Anyone else get the warm and fuzzies for the good ole' days of game collecting? I'm a very nostalgic person by nature; as soon as an era of life comes to a close and another begins, I start to feel a lot of nostalgia for the previous bygone era. So here we are, light-years into the dystopian future and now it's no longer just nostalgia for our gaming memories of our childhood, but nostalgia for when we collected games as adults.
These days, I feel nostalgic for the era when I first got into collecting games. It doesn't seem like it, but that was quite a long time ago now. I was a young adult, just out of high-school and looking for some kind of hobby to pick up. I hadn't played video games in several years, but I just decided to start watching YouTube videos about people who were buying old games for classic game systems. At the time, there weren't even that many, just a handful of vloggers with their grainy digital cameras showing off their Saturn or SNES collections in their bedroom. That's all it took to inspire me to get into it myself. Finally had my own money, and I figured this stuff would be easy to get because it's old and nobody wants it. Wasn't exactly true, but of course it was infinitely more doable then.
Aside from reasonable pricing and availability, what I think was so much fun about that era was just being completely ignorant to all of these retro games that I'd never heard of, and discovering the games as I went along collecting. Going out with 20$ in my wallet and coming back with a bag of games that I'd never played before. The hunt itself seemed endless at the time, it felt like everywhere you went there were video games for sale. Not just the second hand market, but in retail, every store was dabbling in video game sales at that time. Even drug stores had video games, as physical media was at peak saturation. I couldn't stay content to just collect retro, so I dove into the current scene, knowing nothing about 360 or Wii and discovering several years worth of titles I knew nothing about more or less gave me the same feeling about hunting and collecting modern games too.
You really had to be there, to experience it in this exact way, and lot of you here were, so you know what I'm talking about. Getting into game collecting at that specific time period during the late 2000s / early 2010s is something that can never again be replicated. If you sold everything you owned and attempted to start over, it would be nothing the same. Not only because that era has passed, but because you can only experience something for the first time once. It would just never feel the same again. All the younger folks getting into it over the past few years, they'll never know what it was like when we did it.
I would say the golden years were over by around the time I first joined this forum, 2013/14 or so? Game collecting was getting so popular, and so competitive already by that point, you couldn't find stuff the way you did in the years before. This is when it started to go from being purely a joy, to sort of a chore. You had to be more crafty, more diligent. The world was slowly turning to shit because everybody was getting a smart phone and corporations were beginning to take over the Internet and subsequently destroy society. So there's this sort of split between game collecting in the old days before Internet was real life, and you would just use it to communicate about your real world findings, and then the era after it had taken over where there was little left out there in the real world to find, but everyone online had everything that you wanted and was dangling it over your head like a carrot. I'm not so nostalgic for that era where it all got tougher and tougher, and was mostly relegated to buying things online. The fun was all but gone by that point, especially by the later 2010s.
Once the pandemic hit, the hobby was wrecked. I continued on collecting for several more years beyond that, but it was honestly painful at that point, not fun at all. I haven't actively been a game collector in nearly two years. I don't really miss it, because of what it eventually came to be. I do think of the early days a lot, hence the topic. At this point, I know all of the retro libraries quite well. The sense of discovery is gone, I own most of what I ever wanted, everything feels like a ridiculous waste of money now... the past can't be repeated, is the point. You had to be there. I'm just thankful I'm not subject to the present day, where all the most followed and praised hacks of the retro gaming scene, are all these reseller jerks. Those clowns were probably still in daycare when we started collecting. Little did we know they'd come along to turn the entire hobby into a racket a decade later. If you just want to play the games, you're probably just modding or emulating at this point.
So, that's kind of my ramble on video game collecting nostalgia, without getting too much into the specifics. The memories of first beginning my Saturn and Sega CD collections, going to the flea markets and picking up loads of Nintendo cartridges, buying the newly released Nintendo DSi and knowing nothing about the rich DS library that awaited me, etc, all replaying in my mind with a black and white grainy filter, because it feels like ancient history. Looking back, it was definitely one of the most fun times I've ever had, particularly the period from '09 to roughly 2012? My only regret was that I took it a little too far, and forced myself to stick with it longer than I should have through the years, at some point I did let the fixation almost consume me. Finally beyond that now, and I don't think about game collect much at all anymore. Aside from those early days, maybe I just miss the past in general.
