The oldest picture of my game collection. Maybe 2006/2007.No one needs another “I’m done collecting retro games!” Youtube video, but I’ve only ever discussed my collecting journey on the podcast, so I’m writing it down.
I started collecting when the Wii Virtual Console was announced in 2005. $5 for a virtual NES game! At the flea market carts were $1-2! What a rip-off!! Digital-only purchases were a very new thing of questionable value at this point. I started collecting NES games immediately, even before I owned an NES console. Every purchase felt like I was sticking it to Nintendo. I soon discovered GameTZ, DigitPress, AtariAge, and NintendoAge and spent my high school and college life with those browser windows on constant rotation learning about video games instead of calculus.
Collecting sets was just the thing to do. I never thought twice about it. Everyone on NintendoAge was working on an NES set (only 677 games naturally). With my youthful shortsightedness and budget I jumped into cart-only sets. CIB games were like double the price! I began targeting “easy” or small sets. Virtual Boy, Game Boy (cart only!), Odyssey^2, Sega Saturn, Sega CD, N64, ActionMax, etc.. Back then I had a little tracker in my bio of how many sets I’d completed. Whether they were in great condition or CIB? That didn’t really matter.
Besides sets, the rarity guide value of games was king back then. Stadium Events and NWC were the grails! If you have some R9s or R10s you were definitely a cool guy collector. On my teenage Burger King budget, I focused on knocking out cheap R7s and R8s. I still remember the rush of dopamine scoring a Hurricanes and Cowboy Kid for only $5.
Especially in the beginning the list of games worth collecting was small. In the mid-2000s, N64 was new enough to be considered modern garbage. So obscure stuff aside, the landscape of games I wanted to collect was something like Atari 2600 through Sega Saturn. If you put those console lists together then calculate how many games you buy per year and… you’ll eventually own every video game. And so I began to literally buy every single video game I didn’t own figuring I’d just own them all.
The oldest picture of my game collection. Maybe 2006/2007.
When I saw anyone’s Room of Doom with an arcade cabinet, I was super jealous. I bought a few games from the local arcade auction (Daytona USA, Silent Scope, Area 51) and eventually I got a Terminator 2 and The Getaway pinball machine on a whim and got deeply sidetracked for around 6 years. I get on Pinside, the main online pinball community, and start interacting with all these old guys who don’t just have a couple games, many of then have dozens. I’m in my 20s with money and no responsibilities. I want that life! I get into collecting, competing, restoring, and even traveling just for a chance to play rare games on location.
Before my wife moved in, I had 13 pinball machines in my house (which was purchased solely because I couldn’t fit more pinball/arcade games in my 600sqft apartment). There were 3 in the kitchen. My dining room became a workshop where I was restoring, repairing, and modding the games down to every last screw. I cut back when she moved in, but I love her for how much she put up with me, more than a few times driving 3-4 hours for a multi-day tournament in some gas station on the Outer Banks of NC.
When I became a cohost on The Collector’s Quest Podcast in 2017, that started eating my weekend time and I couldn’t travel to tournaments as much. That sucked me back into the video game sphere.
Pinball is a very cool hobby. I know why DreamTR went this route.
In 2019, a copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $100,000 and in the run up to the peak of the market in 2021, sealed video games started selling for unreal sums. At the time I was collecting rare Platinum Hits variants for my Xbox set. I thought stuff like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within PH was the good stuff!
I certainly got caught up in the FOMO, but not for sealed NES games. I considered all the “common” games that I loved or were historically important that I never bothered to collect. If I game wasn’t in a set, I probably never bought it. I didn’t own Half-Life. I didn’t own Doom. I didn’t own a CIB Link to the Past. I quickly finished the last set I was working on (loose SNES) and pivoted hard to “good stuff”.
The mania surrounding 2020-2021 is when I bought the most video games. Multiple games a day would arrive. Sometimes the USPS lady would just leave the whole crate of mail at my door. I didn’t upgrade my entire sets to CIB, but I fixed up all my Marios, Zeldas, Donkey Kongs, RPGs, etc. that I’d previously ignored for being too common. I FOMO’d into plenty of sealed games too now that I cared about condition. If the price difference between CIB and sealed was only 2-3x, I started considering sealed.
Despite collecting more than half of my life, all the best stuff in my collection is from this period. Charumera Zelda, Matte Super Mario Bros., Doom v1.1, Ultima, and bins of good sealed stuff.
A messy shelf from when I was buying faster than I could organize.
Once I was done with sets in 2019, I heavily prioritized my wants. I no longer went on Ebay and purchased every good deal and every rare variant, blowing my budget on 20 random games. I made a list of 200 or so games I thought would be the best games to own period, prioritized them, and started knocking them out top to bottom. No considerations for the market, prices, or hype. Five years later, that list is almost empty. The remaining games are extremely rare. While I’d love to own an original Akalabeth: World of Doom, I don’t think it’s in the cards.
The old me would draw up a new checklist, prioritize it, and start fixing my Ebay saved searches. I have well over 10,000 video games and I just spent the last few years getting what I think are the best games I could possibly own. So… where is there to go from here? I could start a PS2 set. That’s maybe the best console ever made right? But I just spent years tracking down a nice CIB copy of Golf: Champion’s Course (or whatever the real name is), perhaps the rarest Nintendo game. Returning to filling up shelves with filler checklist games feels like a big step backwards in my life already crowded by bins, boxes, and shelves of garbage games.
My rarest and fanciest game.
It’s 2026 and I’ve started directly training my AI replacement at work (enterprise tech support). The writing seems like it’s on the wall for knowledge work in some amount of years. My last big purchase was a sealed Half-Life and it feels irresponsible to continue buying games like my job will be here forever.
I already save a significant percentage of my income and I’m bumping it up the majority of my income now. That means no more buying video games to rot on shelves. It’s safe to say I have enough. I peaked a couple years ago without an exact count, but perhaps 12,000-15,000 games before I started selling.
I’m not yet breaking up my most beloved sets or offloading my rarest games, but as someone who collected for 20 years selling virtually nothing, I have rooms of junk I must get rid of. Maybe I’ll chase the occasional white whale like Dungeon Campaign (Apple II) or Panorama Toh (PC-88) but I’ve already accomplished my big goals. My days of thinking I’ll own every video game are long over. I’m not on social media and don’t feel pressure to post cool stuff. I’m sastisfied.
Well, I’d be happier if I wasn’t worried about AI replacing me, but I think it’s probably a change in course my life needed at this point.
