Turbo Boss Battle! Daily Gaming. Daily Exploding Shotgun Shells.

The Collector: My Collecting

Don't even try and talk to me about Greatest Hits

Collecting video games is an incredibly subjective undertaking. Most people collect because of nostalgia - the games they collect recalling a certain impressionistic, youthful part of their life. Other people collect because they get to a certain age where they can afford the items they couldn't when they were younger (and video games are expensive for kids). Still others collect because they know they can sell it to the aforementioned people for much more than it was initially worth.

Out of my friends, I don't have the biggest or most diverse collection of games (that goes to Alex). But I'm certainly the person with the most invested in a specific collection of old games. That collection is Playstation 1 RPG's.

So why do I collect these games? Video game collecting, for me, is certainly a combination of the aforementioned reasons. Video games were an intrinsic part of my childhood, so I am certainly nostalgic for the games I played when I was younger. Furthermore, I was never left wanting for a video game thanks to my loving parents (and my being an only child), but I still couldn't buy willy nilly every game I wanted, so there are gaps in the collection I have been eager to fill since middle school.

That said, one very simple reason for me collecting these games is that I still own all of the PS1 RPGs I did have, so I had a solid base to start off with. With only one exception (Legend of Dragoon, which I hated for some reason and banished from my sight), I kept every RPG I owned on Playstation. I traded all sorts of other games back to the store or to friends (who cares about collecting Twisted Metal clones?). Starting a collection is probably the hardest part, and many of the essentials of a PS1 RPG collection (even a Greatest Hits version of Final Fantasy VII) are so in-demand that the price hovers around $100 at non-eBay retailers. (So many parentheses.)

I went through a long, fallow period in high school where I didn't buy many video games. I partially blame the one-two punch of Final Fantasy X and Xenosaga for burying my love for RPGs under their gallons of shit. I also blame being a teen-ager: even though I was making money, I spent all of it on music and hip clothes. It wasn't until my temp job at an office the summer after my freshman year of college that I realized I could, nay MUST fulfil my destiny of owning every Playstation 1 JRPG made.

Send me your Jade Cocoons!

It's not worth pretending that the PS1-era JRPG category is actually a very obscure one. It's a very specific period that I am interested in, a period that I consider the apex of the genre, but also a period that saw the games at the height of their popularity. The market exploded open after Final Fantasy VII was a cross-over success, and there was just as many Final Fantasy-wannabe losers as there were eccentric role-playing gems. And it's not like I'm the only person I know with a copy of SaGa Frontier II (ok, bad example). I haven't decided if it is worth my money to own crap like Beyond the Beyond just because it is a PS1 RPG, but that is part of the fun.

I'd be lying if I said I've played all of these games I own through to completion. But I do cherish them, and I hesitate (forever!) to let anyone borrow a game from me. Just thinking about my copy of Final Fantasy IX - how cracked the case is, how it is missing the instruction booklet while having two disk #3's - sends my stomach to my feet.

So as you see, collecting is subjective and deeply emotional, and that's what I want to explore with this column (which I am announcing right here, right now). What drives the video game collector? Are they crazy? Why are they so cool?

Next: I share my actual collection!

About Paul

Paul has been playing games since he cut his teeth on an old Atari 2600 in the early 1990s. He has played every console generation since, and currently jams on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and DSi. He proudly does not own a Wii, and goes back and forth on whether he'd want a gaming PC (he did his fair share of Mac gaming back in the day though). Games-wise, Paul came up in the world a pretty big JRPG nerd, but now he's mellowed plays mostly anything good or weird. He does maintain a pretty impressive collection Playstation 1-era RPGs.