As I am sitting here the movers are slowly packing up my entire life including my video game collection. It is a humbling experience to see the things that I surround myself with and realize how silly it gets at a certain point. I collect for all the consoles I have and I am happy to say that my collection has grown over the years since I have started and my sons love to play games from my childhood with me. Seeing how many boxes it took to get all the stuff in there I had some thoughts about collecting and I thought I would share them.

My first thought was that I should just embrace the digital future and just replace them all with non-physical copies. This would mean that I would not need to drag around the consoles along with all the cases anymore. The other benefit is that I would not have to worry about any of the discs being scratched or damaged. There are downsides as well. the first one is that most of the games cannot be found legally on any platform. The main problem is that most games lose something being played on a different platform. With the NES there were the rituals of blowing into carts, holding reset while pressing the power button, and trying to keep the carts and reading the manual when in the car away from the console. My sons both will sit and play any game when I pull out my Nintendo 64, but if I have it on my Desktop and I hand them a Xbox 360 controller, they get bored and wander off in 5 minutes. So, the digital future while making the load lighter would ruin the play experience and thus make it not worth playing.

The other thing that it caused me to stop is realizing that I have not turned on any of the 3 Atari consoles I had collected since I had purchased them and tested the games. There are some consoles that collecting for just turns into a waste for me because I never want to play those games again. Atari was largely that, so I gave my Atari consoles away and called it a day. Some other consoles got a hard look, but managed to stay. The Sega Master System was one of these, and it has stayed around because I have only played five games on that system and I feel there are more games that I should find before selling it off to someone who will play it more than I will. My PS1 JRPG collection got a long hard stare before I boxed it up as well. I have limited time in my life, but I still have hope that one weekend my sons and I will get to play through Jade Cocoon. So, some things got left behind, but others managed to survive one more move to hopefully get their day in the sun.

While moving is never easy, this move has given me some things to think about. I think that is because my wife and the kids are already ahead of me, so they are safe and sound away from the moving stresses. Will this revelation cagne my life? Probably not, but it does give me a moment of pause when I see something in a store for a great price and I have to think, “will I ever play this.”