10 Years of Collecting, A Retro Retrospection
This is the earliest photo of my collection (circa late 2012, early 2013). It's the only picture I have ever posted of my collection to the wider internet (and if I recall correctly it was taken because of a post here talking about game collections, RIP the old video game forum). It's also an ugly mess. I've even got some random junk in-frame like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and hair ties. But it's the closest representation of when I first started collecting retro video games. The forum I originally posted this on still is around, but they've long since reorganized some of the sections within it causing the original post to be essentially inaccessible unless maybe I manually search through each post I have made? That would take too long.
My interest with retro games really started with a friend of mine I had met at a summer program. I hadn't really bothered with such things, sticking only to playing older games I had already tried or l already owned. But their interest spilled over to me, and I started emulating games I wouldn't have previously thought about like Earthbound. I ended up having a lot of fun and checking out YouTubers like the Angry Video Game nerd.
It was the AVGN and his amazing game room that inspired me to start collecting and eventually checking out forums like NintendoAge and Digital Press looking for like-minded people. Like the AVGN, I had decided to go for some of everything. And so, with my meager amount of money as a kid, I purchased as much as I could, targeting the cheaper items that I was able to afford easily and bulk out my collection with. Some of the items in that photo are no longer with me, like some of those boxed SNES games. I had won them in a raffle thinking it would be the start of my boxed SNES collection, but I've only retained 1 of them for gameplay reasons (Raiden Trad, which is a great shmup series by the way.). Skylanders figures exploded in number and I very quickly gave up on that.
(Side note, that red pencil case is a wonderful way to store loose GBA carts by the way. I purchased a second one from a thrift store years later to separate any games I would play and games I would just own. Or I thought I purchased a second one. It was a knock-off lookalike that honestly feels cheaper and more brittle.)
I want to say I regret my cheap early scattergun approach but I don't. Yes, I wish I bought certain sets of games for ultra cheap compared to current prices, I didn't actually have that kind of opportunity. I didn't really go to things like swap meets on my own. A lot of buying was done in my immediate area like through GameStops and Craigslist listings, which heavily limited my pickings. I still remember when I was in high school, taking the bus to a GameStop farther away from my in order to purchase a cartridge only copy of Final Fantasy IV Advance, then walking 20-30 minutes to another GameStop nearby to pick up a cart only copy of Riviera: The Promised Land. It was my first time going so far out on my own, and on a bus line I had never taken before so that was nerve wracking. Also massive shout-out to the GameStop employee who let me buy Riviera even though I ended up 10 cents short, it would have been soul crushing to have to go out so far on my own and pay for bus fare only to be denied at the last hurdle so you really did me a solid.
That was years ago. People change, and so do collections. I no longer collect anything except GameBoy games, with a little more focus on the GameBoy Advance. Why the GameBoy? Because I have tons of nostalgia with that family of systems. I have an attachment to it unlike other game systems, of which the only similar system would be the DS which I don't collect for. And with that decision, I also started focusing on collecting strictly boxed games so that it could be displayed rather than squirreled away in storage. And no, I'm not into sealed or graded games. Unless I purposely plan to open it myself or I find it at a reasonable/lower than boxed price I do not buy sealed games. In addition, I open all sealed games I own eventually, just so I can have the experience and to see what items come with the game in a new state. Now, my ultimate goal is to collect for all 3 systems, every single release, every region variant, even stuff like games that were imported into countries with no official release of that game. Much like my copy of Bratz: The Movie that was imported into Portugal featuring a translation of the back box text into Portuguese that was stuck on the back. I will never finish my collection, but I will always have something new to chase and that is wonderful. The goal is there, but it really is about the journey for me.
After I had graduated from high school was when I first started working, which meant actual disposable income and not just what I could scrounge up as a kid. I was able to use Paypal instead of the occasional overpriced GreenDot purchase I allowed myself. I could finally start surfing eBay for items on a regular basis. I initially gorged myself on Japanese games and cheap $5 sealed games like Unfabulous and Zoey 101, stuff you could find for a lot cheaper than everything else. Now, this time period is when I would look back and actually regret going to shelf fillers over stand-out titles I personally enjoyed and would probably see go up in price. I had gotten hand-me-down shelves from someone I knew and I really wanted to start filling them out with games. I've got some of those kinds of games on my shelf now, but I still beat myself up for the decisions younger me made.
In August 2015 I started using a website called VGCollect to track which games I had owned. Some games I had to add to their database myself, my Japanese games mostly. At the time, I felt annoyed with their rules on how to format things within the database and quickly gave up on adding new items. Around the same time I had also taken to using Google Sheets as another way to track which games I owned and I decided to go with it after kicking VGCollect to the curb. This went on for a few years, and during that time I didn't share any more photos with the internet other than a few "recent purchases" photos on this very blog.
In 2019 I realized that there are a lot of things that aren't scanned or recorded on the internet. Sure there are scans of manuals and boxes for popular games like Fire Emblem that are online and even Nintendo themselves has provided manual scans of certain games, but there are so many that just don't get a chance. After all, who would care about scanning and sharing stuff like the box art of a Danish variant of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy on the GBA? And so I returned to VGCollect hoping to start filling in missing information where I could, primarily for items I owned for easy verification purposes.
I say scans, but at this point in time I didn't even have a scanner. I used my phone camera, which led to blurry photos with terrible lighting. I also did not use GIMP until recently, which led to poorly cropped photos as the Photo Editor in Windows 10 only allows you to rotate images by whole degrees unlike GIMP which allows by tenths and hundredths, very very useful. To add onto this fact, I started to attempt to fill out more information into VGCollect that I had not previously, like IDs that would help identify different parts of the game (like for the boxes and manuals independently of the carts), and transcriptions of the back box art text.
After doing this for a short time I finally decided that I was going to get a scanner (and Acrobat Pro for those sweet sweet offline pdf editing tools). Put my money where my mouth was and actually invest some money into a cheap EPSON scanner to help archive box art and such. Now, even with this my scans (especially my earlier scans) are not the most amazing. But I think they fly okay, they're not horrible. They help preserve details that may have been lost just due to the lack of interest. In May 2021, I started to upload full box art scans (including the flaps and sides of boxes), entire manual scans, and insert scans to The Internet Archive. Nearly a year later I am still uploading what I can and still have much to go before I even exhaust every single box and manual I currently own.
And so that brings us to the present. Posting to Instagram. Uploading material to the Internet Archive. Adding what I can to VGCollect. There is always more to archive, more to add to databases, more that needs to be saved before it's lost forever. And it's why I do what I do. It really just started out as wanting to be like the AVGN and other retro game collectors online, ultimately leading to my efforts to catalog and upload information so that people could have the information accessible. Always more to do, always so much more to do.
As you can see, my collection has grown substantially since 2012 (please ignore any signs of untidy areas behind the shelf). The majority of my collection is made up of North American and European GBA games, but I've got an okay amount of GB/GBC games as well as Japanese titles. I like to think I've done pretty well for myself. The only thing not showing in this picture really are my consoles (of which I have little) and my GBA Video releases (which I don't have too much space for on the shelf at the moment, might need to see about clearing out that bottom shelf which isn't pictured).
So, where do I see myself in the future? Well, I will continue collecting boxed GameBoy games, maybe one day having enough games to have multiple filled shelves like all the YouTubers do. I will continue adding and scanning information to various places online. I will continue sharing various bits and bobs on my Instagram. But most importantly, I will continue having fun and enjoying myself. Maybe I seem like a shelf collector to some, but my love for retro games goes beyond just playing and collecting the greats and the underdogs. I will continue to show my love for all that shovelware.
