular red-wearing plumber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_featuring_Mario).

The results were interesting - take a look and see where your favorites fall or how many of the more elusive collectibles you recognize (I got a laugh out of Googling the games from Panesian - call me naive).

 I only did a basic copy+paste from the Wikipedia lists linked above, but I'm excited to check out the creative ways others have been using Wikipedia to satisfy their data exploration cravings. If you haven't checked it out, Tableau just wrapped up their Wiki Data Viz Contest and the entries can be found here. Unfortunately, voting for the Crowd Favorite has ended, but I still think these workbooks are worth checking out for some inspiration.

 Duck Hunt, anyone?