Value Atari 2600 Xante Cartridges
Determining Provenance and Value of Xante Carts
How to tell if an Atari 2600 Xante cartridge is real, and what to pay for it if it is.
Introduction
Xante produced re-writable cartridges which could be created on-demand at kiosks. Active in 1983-84 in the Oklahoma region, Xante products can be found on eBay selling quite highly, and are sought after by many collectors. They are blue (not painted), with generic stickers. They could be faked, and have a high rarity score, so here is a guide to telling the real ones from the imposters.
For a complete history and game list, see the Atari 2600 Xante Kiosk Cartridge article.
Determining Provenance of Atari 2600 Xante Cartridges
Painting onto plastic is a notoriously tricky proposition, as the paint would crack and chip off over time; something that is difficult to ascertain either at a real life auction, or an unseen equivalent. Creating a batch of blue cartridges would be an expensive venture, costing well in excess of the value that the would be forger might expect to recoup at auction. Hence, the chances of forged examples appearing on the market is slim.
Even if it were possible to paint up an old black cartridge, there is still the matter of reproducing the Xante sticker, although there is the distinct possibility that rolls of manufactured, blank, stickers could be found in the area in which they were made, and these would carry their own collectors value.
It is feasible, however, that an individual, having previously purchased an original Xante cartridge, might remove the sticker, and replace it with another bearing the name of a title that has not yet been traded. To make the job complete, they might also be able to rewrite the cartridge with the contents of another game from a label that either had a failed commercial relationship with Xante, or never had a relationship at all.
In such a case, a listing of games which were made available under the Xante label would help the collector to ascertain whether this advanced forging had, in fact, taken place.
On balance, there is only a very remote chance that someone would go to all the trouble required to actually fake a Xante cartridge, as the cost would exceed the probable revenue, unless they were patient enough to bleed the products into the market over a period of years.
As a side note, there have been other publishers that have used blue cartridges in the past, so the color is perhaps not quite a good an indicator as it might first appear. The first candidate, Tigervision, actually used a blue cartridge for titles such as King Kong. However, their shape is different to the Xante cartridges.
There are also some Brazilian release games, such as Spacegame (publisher unknown at the time of writing) which use the same blue cartridges as Xante releases. Since these Brazilian releases may be of an equivalent value to the Xante cartridges, the possibility of an individual trying to pass one off as a Xante release is slim.
Determining Value of Atari 2600 Xante Cartridges
AtariAge.com forum participants do not put these on the $1k plus list. However, eBay has seen them going for around $500 in the past (2003). Thrifty readers might like to look into the possibility of finding them nestling in the second hand bin at a video game store in the Oklahoma area.
The value will change according to what collectors are willing to pay for them, but a complete collection might feasibly fetch a high value. They were unboxed at the time of sale, and had generic stickers, making the value somewhat less even if they are in mint condition.
