Recently, I finished a decade long goal of mine and obtained a copy of each and every licensed NES title. With how important communities like rfgeneration, nintendoage and racketboy have been during that quest, it seems fitting that I take some time to give a proper thank you to those that have helped me along this path. With today coincidentally being both the anniversary of the NES in North America and my birthday (pretty cool, eh?), it feels appropriate to chronicle my journey to 677 Nintendo games.






Back in 2002, I was newly graduated from high school and finally had the opportunity to leave home and strike out on my own. It seemed implied previously for a couple of years, but now there was no contest that my families NES now belonged solely to me and I took it with me as I began my adult life. I didn't own much for it at the time, not even a handful of games, but I did have one of the most important games I've ever experienced to start me on my path. A weathered, well loved copy of Mega Man 3.

After a couple years, I was living in a new city and buying up new games for old systems as the chance arose. There are not too many opportunities to do so this far north, so it was a slow burn. But even at this slow pace, I began to notice my collection was far bigger than all my friends, sitting somewhere at around 200 games across a variety of systems around 2004. At this point, I decided to try searching down new gaming experiences that I'd missed out on such as a Sega Saturn and a Virtual Boy. After enjoying missed oddities, I also wanted to revisit childhood favorites. We were always several years behind current gaming trends as a kid, so that meant mostly NES games for me. I had success getting nice little starter lots on Ebay for the previously mentioned systems, so I thought I'd try my luck at finding a large lot of NES games that included some of my old favorites. I eventually found a 50 game lot that included a few of the titles that I had either owned or rented including: Hydlide, Karnov, Totally Rad, and Dash Galaxy. Not the greatest games, I'll admit, but games that held a special significance for me. After playing my fill of those 4 games, I eventually decided to see what other gems might have arrived in the lot. Much to my surprise there were some fantastic and unique titles to dig into such as Chiller, Gargoyle's Quest II and Rad Racer. Why hadn't I heard of any of these games prior?

This was literally the point where I decided to continue buying as many NES games as I could in order to find more interesting games that I hadn't yet had the chance to try myself. This was during the rise of emulation that nearly all my friends were content with enjoying, but even that early novelty didn't sit well with me and I felt the desire to play these games on their original hardware. I came to the naive conclusion that I wanted to own all of the NES games that came out. I figured I'd have the whole set within 1-2 years and then I could probably move onto the next interesting system, such as SNES, and get them all about as quickly. At the time, I knew almost nothing about the number of games released or how challenging or expensive some of the titles would be to acquire.


People that were using eBay many years ago, will remember that it was relatively easy to find great deals on video games pretty much daily with very little effort. With no local retro game stores for me to take advantage of, I started scooping up single titles online that I remembered playing at friends' houses. Games like: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninja Gaiden, Little Nemo, Duck Tales, and Bubble Bobble.

Around late 2006 early 2007 I started stumbling across websites dedicated to old video games. The most significant being rfgeneration. I lurked for many months before joining in April 2008. Here, I learned about new outlets to buy games from. For me, the most fun was garage sales and pawn shops. After getting praise for posting a small score about a great NES/Genesis (Mega Man 2, Earthworm Jim, and boxed consoles for both systems) lot I had picked up from a local garage sale, I was pumped to keep searching locally. After getting a cheap N64 that was missing the AV Cables, I posted on the site that I was in need of such a cable. I was promptly "hooked up" by a friendly member and that concluded my first ever financial transaction through an online forum. It was so casual and friendly that it emulated that local experience for me. I now had yet another outlet to find the awesome gaming stuff that I was constantly hunting for!

2007 also happened to be the year that I got married. As with most people who get married, priorities change. I used to have several other hobbies that also demanded my money and attention. With the goal of starting a family and purchasing a home, it became apparent that I wouldn't have as much money to spend as I used to. I was having far too much fun playing and collecting games, so I dropped and sold off a couple other hobbies and let video games be the big focus. This was also the point I cut my spending budget drastically. For the next 2 years, I would be on a $20 a pay period budget to purchase games with. This meant that I would have to drop a lot of the online purchases and spend more time hunting for local deals. I had a daily ritual of stopping at 4 different pawn shops just before I started work each day. It was slow progress, but I was able to find a lot of great deals on games I hadn't owned yet including gems like Dragon Warrior II, III, IV, Rainbow Islands, Castlevania III and Ninja Gaiden III.

