I like this kind of thing.
History, start in the mid 2000s and joining VGcollect in 2011I'd always been interested in gaming since playing Super Mario world when I was 4 or 5 at a daycare center. That daycare is where I got in most of my gaming as my brother and I begged my dad to get us an SNES. He didn't want to, but he did happen to have something in the closet from his younger days... an Intellivison that he let us use that really was what started my interest in retro games. At school my friends would talk about games on the SNES and Genesis which was completely different from my experience of playing Frog Bog, Night Stalker and Astrosmash. I hate myself for the fact my dad kept all the games and system with pristine boxes but us kids didn't consider that and just mishandled and destroyed all the fragile cardboard and only cared about the practical items which luckily I still have to this day. I inherited a lot from my dad, in many ways to be elaborated later, because he would also go to the flea market every week and occasionally come back with new Intellivision games.
Eventually we got Gameboys and finally the coveted SNES by the time the N64 was out, which we chose over it. Throughout the years I made attempts at getting into older systems via early emulation on the family Windows 95 and even buying an NES at a friend's garage sale... which I sadly returned because we couldn't get it to work being ignorant of the proper method of cleaning back then and this particular situation
for sure didn't effect me at all. I moved on through childhood upgrading to the newest systems occasionally. By the time I entered high school I met
Byron who had managed to already have some collection despite our young age, lack of money being a big reason I couldn't. This would change in a tragic way.
Early in my sophomore year my dad extremely suddenly died in a just few days from some kind of infection they couldn't pin down in time. Time moved on and then in my junior year I started to receive small chunks of inheritance to the degree of about $500 a month and that is when I started collecting proper. I was pretty reckless as a young man with money for the first time is not unlikely to be, but because of the stupid rise of the retro game market in modern times I would make a huge profit nowadays if I ever wanted to sell. The one system that had always evaded me was the NES so that is what I started collecting for. I snapped up every well known game and some "rare" ones judged by internet sources and still cringe at seeing stuff like Bubble Bobble 2 for $50 in 2006 and passing it up because I thought it was too much, if fucking only. I was doing this all on eBay as I had limited car access.
When I graduated in 2007 I started getting out more in my dads old truck and when I was out with Byron we would occasionally stop at garage sales and then we came up with the idea to go out Friday mornings to garage sales and thrift stores and that became the start of 5 or 6 years of doing this weekly. As we did, and our collections grew, we started thinking about tracking our collections - but how? We searched around online earlier with nothing good leading me to just take a picture of each individual item and put it on a photobucket as a tracker. Eventually we found a site called RetroCollect we started using but it was heavily UK based and not great for US tracking. However, we got friendly with a user on the site name
NightowlJRM who just happened to tell us about a new site he was using -
VGCollect!
When we joined the site was in it's exciting start-up phase where it was buzzing with activity and would frequently talk with Matt & Co. with the other early users for suggestions to improve the site. It's a shame almost all those old users and admins are half a decade or more removed, but I've got weird leftover souvenirs like
Scott following me from back then. Well, we had our site to track collections and I was personally putting lots of effort into updating the databse and my passion for collecting was high! On to the bright future!
Present dayWell, the future wasn't so bright for me or my collecting hobby. Around 2014 I had the worst parts of my life one after the other which badly hurt my passion for collecting but the other side of the bad coin was setting in even before then and would have driven me out even if I was on cloud 9 - modern retro game collecting over-saturation. Now, I started collecting seriously in 2006 which was a mythical dreamland golden age so amazing I wouldn't believe it ever existed if I couldn't physically look at my collection. Every Friday we would make amazing finds for pennies and that sets expectations. By 2012ish I was already sure it was over for collecting. Flea markets that used to sell boxes of games for $5 to get rid of them were now selling Combat for Atari for $100 thinking it was some valuable treasure handcrafted by DaVinci. The money I was spending on gas to traverse our spots was becoming not worth it for our returns.
More and more disheartened and frothing with rage at resellers the worst year of my life in late 2014 broke the camels back and I stopped actively hunting for games in the wild. To this day the last piece of retro tech I bought for my collection was a bundle of NES games from our own
Soera in 2017. I still like the idea of collecting things, but it's not the same as the old days. I collect Amiibo to which I have a full collection as of now, and I do enjoy collecting Switch games as many sites exist to print indie games I love that would otherwise have no physical release. The thrill of the chase is gone due to being priced out of that wild hunting. Today's prices make pessimistic view of 2014 seems sunny in comparison. I once had aspirations of a 100% complete NES collection which would actually have been possible with my meager means had I picked the right games to buy with hindsight, but now the remaining 5% I still need would probably outprice the 95% I have several times over.
It's all a big shame. The past is price locked to all but the most wealthy or irresponsible and the future is digital slavery where you don't even own games you buy on online platforms, I don't even track Steam and digital games I own here because that is about the same to me as counting games I pirated in terms of ownership. My playlist just hit Little Dark Age and I think that's the perfect song to end my rant here.