Market Report: Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves
I was a pretty big Capcom fan as a kid. I grew up with Street Fighter II, and to me the SNK fighters seemed like cheap clones. I never gave them much thought.
It's only been recently that I started even thinking about some of the SNK fighters. I read this excellent history of Street Fighter and one of the things I noticed was that at the end of the Street Fighter II era, about half of the team left to go work for SNK. So the people making the game loved so much as a kid were later making similar games, just with different company utilizing different characters.
So it should not be a huge surprise that Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, plays so well. In many ways it is like a lost Street Fighter with different characters. The game was well-received, but like many SNK games it did not gain a huge following. Couple the game's limited appeal with the fact that it was released at the end of a dying Dreamcast system's life and it's not surprising that the game is pretty rare.
Up until very recently, the game could be had complete for between $50 and $60 on eBay. But I always noticed that there never seemed to be many up for sale on the site. And the game seemed underpriced compared to rare Capcom Dreamcast games like Cannon Spike and Giga Wing 2.
Well, there are signs that the game has taken the leap into the higher priced Dreamcast games. After very few listings for CIB copies, one recently auctioned for $136.50. Previous highs for the game in the last six months were in the $80-90 range. And if you were lucky you could have picked up a copy for $55 shipped before Christmas.
Perhaps even more telling is that even after that big number was put up, there are still very few CIB listings for the game. Right now, a quick search reveals only three CIB copies listed on eBay, and two are overseas.
If you see a copy of Garou, you ma want to pick it up. The recent spike in price may not have been noticed by local sellers. If you really need a copy, you may want to keep a close eye on this market as it seems like there is still some room for the price to go up.