By the end of 2007, we had purchased our first home, a small trailer on the outskirts of town. We were also expecting our first child to be born in the spring of 2008. My son was born in May and definitely cut down on the hunting. At first, I tried to take him garage sale-ing with me, but it was apparent early on that it was not a good idea. So I took a little break from the hunt, only leaving early once a week to check out the pawn shops now, and enjoyed the time at home with my new family.


With our tight budget over the last few years and a little help from family, we were able to sell our trailer at a profit and move into a house part way through 2009; a house that we still live in and love. This was particularly exciting for myself as it presented the first opportunity to have my very own game room. I used my blog here on rfgen to chronicle the construction of the room from start to finish. During my birthday in 2009, I decided to treat myself to something special for sticking to my small budget for so long and found a copy of Little Samson online to add to my collection.

With our envisioned life coming together, we finally had a little more freedom with the budget and I was able to start doing more purchasing. Whenever I had the funds available, I would either buy myself another of the pricier NES titles, as I noticed them quickly climbing in value and wanted to get some of the more challenging titles before they grew to be too much of a hindrance, or purchase a lot of 20 or more games that were missing from my collection at a time through forums. With Little Samson being the first of the bigger purchases for me I started compiling a list of other games I wanted to grab before they exploded in price and also of games that I was still very keen to play. I did my first Nintendoage transaction and bought myself some old childhood favorites that were still missing from the collection, Adventures of Lolo 1-3 CIB. Through Nintendoage as well the following year, I was able to grab some big games like: Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, Chip n' Dale 2, and Duck Tales 2.

By the summer of 2011, after pushing my WTB thread on racketboy, nintendoage, and rgeneration, and scouring eBay with my free time, I was able to knock off a lot of my heavy hitter list including titles like: Fire n Ice, Bubble Bobble 2, Bonk's Adventure, RC Pro Am II, Contra Force, Panic Restaurant, and Power Blade 2. Since I was still looking for deals at this time, I was able to snag a relatively cheap BIN on Snow Bros. and Zombie Nation that had no pictures in the listing. Both were risky, but turned out well in the end and saved me some serious $$$.

Around this time, I also made one of the only transactions through a forum that I was not satisfied with. A member on nintendoage was selling many pretty hard to find games and I had the opportunity to purchase several of them at once.  The lot consisted of: Chubby Cherub, Color a Dinosaur, DK Jr. Math, Gemfire, Godzilla 2, Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, King's Quest V, Paperboy 2, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, Pro Sports Hockey, and Wizardy II. This was a great opportunity to purchase a lot of really challenging to find games at the same time. When they arrived there was severe label damage on Gemfire and minor damage on DK JR Math and Pro Sports Hockey, none of which were mentioned previously. To this day, I still need to find another copy of Gemfire to upgrade the condition of my cart.

The start of 2011 was also the time I noticed that I was buying games far faster than I was playing them, a common problem for us collectors. So I decided to try and change that and challenged myself to beating 100 NES games over a period of 100 days. I had a ton of fun doing so and eventually challenged myself to doing a different 100 games over another 100 day period. To date, I've beaten 326 of my NES games and have the videos uploaded to YouTube as proof.

During early 2012, my family and I were able to go on our first big trip together and we chose Orlando Florida as the destination. One of the prominent members here at rfgen, Shadow_Kisuragi, was kind enough to get me a tour of his then place of employment, EA Games. And on top of that, he invited me into his home to play some games and even took me out to the flea markets, which we didn't have available back home. I ended up checking a HUGE duffle bag full of uncommon titles on the plane ride home from a very successful day at the flea market. I left with many games I wanted, such as: Qix, Kickmaster, Whomp 'Em, Golf Grand Slam, Dragon Strike, Slalom, Ghost Lion, Darkwing Duck and Krion Conquest.

That trip to Florida was kind of a reward. My wife and I had recently just paid off all of our debt, with the exception of our mortgage. We both decided to splurge and treat ourselves to something. My wife chose the trip and I used mine on something a bit more selfish. After seeing the last few copies of Stadium Events continue to climb, I felt that it was quickly getting out of my reach. This was likely going to be my last opportunity to pick one up if they kept rising. With that in mind, I started hunting for a copy I could afford. Enter Skyjing! I mentioned above that I'd taken a chance on a couple risky eBay listings and they had turned out well. Well here was yet another risky auction, but this time instead of gambling with $100 or less, it would be much closer to $2K. I decided to go for it. At this point, I still needed around 150 more games for my set. Luckily this was the last BIG game, all of the other notoriously expensive or rare games I'd already obtained. This was the point where I felt I had my goal of a licensed set in the bag and it was just a matter of time.



