Collecting Goals

Time to state the obvious: In collecting, it helps to have specific goals.

"But I want it all!" you say, trying to stuff yet another RCA Studio II cart into your cramped apartment.  More power to you, I say.  But trying to collect everything is probably destined to result in disappointment, which will manifest itself should you ever get around to actually playing that Studio II cart.  You have to narrow down your focus.

I think most retro game collectors who, like me, gave away their original childhood collection (in my case, not with my full consent) often start with the idea of recreating it.  I know that was one of my earliest collecting goals, but now I've pretty much achieved it – albeit with some caveats that I'll go into in another blog post.

After that, where do you go?  Well, an obvious choice to get the games you always wanted "back in the day" but never managed to obtain. I expect that for many collectors, that won't be too difficult.  The games you probably most wanted back then were the well-advertised, popular ones – in other words, the ones that are now common.  When I was a kid, I didn't have Space Invaders for the Atari 2600.  I played it at my cousin's house a couple of times, and loved it.  With all its variations and options, I daresay it's more fun than the original arcade version!  Back then, I longed for that marching, invading phalanx with every fiber of my 8-year-old being, but I never got it.  Now, I've had so many extra Space Invaders cartridges pass through my collection that I probably could have built a second house with the things.

Once you get what you've always wanted, you can start looking for the fun-but-obscure titles that everybody else wants.  I'm referring here to the great games you never heard of back in the day.  Even if you were incredibly well-informed years ago, I'm betting there's plenty of stuff you missed.  After all, what did you have to go on back then?  Your friends, playground gossip, maybe a subscription to Electronic Games magazine?  Today, the Internet makes it possible to be entire orders of magnitude better-informed than back in those days.  It won't take more than casual searching to discover a whole bunch of great old stuff that is new to you.

But eventually you might exhaust even that avenue.  After 17 years of collecting, I feel I have, or at least am closing in on it.  So to avoid aimless collecting, I need to find a new quest (or series of quests).  I think I have, but I'll go into it in a later post.