The Mass Genesis Exodus

(This is a long entry that talks about videogames. You have been warned.)

I started collecting Sega Genesis games back in 2003, shortly after stumbling across the Digital Press website and attending the first Oklahoma Videogame Expo. Those two events drug me into the world of what people refer to as “retrogaming.” By definition a retrogamer is a person who plays, enjoys and typically collects “old” games. There are two basic groups of retrogamers — those who discover old games and systems, and those who bought them when they were new and never let go of them. I’m definitely a member of the latter. Some of the Atari 2600 games sitting on my shelf today are the same physical cartridges my parents bought for me back in the late 70s. For years, I didn’t even know I was a retrogamer — I thought I was just a guy who liked to play old games, and didn’t throw things away. Go figure!

Before 2003, most of the old gaming systems I owned and played were ones I had bought new. I hadn’t purchased an old NES deck because of some sudden interest in retrogaming — the NES I owned was the same one I owned as a kid. In fact, somehow, I had ended up with four systems: my old one, Susan’s old one, and a couple I’d picked up as spares from thrift stores along the way. This is course was before eBay came along and disrupted the videogame ecosystem, but I digress.

As I am wont to do, in 2003 I discovered this whole new world of retrogaming and I got excited. I drug things out of closets and the garage, hooked up old systems, drug old out games, and stacked shelves everywhere as a public testament to my gaming loyalty. I displayed my shelves full of games as a badge of honor, a testament to my loyalty to gaming. I like gaming “this” much. Through this new community I found others who liked retrogaming too — and based on the size of their collections, they liked it more than I did.

And so, I started buying, mostly games for systems I already owned. I bought Atari games, and Nintendo games, and a lot of old PC games. I stacked these games on my shelves. When people would come over I would point to the games and say, “I like gaming that much.”

If I could put my finger on when the downward spiral began, it would be when I acquired a Sega Genesis. I didn’t even buy it; my friend FalseGod gave me his old one along with half a dozen games. I never owned a Genesis as a kid and I didn’t have any friends who had one either. If I could pinpoint the specific moment in which I began collecting for the sake of collecting, it would be that moment. I didn’t want a Genesis because I liked playing it; I wanted one because I didn’t have one. Shortly after acquiring the Genesis I began buying games for it. It began, as many collections do, via eBay — a purchase of thirty or so games from a local seller kickstarted my collection. Over the next several years, through a combination of garage sales, thrift store finds and eBay purchases, my collection of Genesis games grew to over 200.

I never played a single one of them. Ever. I may have tested one or two of them just to make sure they worked, but — well, here’s my dirty little secret (actually, if you know me at all, it’s no secret): I was raised on piracy. Essentially all computer users of the 80s were. As young kids we swapped and traded games all day long, building huge empires of copied games on cheap floppy disks. For me — the real me — gaming has always been about the games, not the boxes, or the manuals, or the packaging. That stuff is interesting to me in part because, for the most part, I never had it when it came to PC games.

The Sega Genesis is not a particularly difficult machine to emulate. We’ve had Genesis emulators for the PC now for over ten years (KGen and Genecyst both date back to 1997). Several Genesis emulators were released for home consoles such as the Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox as well as for the PSP, Nintendo DS and GamePark systems. In short, anyone with enough processing power to read this post has the ability to download, run and play any Sega Genesis game ever released, for free.

For those who feel that emulation is not “real” enough let me throw this one at you — I own both a Genesis console copier, and a Tototek Genesis flash card. Both of these devices allow me to transfer and play Sega Genesis ROMs on a real Sega Genesis. That’s about as real as it gets.

Those boxed Sega Genesis games sure did look good on my shelf, but I have come to a couple of realizations. The first is, I have never, nor will I ever, play those games. Period. I just won’t. The second is, the game collecting scene has changed in such a way that it is no longer fun to me. I never enjoyed playing Genesis games; I enjoyed hunting for them. I enjoyed visiting those garage sales and thrift stores in hopes of finding a game I didn’t have. Those days are over. Except in rare occasions, games aren’t making it to the sales floor any longer — they’re being sold online. Or, if they do make it to the floor, they’re being quickly scooped up (sometimes by employees) and resold online. The days of building a sizable collection through physical hunting are dead.

My brain is complicated and twisted. Collecting tortures me. I love the hunt; I hate the spoils. I search for games and kick myself while buying them. My collection has grown to the point where I have erected shelves on every wall of every room that Susan will allow me to touch. Susan once noted, “If you had your way you would put shelves on every wall,” and she is probably right. What good is a collection that no one can see?

When I get overwhelmed by all my stuff, I deal with it in one of two ways: by buying more stuff (which makes no sense to me or anyone else) or by selling stuff. Overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have piled around me in my game room, I arbitrarily pointed to my Sega Genesis collection and announced, “You have been banished.”

I sold about a hundred games to a couple of fellow collectors. I did that deal in person, so no shipping was involved — awesome. I then sold another thirty or forty via online sales. The final hundred or so went via Craigslist this weekend to a nice couple of recently picked up one of those new clone systems that play both NES and Genesis games. For some reason I thought that was kind of neat — a couple, picking up used games and playing them together. Maybe I should buy a … nah.

The vast majority of my remaining gaming collection can be divided into five main categories: Atari 2600, NES, PC, Commodore 64, and “Virtual.”

The majority of my Atari 2600 and NES games are loose, and I have less than 200 of each. The odds of me playing any of them on vintage hardware are low; still, I find the thought of parting with them difficult. My justification for keeping them is that it would be expensive to replace them, and if I get too tired of them I could always box them up and stick them out in the garage.

My PC and C64 collections consist of mostly boxed games, maybe 100 PC games and less Commodore 64 games. While I might someday play some of these games, I will never play the disks that sit inside these boxes. I have copies of all of them. The boxes might as well be empty. I didn’t buy them to play the games, I bought them because I like the way they look on my shelves. That’s exactly why I started buying Genesis games, too. I have the same conflict as I do with the Atari 2600/NES stuff — monetarily it’s worth very little, but without spending a ton of money it would be difficult to replace the games. I like the way they look on the shelf, but I am running low on shelf space. Decisions, decisions.

The rest of my collection (and the vast majority of it at this point) is virtual — that is, ROMs for emulators, burned discs and downloaded games. I’m very happy with the situation at this point. I have virtual copies of every single Sega Genesis game sitting on my Xbox. The physical act of pulling a game off the shelf and inserting it into a console does nothing for me.

There is one other aspect of my collecting that I would like to tame — boxes. I have the original boxes for most of my gaming systems. I’m not just talking about stuff like the Wii or the PS3 — I have boxes for my Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, all my Commodore equipment, and so on. It’s a pointless collection of cardboard that takes up a ton of physical shelf space. I’m not mentally ready to part with those, either. I don’t know, I’m kooky.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the day I started collecting Sega Genesis games symbolized “something.” For a long time I didn’t know what that something was, but in retrospect, I think it was the beginning of collecting not for my own enjoyment, but to impress other people. I suspect that a year from now, I will look back at the sale of my Genesis collection as see the end of one phase and the beginning of another.