I’ve been collecting wrestling tapes steadily for about 7 years now, and it all started with King of the Ring 1998 at a flea market. Ever since then, it’s become a passion of mine to not only collect the covers that I used to see so often on my local blockbuster’s shelves, but to basically build my own physical WWE Network. When the internet crashes, I can still safely watch Waylon Mercy VS Savio Vega from 1995, and thank god for that.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about collecting classic WWE/WWF tapes and maybe offer a few helpful tips or insights along the way.

Off the top of my head I’d say that 1998 is probably the easiest year to collect for. None of the tapes are expensive or hard to find, which makes sense due to the WWF being red hot at this time. The tapes were most likely produced at an absolutely massive rate. However, just because it’s an easy to complete set, doesn’t mean the tapes aren’t badass. Royal Rumble 98? Survivor Series 98? These are iconic covers that are burned into the minds of wrestling fans everywhere.

Interestingly enough the year prior, 1997, is one of the harder years to complete. The first reason being that 2 of the tapes were the Silver Vision Clamshells and weren’t released in the US. This includes In Your House DX, and A Cold Day In Hell. The controversial Survivor Series 97 is one of the more rare tapes out there as well and can reach up to $60-$100.

Although the year sees a few commoners like In Your House Ground Zero and Summerslam ‘97, most of the 1997 releases hover around the $30-$45 price range. Some of these include In Your House Final Four, Canadian Stampede, King of the Ring, and Bad Blood.

The price and rarity of wrestling tapes started to dip significantly in the 2000’s. While the year 2000 is one of the best years in professional wrestling and has quality PPV’s each month that warrant their current price tag of around $10-$15 each, that’s about as rare/expensive as you’ll get past that point (aside from a few outliers).

The year 2002 is another easy year to collect for, aside from 2 titles which can be extremely hard to find. Vengeance and Judgment Day 2002 were sold as online releases only (and possibly only as in Canada as well). It took me quite a while to track these down. I still lose sleep to this day over the fact that I paid $50 to see the worst chokeslam ever. But, unfortunately for tapes such as these you really just have to bite the bullet and overspend when they do pop up on online. My mindset when it comes to tapes like this is “overspend now, and cross it off the list forever so I can turn my attention to something else, or wait another 2-3 years for it to pop up so I can save 5 bucks”.

Thankfully, the Wrestlemania's 1-20 are rather inexpensive and easy to find. Wrestlemania 21 however can be difficult to track down.ot necessarily an expensive tape, just obscure. WWE Tapes from 2005 all carry a similar theme.

The 2 rarest/most expensive tapes in my collection would have to be In Your House Mind Games 1996, and In Your House Lumberjacks 1995. Lumberjacks, to my knowledge, has 2 other alternate titles. 1.) In your House Terminators, and a Canadian release that looks completely different yet has the Terminators title. $100 for Lumberjacks or Mind Games is not unreasonable, especially for the former. Personally, I’d say jump on them if you see them pop up at or around that price.

It’s surprising to me that there aren’t more elusive/rare tapes in the $100 price range from WWF’s financial dark ages of 1995/96. But, that's the beauty of collecting wrestling tapes. A lot of the time things don’t make sense, there’s no rhyme or reason for anything, and it’s a chaotic mess...just like the WWF.

I hope this short blurb on collecting wrestling tapes has inspired you to go out there and track down some of the titles that have been evading you on your search. If you were able to pick up a helpful tip or two, that’s awesome as well. Happy hunting!

- Nick Collins

You can find more great VHS content from Nick over on his site nostalgiavideo.net , and be sure to follow him on Instagram and Facebook for more nostalgic content every day!

WWF & WWE VHS Collecting with Nick from Nostalgia Video!