I've been selling my video game collection

I started collecting retro games in the mid to late 2000s. I've always had a fondness for older games, but now I had me a pitiful little job at the mall and some disposable income coming in. What did I spend this money on? Cheap old video games!

It feels odd to reminisce about now, but there was a time where you could actually walk into a Goodwill or Salvation Army store and get Actual Factual Good video games for dirt cheap. While writing this I finally pulled the $3.00 sticker off my Streets of Rage cartridge. Garage sales and secondhand stores like Movie Trading Company and Half Price Books were also great places to find old video games. Even Ebay prices were decent; higher than secondhand stores, but still way lower than anything you'd see today.

What I'm trying to get at with this lengthy preamble is that I had a BUNCH of old games. Which is cool, when you want to admire several shelves filled with cartridges and jewel cases. But how much of my living space do I want to devote to several shelves of video games? And what if I want to use those shelves to show off other things I enjoy? I wish I had infinite space and infinite shelves to house every little infatuation I have, but I don't.

And let's be honest: I just don't play these games as often as I should anymore. Emulation has gotten outstandingly good since 2007, and when I have an itch to play something like Kirby's Dreamland 3 or Um Jammer Lammy, more often than not I'm hopping onto my MiSTer rather than getting a game off the shelf.

Actually, those games were bad examples. I am still very much keeping my copies of Kirby's Dreamland 3 and Lammy. I'm mostly culling my collection down to only the games that "spark joy" or whatever you want to call it. Why do I have two copies of Low G Man? Why do I have any copies of Low G Man, to be honest. I'm starting with the cartridge games, because emulation of these games has reached parity with the real thing. I'll probably hold onto anything PS2 and beyond, because it still feels like emulation on those systems isn't 100% perfect yet. Maybe a decade from now things will be better and I won't feel compelled to keep my copy of Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron.

This isn't a decision I came to lightly. It's not like I woke up the other day and said "who needs all these Intellivision carts?". This has been something rattling around the ol' brain box for a couple of years now. The only thing that has stopped me is the obscene price of retro games nowadays. Games I originally bought 20 years ago for $7 are now nearly $100. If I regret selling anything, I'm gonna have to pay a pretty penny to get it back.

But I think I'll be okay. So far I haven't regretted anything I've sold. It's not like I had a full library of any system, I've never been a completionist. But I did have a major weakness for buying any game I could just because it was dirt cheap. And at this point in my life I think I'd rather have a paired-down collection of games that really truly mean something to me rather than shelf after shelf after shelf of games that I've toyed around with for 20-ish minutes.