Game Archiving

Recent Bombcasts and with the launch of a new console got me thinking of how I should properly archive games for my own collection.

I stored many of my old NES/SNES/N64 games at my parents and just have not collected them before moving. My question to you all is how to you store your old games? What do you do when new consoles come out with your old ones (Like the Switch and your Wii U?)

I store all of mine in an extra bedroom on a bunch of shelves and plastic drawers. I have however run out of space and am going to build my own shelves along the walls.

I'm not very sentimental about games so I sell them for the largest amount of money I can, sometimes I regret this but I'm also not happy if I'm sitting on $1000 worth of games I will never go back to.

# I'm selling or giving away 90% of my games. I simply do not play my PS3, 360, PS2, XB, or PS1 games. Its my feeling the market old games isn't really rising, it falling against the value of a dollar, so I'm not going to be precious about stuff that simply is more in the way than worth something.

Bookshelves with narrow shelving. I do get rid of cardboard boxes (back before CD/DVD sized standardisation - something I think arrived in Europe before the US?) but can keep the manuals in my standard book shelves (for games back when a manual was both large and required to play the game) and then it's mainly CD and DVD shaped containers that also are fine for fitting thousands around a wall. Cheap bookshelves are a great alternative to having visible walls.

The floppy disc shelf is probably the least easy to find stuff, what with the edges not being labelled - also a shelf I'll rarely ever need to use as it's all digitised and I don't even have a floppy drive in my current PC (more proof of ownership than useful containers of game data). I also have very little pre-MegaCD on console (due to selling off stuff when I really needed any money - something the old PC collection was immune to due to lack of value in bare discs) as I only really restocked (thanks used games market) from that period of selling off back to the early CD consoles so the occasional carts are generally just bare and on a shelf (would be nice to have cases for them but those don't seem to be the norm for cheap used stock).

Of course, I've mainly gone digital in recent years so that's made it a lot easier on additional shelving (both for books and games). I don't think I'll ever need as much shelving as the xbox/PS2/GC/DC generation takes up.

I'm sure I could probably box them to avoid the occasional dusting but then how would I be easily able to remind myself of how 3x3 Eyes: Kyuusei Koushu S played on the Saturn?

My collection is thankfully pretty small and can be contained in one set of shelves. Digital versions probably make up most of mine, now.