[img width=700 height=457]https://c4.staticflickr.com/6/5721/31347247235_99fd5303a4_c.jpg[/img]Back around 2004 I ordered my first box of NES games off of Ebay. There were about 40 games in it and it cost me around $100. I was mostly trying to acquire some games I had as a kid like
Hydlide,
Karnov,
Ninja Gaiden and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was very cool to explore other games that I didn't even know existed that also came in the box, including unusual games like
Chiller, hidden gems like
Kickle Cubicle, and classics like
Contra. In retrospect, it was an amazing deal, but I didn't know that at the time. I had just picked up a cheap NES at a local Pawn Shop and was looking for some software to play on it...simple as that. After enjoying the next couple of weeks of immensely exploring each and every title in the box, I realized I had awakened something I didn't know was inside me.
Shortly after that initial Ebay purchase, I bought a Virtual Boy and Sega Saturn bundle on Ebay. Each purchase came with the system, as well as a few games to try out. These were two consoles I had pleaded with my parents to purchase for me, and they (probably wisely) declined to help me obtain them. Finally, it was my chance to experience them. Soon after, the research started: What other NES games are there? What systems did I miss out on completely? Who can I talk to about this kind of stuff? These questions led to many of my still favorite areas of the internet, including RF Generation and Nintendo Age. I very naively decided that I should get all the other NES games that I was reading about and it sounded like there were a lot of cool ones I had completely missed out on. I figured this would take me a year at most and then I'd sell off the ones I didn't enjoy and move over to SNES and do the same.
My journey ended up taking around 10 years of garage sale hunting, tireless nights scanning kijiji/craigslist ads, obsessive pawn shop/thift store shopping, what seemed like endless trading and selling of doubles, making awesome friends online that helped each other look for elusive items, taking advantage of game stores when travelling, hitting up flea markets when the opportunity arose, buying the occasional game online, and finally opening up my own store (which caused the local flow of games to mainly funnel right through me) to finish. I was so fortunate to end my licensed NES journey through the sheer generosity of the amazing community here when my lovely friends from RFGen pooled their resources together and purchased me the final game I needed to complete my set, the appropriately named Ubisoft version of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was an amazing journey. I invested what a lot of people might consider an unreasonable amount of time, energy and definitely money into this decade long obsession.
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This is what I wanted out of my gaming friends when I was a teenager, not so much these daysI don't regret a second of it though. What started off with the simple concept of "I wanna play some new cool games from this era I grew up in" ended up being an amazing journey that has played an unexpectedly significant role in my life. It lead me to start a now award winning, local small business. It opened up my once introverted self to many new social experiences. It threw open many doors of opportunity and gave me a ridiculous amount of awesome entertainment to consume. But most importantly, I've made lifelong friends, both local and online through our initial bonding over a shared passion for video games. What started simply as conversations about, "How do you beat Battletoads?", "Do you have
TMNT III for trade?", or "Why does my system keep blinking!?!?!", evolved into meaningful and lasting friendships. We can now share pictures and anecdotes about our children, look for a comforting shoulder when working through a setback or loss in our life, support each other through challenges, ask advice when exploring unknown waters, and still help each other find that copy of
Little Samson or fail miserably at
Double Dragon II together.
After finishing my NES set, I didn't pause for a second with my collecting. As of this writing, I'm three games away from a full Turbografx 16 set, three games short of a CIB Virtual Boy set, closing the gap on complete SNES and Dreamcast collections, I just broke the halfway mark on the staggering PS2 set, and am always chipping away at subsets for a variety of systems. What's the appeal of a full set some ask? For me the answer is two fold. To explore the library and discover new and interesting games, but more importantly, I'm just excited to see where it takes me.
