Whether we call them ‘games’, ‘computer games’ or ‘video games’ this is a hobby that entails so many types of games and experiences that its just vast, in fact the biggest entertainment industry ever. So its no surprise that there are a huge amount of gamers that play games and also may collect games at some point in their gaming journey.
Like me for instance, I’ve had my boots firmly in gaming since 1982, and always had a good amount of games to play for the gaming system of my choice at any given point in time. however normally, like most people I guess when it comes time to get that new system that’s all over the TV ads, it’s time to sell our old gaming rig to buy the new X-bit gaming system that all the cool kids are playing!
It sounds like a simple choice doesn’t it? However there are always games on old systems that still hold dear in our gaming experiences, are we going to miss them? probably. yes. They are games that have entertainment value and hours of time put into them and skill gained in playing them. Nagging us in our mind is will the old games make their way onto the new systems? will the new system have enough games initially to quench my gaming thirst! That new system looks soo shiny, I need it! Simply that is a difficult choice that any long term gamer has to make at some point.
Travel many years forward to the end of the long reign for the 7th Generation Consoles (Microsoft Xbox360, PlayStation 3 & Wii U) and the new contenders enter the arena for the gaming generation crown, that is the Xbox One and PS4. No doubt these consoles are the next best in Gaming with 1080p 60fps promised. BUT for me, I sensed the end of traditional gaming, disc > Console > Play would now be digital games, downloads and DRM being added to games and systems (xbox one release had a big backlash from gamers), I still got an Xbox one but a few years in and I started to realise that I missed that quick experience of putting a disc in just playing a game.
It was at this point I thought that I needed to revisit the old systems that I missed, and games I hadn’t played. At this point my game collection was born and I was still into collecting other things , Lego was on of them. But for me re-visiting old games bought back old memories and missed gaming opportunities. On that day my game collection began.
The picture above is the early days of my gaming set-up small, but functional because at the end of the day I like to play games, I love the immersion, story telling, emotions and the excitement that a game brings to entertain you. This story will have many episodes with a few surprises along the way and some failures. The journey of my game collecting has been a zig – zag of direction changes, a few regrets but a whole heap of fun!
