Video Game Collecting : Part One - Why I Collect Physical Games

By Cyfir (Cyfiremmerich Resident)

In Second Life, everything is digital and on Linden Lab’s servers. If Linden Lab’s shut down Second Life tomorrow, everything that you have in your inventory and everything that you’ve built up in the virtual world would be gone. Is this likely any time soon? No, but this scenario isn’t unheard of in today’s age. All that needs to be done is for a company to pull the plug and everything that you’ve worked towards in a social space or game is wasted time and this is why I like to collect physical media. If everything else shuts down, I can still plug in my Nintendo 64 and play some Cruis’n USA. Or I can plug in my Wii and play a complete $3 copy of Ghost Squad with the Wii Zapper and relive my time in the arcade playing lightgun games like Time Crisis. Or I can start up my original PlayStation and steam roll through Metal Gear. You get the idea.

I don’t have a huge collection at the moment. There was a long period of time where I swore off playing video games in favor of doing things that I felt were more productive with my spare time, such as helping out communities in Second Life and elsewhere. It felt more fulfilling than beating a game for seemingly no reason. However, that started to change as I fell out with the groups that I was part of and I found myself needing a hobby. So I fell back into video games. I found myself regretting getting rid of all the great games and systems that I had as a kid, especially since a handful of those are rare now.

Some might think “why not just get a raspberry pi and emulate all your favorite retro games. Well, for one. I’m a huge fan of original physical hardware. I’m a hardware geek. I love how owning a physical system and cartridge is kind of like owning a mini arcade board. I love to mod my Gameboy Advance and open up and fix old games that aren’t working. It’s just another aspect of the hobby that’s right up my alley. If I wanted to emulate games, I would just do so on my PC. You don’t need another physical box to do it. I’ve also not had the best experiences with emulation. Sure, emulated versions of older systems like the Playstation and Nintendo 64 look tons better thanks to modern technological advances and modding, but they’re also prone to game crashing bugs and glitches that haven’t been ironed out in the emulators. I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time via emulation, and the game suddenly crashed and I found myself realizing that I hadn’t saved in a while and I lost hours of my time in the game. I turned around and bought the port of the game for 3DS and that issue was eliminated. I just prefer the reliability of the actual legit hardware and software.

Now, I’m not rich. In fact, I’m the opposite, so I can’t just go out and buy all the old video games I want. However, I could have gone out and found a big lot of really cheap games and I could have had hundreds of games by now. However, I just don’t see a point in that. I want games that I actually want to play, that holds nostalgic value to me, or that I just think looks cool. At the moment, I only own 79 physical games since I started collecting again. Surely, getting 79 good games in nine months would be expensive right? Not really. In part two I will be covering how I’ve built up my collection so far and different ways that you can do it.

Cyfir