Ours is a funny hobby. Rarely, if ever, is something collected both for the sheer joy of collecting as much as it is for a very real, use-oriented purpose. Games are, after all, meant to be played. A beat to hell cartridge missing its shell will (often) play ever bit as well as one that's just come out of a factory seal. Very little else can say that. So really, the value in a game is in the eye of the beholder -- this is true for collecting anything, but in my opinion nowhere more so than with video games.
Myself? I want my stuff to look good, but the only thing that I really need original is the board/chips itself, and I occasionally wonder why I even need that -- in many cases, a homemade cart runs just as well as the factory cart. Heck, in some cases it runs better -- look at the notoriously bad Tengen motherboards for Genesis. Yes, windowed chips have a greater chance of getting wiped, but with the absolute most basic precautions the chance is basically nil. As has been pointed out on numerous retro gaming sites I've been on before: all games will cease to function eventually for one reason or another.
But all the rest of it? Don't care. Original box? I won't say no if I come across it for the same price as a cart-only release, but I won't pay more for it -- I'd rather it get saved for someone who truly appreciates the cardboard, I will HAPPILY standardize my games in UGCs/DS-size cases from you guys. Original label? It's nice and all, but if it's badly beat up, screw that yank it and replace it if I can make it look good (this is especially prevalent in my mind with Neo Geo MVS which I've started to collect for -- they were originally designed to be in an arcade cabinet after all, even pristine labels are little more than basic black on white VCR-tape like labels. Artists have made far nicer, full color labels more akin to home releases and I intend to change mine out for those eventually). Original manual I would like if I could just because 2nd-4th gen games tended to need them to explain things, but honestly if someone gave me a full color replacement that's cut/stapled correctly? I would be every bit as happy with that. The main reason I prefer the original manual is just because most reproduction ones (obviously excepting places like Wiggy, or Tusk, or Timewalk RIP) are just lame photocopies that never work right.
But yeah. That's my take on it.
