Recently I have been thinking a lot about the state of my collection and where it could go from it's current point. When I started collecting seriously it was the mid 2000's. I was still in high school and I didn't own much more than the games I bought as they came out, or whatever was cheap enough from GameStop. I came into some money, and the NES had always fascinated me, and it was also just the right time before there was the unforeseen bubble. I started going out every week and looking for games, and that leads to now.
When I started I didn't know a whole lot about the libraries of each system, which was a big part of making things fresh and exciting. There where dozens of games I knew I wanted, and as I experienced more from the hunt it grew to hundreds. My dilemma now is that I know just about every game in the library of all the most prominent systems, and through my decade long effort... I own pretty much every one I want specifically. Now, it's always exciting to find games in garage sale/thrift store environments where you can get colossal deals, and I don't think I'll ever tire of that because the surprise becomes less what the games are but which games there are, and I'm always looking for the obscenely rare chance of a new NES game to complete the library, but it's not quite the same now knowing what I am going to find are more collectables and less playable games I want to own a physical version of.
With the exception of the NES and my completionist efforts, I feel like my other major libraries are curated to an extreme level, with the exception of random games I got on the cheap. When I am looking at SNES games now I know that there is almost zero chance it'll be a game I am excited to play because I own (nearly) all the classics and gems. The same can be said for the Genesis, PS1, PS2, N64, and other systems with many high quality titles. I don't really want to buy most of the games left for these systems as they are mostly shovel-ware, and I probably never would unless I found them for pennies on the dollar or became obscenely rich and just completed collections CIB for the aesthetics of it (Is this what TheFlea does...? Hehehe). There are no more Marios, Castlevanias, Final Fantasies, or Sonics to find. The general surprise of what lurks in massive libraries is no longer a secret to me, and it's left me a bit jaded.
Earlier and more exotic systems aren't really jam-packed with classics, and I collect more for the history and uniqueness, but that hardly matters with how rarely I come across them. The systems I really would like to shore up on that actually have quality titles, the TurboGrafx family chief among them, are just not widely available. In a decade the closest I have ever come to a TG16 related item in the wild where at dedicated game stores. It's gotten to the point where in the past couple years I have turned to Amiibos & Skylanders, and more recently strategy guides, instead just because of how little curated items I have left to find.
Have any of you reached the point where you feel like you have most everything you want? Is your mentality about the hobby significantly different than mine? I'd like to hear about it.