Exactly 15 years ago, my father told me I was spending too much money on videogames that I would get rid of before I reached an adult age. It was basically his kind wat to tell me I was wasting money on useless things instead of saving for my future. At that time I was only buying 5 to 7 titles per year and my collection had less than 50 games. I said that I wouldn't get rid of the games so easily, considering how much I liked them. I am pretty sure he already recognizes he was slightly wrong...
I was very surprised to find out that my collection is close to reach the impressive number of 4000 games/items. It's been 10 years of intensive collecting. Even though my older games date from 1997, I only started collecting more seriously in 2004. Unfortunately, the growth was much slower during the last couple of years, but still, what an impressive number!
Some time ago I had a problem with the excel file where I list my entire collection and lost all the updates I had been doing for an unknown number of months. I had to restart from an outdated file and, unfortunately, I've never managed to completely update the list. Basically, I wasn't really sure about how many games I had but I knew they were over 3000.
For the last couple of weeks I've been focused on making great updates to the list. It's not easy to update thousands of items in an excel file... it takes a long time and lots of patience but this was something I was wanting to do for some time. I finally found the patience for that. I had to check all the message board entries, this blog, all my e-mail accounts, every picture I've taken and the older store receipts I kept in order to find out every game I had bought in the last few years, including the estimate year of purchase (and month, when possible). Unfortunately I can't know for sure the year of purchase for several games, so I had to resort to my memory, which was reasonably accurate. How do I know that? I randomly picked several titles from my list which I had proof of purchase and tried to guess the year to see if it matched the excel entry. I missed a few but got most right. But the thing is... the number was much bigger than I expected and I'm already over 3800.
When I've reached about 2000 games, I never knew if I would actually go much further. Yet now I have almost twice as many and never felt so determined to keep going further, except that money is becoming a serious issue at this point of my life. Hopefully, things will turn around for the best some day soon and I will keep pushing my collection forward.
There are still well over 100 titles until I reach the definite number of 4000 but I am very impressed to have come this far. According to my estimates, when I reach a number of 5000 games, the goals I've set to my collection will finally be accomplished. However, it's particularly bothersome when a majority of the titles I am still missing for the older platforms are the really expensive ones. I don't know what I will do about it but at my current financial condition it won't be easy to be paying over 100 euros for every title I'm still missing, let alone those that are worth 3 to 5 times that much... Spending that much money on a regular retro game is something that I don't do more that a small number of times per year. But every year that goes by, eBay resellers succeed in increasing the value of the already expensive games to the point that it's almost impossible for me to collect them. On top of that it's nearly impossible to find many titles outside eBay, which became the House of Speculation flooded with overpriced Buy it Now deals.
Now to talk about this blog... This blog never had a big visibility - it was never intended to have anyway because I like to keep a low profile. When I originally started it, many people were unaware of the existance of certain editions and press kits. Nowadays it's completely different. Everybody knows about or has access to press kits, so there is nothing really impressive that I can show to you right now. I can't even keep up with all the important stuff coming out and sadly I have to sacrifice most of the newer press kits. Still, this is really the only way I have to list pictures of my collection and I do appreciate the presentation I've given to it. I've put a lot of efforts behind this blog over the years. I hope that the old visitors still have the time and patience to read through all the crap I write :D.
A new update will be coming soon with a few items that were left behind and some newer things. Stay tuned :)
