I mean, the act of people scalping stuff has existed before the digital age. Even a century ago: scalpers would pay a third party to hold a spot in line on purchasing concert or theater tickets to resell at a higher price since the internet didn’t exist back then. Like, in the 90s: scalpers showed up in person (paying someone to hold the spot for you whilst in line) for acquisition of the product, that’s how they’ve done it.
At the time, pre-orders for an upcoming console or game were done in store (you physically went there placing an order after seeing an ad on TV or a magazine). But, how common were scalpers during that era? It would be like a group of scalpers pretending not to know each other or split into smaller groups heading to different retailers on buying the same product whilst playing as another customer.
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I remember a guy would show up at our house every now and then with the most random shit including game consoles and sell it to us at a low price. We lived in very low income government housing.
As an adult I now realize my family was purchasing stolen goods 😹
In 85 we were phone phreaking to get free long distance so we could dial up a bbs in California to illegally download the game Paperboy.
The main reason we didn’t have scalpers was that there was no way to sell these games on.
There were no online auctions until the tail end of the 90s, and even then virtually nobody trusted them. There was no digital payment - you had to send cash, cheque or postal order in an envelope. There was no Facebook. Essentially there was no way to sell to a large audience.
