I just ran into this myself. The original games came out around when I was 7 or so, and I played through gens 1 and 2 on my gameboy before "growing out" of them. In college (circa 2010), a good friend of mine revealed the magic of ROMs to me, and we would always use those as a great way to procrastinate all those fun assignments and papers. But my laptop isn't the best and it could only handle anything gen 3 or prior (anything B/W or HG/SS on ran at a snail's pace and was too annoying to play). But that was still cool, because I got to play R/S/E and FR/LG as well as some of the older ones and enjoy them for the last couple years.

I got the itch again last year in grad school with all the new stuff coming out, and I ended up getting my hands on a 2DS (I'm a poor college guy, best I could do on my budget at the time) and XY. Loved playing that with all the new stuff. Was thinking about getting ORAS, but then thought, hey, I never got to play through HG/SS or any of the B/W and sequels, maybe I can grab those for pretty cheap and play them first. So just last night I looked up HG and SS since there was a front page post here about how great they were, and I saw that $125 price tag and think my eyes almost fell out of my head. I guess I was extremely naive to the rarity effect of their cost these days. I play mostly sports video games, so I was thinking it would be like going to pick up a pre-owned copy of Madden 09 for a great price.

After reading through these comments, it doesn't seem like that's going to change any time soon. I found some copies of HG/SS and B/W on sites like Amazon and GameStop for $40-50, but I can get ORAS for less than that, and Gen 3 is my favorite anyway. At the moment, I'm not on a budget to spend more than $50 on video games that I use just to waste some free time, so I'm kind of disappointed it's priced that way. But I get it, I guess.