What drove you to collect old games?

[VideoGameCritic]

When did you decide you wanted to collect retro games and what was the reason?

For me, I can trace it back to a one-page magazine article. I believe it was in the back of a Rolling Stone magazine. The year must have been around 1997.

There was a photo of a huge stack of new Atari games next to a system. The article was only about a paragraph or two long. It talked about how through the magic of the internet people had set out to reacquire the games of their childhood.

I was just beginning to surf the internet at this time, and sure enough I discovered all the old Atari games I missed were still available - and for dirt cheap. So, I set out to rebuild by original collection of 41 Atari 2600 games, and you know what happened after that. One thing led to another...

Anybody else have a story to share?

[Robotrek]

For me it was around 1995 or so. I was all in on the Playstation, but I had noticed some poor fellow trying desperately to trade in Atari 2600 stuff for SOME credit towards a Playstation at the store I was going to get mine at. He had an old "Blazing Flippers" T-Shirt on, as well. Blazing Flippers happened to be my childhood arcade. But back to the guy. He was told to buy something or get lost, and they weren't going to take it. I had lost track of my 2600 stuff over the years, so I followed him out and asked about it. He had somewhere in the ballpark of 60 games with the black variant of the Atari 2600, and a few controllers. Taking it home and playing the games again really blew my mind. They were still quite fun! This got me curious, so I threw out an ad in the paper in Ellicot City asking to buy old video games. A woman who's kid went off to college called me to come and have a look at her son's "Nintendo arcade games" (that's literally what the lady called it). I went over, and there was a TON of NES games there. I remember counting it to like 50. I wondered how spoiled this kid must've been. There was some recently released stuff in there too, like Panic Restaurant and Wario's Woods. She let me have it for 20 bucks! I felt like I had committed the heist of the century! More and more people were responding to sell me this stuff. I built up a Colecovision collection, an Intellivision collection, all sorts of stuff. Around the end of 1997, I had moved out from the bar basement I was living in back in Ellicott City. Bounced around a few places, and the collection came with me. Early 2000 I moved in with a bunch of guys I had been meeting up with at the local bar in Westminster. My collection, strangely enough, encouraged all of THEM (minus one, but he was a bit older) to start playing retro games! Over the next 13 years we pooled together and built quite a collection, but sadly, prices kept going up and up, and a lot of our interest was going down. By the time I had moved out of there, my interest in actively seeking out consoles and games to buy had dwindled, and I learned to become satisfied with what I had for the most part, considering I had never played about half of what I had owned. I still have a lot of what I owned, but it's less than it used to be.

One could say I learned to obey the PC-Engine, and released those games.

[Zack Burner]

My story began in 2014, I was getting a little tired of doing emulation regularly (I still do it every now and then to this day thanks to the ability to emulate online), so I decided to start with the famous SNES in all it's glory (three years later I got the Classic edition of the same system). I'm thinking of selling it and the 24 games I collected in 6 years some of which I beat. The reason I got it was because I didn't have it back then, only the NES until I sold it off in 1998, I just wanted to make up for lost time playing it genuinely. Later I got some more GBC games for my trusty, still playable Gameboy Color. In 2019 I got a PS Vita just to play the Sly Cooper series. The next year I got two more systems: A Ultimate Genesis portable which I then got rid of, not feeling more attached, and a plug-in-play of Ms. Pac-man since I'm a fan of the arcade game. So yeah, there you go.

[Retro STrife]

Early 2000s for me. Growing up, I kept my old systems hanging around, so I'd pull out the NES or Atari 2600 once in awhile. But I never thought of collecting until around 2001 or 2002. I had a first job and could finally afford video games, so I wanted to expand past my PS1 and N64. I was a member on a really small tight-knit gaming forum (similar to this one, but it's long dead now), and a couple guys from UK talked about the Saturn. They convinced me to buy one on ebay even though it was a dead system, and the rest is history. I loved it and found some of my favorite games playing a system that most people thought was garbage at that time.

There was something unique about playing a dead, failed system that no other gamer friends had or cared to have. Next thing I knew, I was buying a Jaguar and a CD-i to continue that enjoyment of crappy systems. (Funny how cheap those systems were looking back.. my Saturn with 15 games was like $100 on ebay, Jaguar with 4 solid games was $50. And we thought that was expensive!) I think most collectors tend to focus on games for the select group of systems they love the most, but my focus turned to collecting systems and then building a smaller library of solid games for each. For whatever reason, the hardware just drew me in more than the cartridges. I think that's part of how I ended up here--this was one of the few places with reviews for tons of systems, even the more obscure. Anyway, my interest has come and gone in waves since 2001, but I've wayyy slowed down with system collecting the past few years and I'm good where I'm at, but I still have all of them hanging around. Now I’m trying to finally catch up on playing them. But I guess the point is, it mostly goes back to the Saturn, Jag, CD-i, 3DO, and other "crappy" failed systems, and weirder systems like the Vectrex and Virtual Boy, which really sparked it for me.

[Gentlegamer]

One could say I learned to obey the PC-Engine, and released those games.

[Breaker]

I had always kept my old systems and games whenever I purchased a new generation, but my addiction to collecting really started in 2012. I was perusing N64 games in a used game store, and I saw a ziploc bag that had a sheet of stickers in it. I asked the guy behind the counter what it was. He was selling sets of top labels for the entire N64 north american game catalog. They were pretty cool - matching the artwork of the boxes and front labels of the games themselves.

I didn't buy it right then, but that made me look into the games I had amassed, and I had something like 91 of the 296 games. I was talking to a buddy, and he "challenged" me to complete the set. So, I bought the top labels and then set about collecting all the games. I finished that catalog in about a year. I've since collected the entire NTSC Dreamcast catalog (that took quite awhile), and I'm 2 games from having the whole Sega 32X NTSC catalog. Along the way I've added lots of other consoles and games for each.

[Robotrek]

One could say I learned to obey the PC-Engine, and released those games.

Don't be a collectard!

[Gentlegamer]

One could say I learned to obey the PC-Engine, and released those games.

Don't be a collectard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvkXpRLspYE

[ActRaiser]

For me it was in the 2002-2005 timeframe or so. I was on call 7 by 24 for operations support. I needed to do something that kept me near a computer during that time so I started collecting old systems.

Now, I'm to the point that I'd like to start selling the stuff that can be easily emulated or played via other means to free up space.