My in-laws mostly live in Edmonton, which gives us a great reason to visit annually. During one such visit, I was in contact with a nintendoage member by the name of Krunch. We made plans to hang out and go game hunting. The publisher that I was missing the most games from happened to be KOEI, so I made it a goal to grab any KOEI game that I was still in need of during my trip. We went to several game stores, pawn shops, a flea market, an antique mall and even some kijiji meet ups. I was able to grab several games from my list, but so far it was stuff like Magic Darts and Fist of the North Star.......not anything exciting like a KOEI game . During our last stop to his favorite local game store, I got to chatting with the owner after picking up several games. It was a great conversation that ended up scoring me a very cheap Vectrex. But more importantly he also had a copy of L'Empereur hidden away!!!

I had all but exhausted my local haunts and was patiently waiting for deals online that I could afford. While waiting for the next affordable Dragon Fighter or Sword Master to show up I posted a local ad looking to cross off anymore games from my list locally that I could. I only got one response, and it turned out to be from my neighbor. He showed up with a nice shiny copy of Cowboy Kid in his hand and gave me a fantastic deal on it

Over the next year, I slow picked off a few more titles getting my set pretty close to 100 games remaining. During that time, I also decided that this city finally needed a proper game store. On September 1, 2013, I opened my own video game store locally and the community here had a great response. During the first few months, I found all sorts of new gamers to talk about collecting with. Several of them were intrigued with how close I was to having all the games in a licensed set. Lucky for me, a few of them were also travelers. When they went to other cities such as Vancouver, Edmonton and Seattle, they would have a copy of my list and were hunting for me. Before too long, I had a couple dozen more games brought to me dropping my list even further.

With the list getting closer and closer, I made less of an effort to pick up games on other consoles, since in the past, I had focused a lot harder, and almost solely, on NES collecting. I was able to grab up a couple bundles of games off of Nintendoage members who were selling groups of games I was still in need of. It was a really great feeling to be able to purchase 8 or more games at a time on my list , when the list was getting so small. At the same time, I was once more scouring eBay daily for several of the harder to find titles left on my list. In a few instances, I was able to find a good price on a game, but the seller wouldn't ship to Canada. Singlebanana and Duke.Togo stepped up and helped me out as shipping proxies more than once.

As I was getting closer and closer, I was given the opportunity from another rfgen member to buy a large NES collection within Canada. Our own Robotcowhand put me in touch with a co-worker of his who was selling off a 400+ lot of NES games...... with no doubles!! He happened to have 7 of the titles I was still hunting for at a time when I was looking for less than 10 games! So after a long process I was able to negotiate a deal with him with a majority of the games coming for the store, a few titles put aside for some friends, and those 7 titles staying at home with me. Fleach happened to be heading across the country for a personal visit and also lived quite close to the guy I was buying from. He was generous enough to meet up with him, broker the deal on my behalf, and then transport all those NES games across the country for me... what a guy!! With these games and just a few others that had also recently arrived, I was down to my final remaining game, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by Ubisoft (a fitting title!).

At the time I needed this game, it could be bought on eBay for around $100+ shipping if I desired and had the money. With all the spending I'd been doing and just the thought of how I wanted to end my NES journey, I decided buying the last game off eBay, or even a forum seemed anti-climactic. I decided to wait until I could obtain a copy locally, in person. I wasn't too concerned with how long that would take, I was so close I could feel it. I still had a few friends searching for a copy for me when they went on trips down south or across the border, so I was confident it wouldn't take too long. After what seemed like forever, because of the pace I had been obtaining games recently, I got a text message from singlebanana saying that I didn't need to worry about finding a copy of The Last Crusade anymore, but he wouldn't give up any extra info on it. So I waited patiently. A few weeks later, EngineerMike came into my store with a Batman gift bag and offered it to me as a present. I eagerly dug in not knowing what to expect. In it was a few other games I had been looking for on different systems, but in the bottom of the bag was the real treasure........

Neatly gift wrapped with a card attached to it was a nice shiny copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Ubisoft)!!! The last piece of my journey was simply handed over to me as a gift. As I read the card and note that accompanied this amazing present, I was filled with excitement, joy, pride and many other feelings all at once. A group of rfgeneration members had each chipped in their own money to help me achieve my long time goal. It was a spectacular way to end my quest and really reinforced what I've felt for a long time, these communities are about more than just collecting games.


I've been here long enough that I've got to see some of you guys get married, start families, buy homes and achieve your own personal goals, both short and long term. Some of you I consider close friends and hope to continue enjoying your company for as long as I'm alive. Its been a true pleasure and I'm thankful I stumbled across such an amazing community all of those years ago. 

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