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Through some relatively recent unfortunate financial circumstances, I was compelled to sell off my copy of Stadium Events for the NES. My journey to complete my NES collection and the fact that I'm just a handful of titles away from having all the unlicensed games as well, made it quite a difficult decision to let go of this game. A brief little background for those unfamiliar, but it took me nearly 10 years to gather a copy of each licensed NES game. This journey lead me to meet many friends over the years, some from RFGen, NintendoAge, Facebook, locally and many other areas that helped me reach this achievement. The final game to cap off my collection was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Ubisoft) and it was sent to me as a surprise when a group of amazing buddies on RF Generation pooled their resources to purchase me a copy and send it along with a card signed by each contributor's signature. It was truly the perfect end to a fantastic journey and has held a special place in my home for the last several years. The recent selling of this single game however has me really contemplating what and how I plan to collect going forward. This may have changed my overall approach to collecting.



After completing my NES collection, the next logical step was to see what other sets I'd enjoy collecting for and start completing those. TG16 was an easy one for me to jump into as it is a very small set with a lot of games that I enjoy playing. I had already owned about one third of the set before I even considered going for all of them anyway, so why not? It took me about another 2 years after finishing up with my NES set to complete that one. Dreamcast seemed achievable and has a good variety of quirky gems in it's library too, so I've been plugging away at that one and am quite close to a full set there as well. SNES is one of my favorite systems, and although it has a larger library, it's got a ton of stuff I havn't played yet that I think I'd enjoy. After knocking off nearly all the most challenging titles, I've been slowly picking away at the library to the point the end is nearly in reach. CIB Virtual Boy collection? Easy peasy compared to any of these other sets I'm working towards, plus I actually enjoy playing the system. I've never collected for a system as it was actively sold at retail, so going for a full Wii U set seemed like it could be a neat change of pace. Fast forward to now, and I'm in the home stretch of that console also. These all seemed pretty easy and all were closing in on being done so why not look for a real challenge on another console I love? Enter PS2 full set collecting. Late last year, I passed the halfway mark on the PS2 set and am now well over 1000 titles into the system.

As I look at my now incomplete NES collection and realize that it will likely never be complete again, I begin to wonder if I want to continue on my quest of full set domination. While I've greatly enjoyed it and don't regret a second of it, I feel like that part of my journey may have passed and it took a significant event like this for me to realize it. The collecting landscape has changed so much in recent years. There are no more games while garage sale-ing in my area. Pawn shops are devoid of carts and just full of modern generation sports games and shooters. I'm in far too isolated of a community to enjoy retro conventions without significant travel costs. Facebook groups have overtaken craigslist/kijiji and vgpc/gamevaluesnow/lukiegames and other sites have all but ensured that deals are next to impossible to be had for those on a budget unlike the old days. Even shipping costs and the comparatively weak Canadian dollar have made it prohibitively challenging to order online. Most new games coming out are becoming less and less appealing to me with games selling me only a fraction of the content I'm used to receiving up front and promising to charge me more for those extra characters or missions down the road or have just gone straight to digital only. I'm in a weird spot right now where the older stuff I want is hard to get , expensive or both, and the newer stuff is becoming less and less appealing at an accelerated rate. What's a collector to do?

Even at well over 6500 titles in my collection, I've got a pretty extensive wishlist that I'd like to work towards filling, as well as many items of which I'd like to upgrade the completeness or condition. The idea I keep coming back to lately is to make a shift from collector to curator. This would mean going through my full sets and nearly full sets, and in some cases even my entire library for certain consoles, and make a massive purge. I would keep only my favorites and use the funds from the purged items to make a big dent into my wishlist. This idea has been rattling around in my mind since I had to let go of my Stadium Events several weeks ago and I've been looking for a way to continue to enjoy my hobby of collecting and gaming.

This blog is more or less me just working through this idea out loud and as I spend the next two weeks on vacation traveling around with my family. I plan to come to a decision of how to proceed by the time I return home. Any advice or feedback will be taken into consideration, but I'm also just curious to know if any of you guys are feeling the same way about collecting in recent years.

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