RF Generation Message Board

Awhile ago I got robbed and lost the vast majority of all my classic gaming collection. I wasn't reselling, and everything I had for the most part was played by me. But I had been collecting, refurbishing, and saving it up for about 30 years. I had a few titles on the ps1 that were both played and duplicate never opened (parents divorced, got 2 copies of some things, like Legend of Dragoon, Parasite Eve, and FF7). I have been debating the pros and cons of replacing what I lost with actual discs, cartridges, consoles, etc, and replacing (mainly the disc games and hard to find things) with some sort of alternate. Any thoughts on emulated versions (such as PS store) versus disc rot?

All ends up being a matter of personal preference. The digital items you own will eventually be lost one way or another. Service termination, delisted, etc

The physical items you own will eventually break but before that happens they can still be sold should you decide to do so.

sorry to hear about that! worst nightmare for any collector. if it happened to me, i think i would give up on collecting...the amount of investment into what i have is so high, it wouldn't be worth it imo to pay the same (or likely much more) to replace it all. i would of course get back any games that were really important to me, but that would probably be it.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, and my mindset is roughly where techwizard's is at. I've been a "budget" collector for pretty much all my life, collecting games at a very early age. I allowed an event to use my Sega collection some-odd 10+ years ago and most of it ended up stolen or missing, only jewel cases or keepboxes remained. For me, the SMS was an integral part of my childhood; other than the Atari 2600/7800, it was my first game console, so I have slowly been building that back up. But the dreamcast stuff? I can't really be arsed.

So, to re-word what's already been said....is having a physical item meaningful to you? Does it have to be the original item? Just how sentimental are you about it? If you just want to play the game, emulation may not be perfect, but honestly it's pretty good. If you're crazy for, say, Square RPGs, you may want to rebuild just that part of your collection.

Hopefully this helps you step through some of your thoughts!

on the positive side of things, it's a good opportunity to assess your previous collection and decide what was really important, and apply your current standards to all areas of your collection. what you do rebuild will be a lot better than what was lost, in theory.

Personally, it's all about how you prefer to consume your media and the memories behind it. If you prefer to play your games on the original systems, to have the original experience, then you'd want physical. If you just want to play on your modern hardware, you probably want digital.

Physical will "always exist", until it breaks. Digital can have a myriad of things happen to prevent you from playing, or owning, the game years after. I personally prefer physical because I enjoy the original experience, and if something happens I can sell it. Digital will likely be cheaper, but it's not like you can sell it after it has appreciated in value.

Sorry to hear about your collection being stolen!  Such a terrible thing to happen, especially when you've curated it over that long a stretch.  My view is, just start collecting again.  Sure, it's an investment, and some of the stuff, should you decide to re-acquire it, will be quite costly, but to me, the experience of hunting the stuff down and getting it into my hands (or back into my hands, for stuff I traded/sold/lost as a kid) is part of the overall collecting experience.  Emulation is great, and I use that to play games quite a bit for convenience, but nothing beats having the physical copy of something that you can use whenever you please.