You’re a collector now. Be proud.
Fellow blogging site Guru Meditation put up a great treatise on the mentality of the retro gamer and our often-obsessive behaviour with this hobby. The following is an excerpt:
Now that first console is just one part of a mammoth collection that consumes your house. Somewhere among the countless games, consoles and peripherals is that first machine you ever picked up, that one that made you feel as though you’d crossed some great boundary, discovered some long hidden gem.
For me, that first console was the Sega Master System in… ’98 or ’99. I was lucky enough to have an SMS in the early 90s, and when my brothers and I wanted to upgrade to the Mega Drive we sold the SMS2, accessories and all our games to cover the cost of the upgrade. By ’98/’99 I was able to drive, so I started hitting up the local video rental stores and my favourite local independent gaming store to see what they had around. I missed out on some gems at one of the video rental stores where they were getting rid of boxed titles for $2 a pop (including Ys III!), though I still managed to grab a few oldies. My local independent was amazing though – bought up most of the stuff on the shelf and he rummaged around the back to find some other great classics (including a very clean boxed copy of Phantasy Star!).
The Master System was the only system I ever sold to fund the next round of gaming. Since the Sega Mega Drive I’ve kept all the systems and most of the games as one generation transitioned into the next.
I’m a shocker of a hoarder, but it pleases me that there others out there who have the bug worse than I!
Anywho, you should go have a read of Ode to the collector. It’s brill 🙂
