My first computer was a VIC-20. My parents bought it used from a lady back in the mid-1980s…I recall the seller bringing it to our house, and eagerly looking out the window for her arrival. It came with only three games: Raid on Ft. Knox, Adventureland, and Pirates’ Cove. We eventually headed over to the local Toys R Us and snapped up about 10 more titles, all for a few dollars each. At that point, the games were on clearance – no one cared about “the wonder computer of the 1980s” by ’85 or ’86.
I’ve been buying games ever since then. Computer games, video games – it doesn’t matter; I’ve enjoyed them both, even during the days when there was more of a divide between the two. There has always been something magical to me about the idea that you don’t have to just watch things happening on the screen passively – you can influence the images, interact with them. The old VIC-20 eventually stopped working, and I sold the games, but that’s the only one – I’ve kept the Laser 128 (an Apple ][ clone) and its games, the Game Boy, the NES, the PS2…and most games that I bought for those systems.
A few years ago, I started to track my games on Backloggery.com. I realized that there were some games that I had always meant to get back to, to finish…and that I just hadn’t done it. I wanted a way to see where I stood with these. Given the decades of collecting, it was a bit of a job to enter all of them in. Eventually, however, I had gotten most things into the system, and I was finally able to see how many games I had finished – and how many I hadn’t.
My “uncompleted” ranking stood somewhere in the high 60% range. It was an eye-opener, and it accomplished what I had hoped it would do. For years I had snapped up game after game – loads of them, fairly indiscriminately, figuring that I wanted to play it and that I would get around to it eventually. I had over 800 games in my collection, 500 or so that I hadn’t completed – and lots that I hadn’t even played.
The worst offenders in my backlog were the lengthy JRPGs. Back in the 1990s I had read about these in magazines, and always wanted to play them, but I never had a SNES or a PlayStation to do so with. When I finally got a PS2 in 2002, I bought lots of games I had wanted to try: Final Fantasy games, Grandia, Xenosaga, all of that. Several of these were still in the shrink-wrap – I had never even booted them up.
It took me a few years to get there, but over the base 2+ years I’ve begun to sell some of these off. The rarest and most expensive ones were easy – $50-$100 for a game I haven’t played, and probably won’t get to play? Sure. It’s harder to justify letting a game go for $5; given eBay fees, it hardly seems worth it. Still, I’ve cut my collection by quite a bit.
With the new year, plenty of bloggers (like Bhagpuss) have discussed large numbers of games that they want to cover. I’m trying to avoid setting goals like those – if anything, I’m purposing to take a critical eye towards the rest of my collection and figure out what I can sell. I’m also hoping that this blog might give me a way to chronicle my experiences with some games – maybe if I write about it, I’ll feel more ready to part with it.