What got you in to collecting?

I am not sure if this has been done before but I just thought it would be neat to hear why and how some of you got in to collecting. I am sorry if this has already been asked....

I guess I can start this off by telling why I started

When I was younger my aunt raised me and she spent a lot of times playing games in the afternoon. Most of my memories was of her sitting in the kitchen playing Earthbound or FF3 on super nes. At the time I thought them games where dumb. Only games I liked back then was mortal Kombat 2 and Rock & Roll racing, but anyways back about 6 years ago my aunt died of cancer and so I decided to pick up Earthbound and play it since it was her fav game and I was hooked. only problem is I moved back in with my Mother at the time and a week or two after she died everyone living in the house moved. Hear is the problem instead of putting the games up they threw them all away. Some of the games that got thrown out where earthbound, Chrono trigger, Secrets of evermore and mania, breath of fire, different zelda games, and a bunch of other great RPGS. So this lead me to rebuilding the collection then lead me in to collecting games and systems that we could not afford growing up. Now I am just addicted.

 

OCD

 

For me it started off as more of a hoarding thing, I never wanted to let go of any of my game related stuff. then I started to give stuff away to my younger cousins and friends. After a while I realized I had a lot of cool stuff I just gave away, and decided to start keeping everything again.

Then I found the internet... Actually I found out more about what it was capable of. I started seeing pictures and reading descriptions of all these games and consoles. Games that I had and later found were rare (like final fantasy 7, I threw my first copy away :-0OH::-banghead and the consoles that were available in awesome colors, (like my green gameboy pocket I gave to my cousin who in turn left it on the drive way and well... you know...)

So now I collect nintendo and sony consoles in colors people usually dont see or know about. My first was my ceramic white psp. At the time, there was only the regular black one. I loved showing that thing off in school, was a sophomore in high school at the time. Even when I wasnt trying to show it off, I still got a lot of stares. Still have this psp, still in excellent shape with minimal scratches. But now I have so much more too.

 

FF7 isn't rare, it just goes for more than most games from that era because its desirable .

 

Exactly

 

You said rare, so you cant say "exactly"

Rare and desirable are different.

iPhone is desirable and sells for a lot, but it is not rare.

 

Obsession. Nice and simple.

 

Seeing other people's collections.

 

3DO nostalgia and stuff I couldn't afford as a kid

 

Always pissed me off, got too jealous.

 

Packaging / Discounts / Buzz from buying things not for sale / OCD

 

Being able to afford all the stuff you dreamed of as a kid. And still being kid enough to go for it.

 

A ton of reasons:

love for games
interest in preserving stuff
having games/consoles I desired as a child
...and of course, ye olde OCD

Sometimes I find myself enjoying collecting, organizing and cataloguing more than playing games, as I recently have not much time for that.

 

I began to buy games for Master System to my school friends about 15 years ago and I have been collecting since that time, because videogames are maybe one the most incredible remember from my childhood y one of my favourite hobbies today.

 

So I bought this BC PS3 from a mate for 50AUD. It had a broken laser, so I ordered one and fixed it, but it broke again like 5 minutes later. I got a "professional" to do it, thinking I did something wrong (never doing that again), and had a working PS3. I didn't play it much, but instead spent most of my time hacking it. In the end I ended up corrupting it's NAND and killing it.

This basically broke my heart and led me to want to get old consoles that just worked. Simple as that. Now I have about 14 consoles, and that poor PS3 just sits on my shelf buried by all my new (or should I say old) things. Mostly a Nintendo collecter, wanting to get into Atari and Sega (really need a Mega Drive/Genesis)

 

Ikaruga -> Shooting Games -> Dreamcast Games -> Japanese Dreamcast Games -> Shooting Games for other consoles -> Sega Saturn -> PC-Engine -> Japanese Games in general -> Anticipating complete collections

And that's where I'm now

 

Nostalgia and good memories from childhood...

 

Toy envy when I was a kid.

Most of the kids at school either had a Playstation or a Sega Genesis, I had a PC, but my parents wouldn't buy me any games for it, and when I asked for a PS1, they said it was too expensive. Thankfully, a friend of my brother got a CD Writer in 1998, he gave me a CD that was full of DOS classics like Doom, Indiana Jones, etc., and my godmother gave me a Sega Genesis for my birthday in 2001.

Even though I had a lot of fun with a bunch of DOS games and the Sega Genesis, I still resent the fact that I missed so many classic during the 90s, so now I collect consoles and games that I didn't have the chance to play when I was a kid.

 

Nostagia from i time ive never lived in, but would like if i could.

Games that i may never be able to enjoy in the future lost in time.

And its one of the few things thats keep my sanity level at an accepted level. i Would go crazy with so much hypocrisy and alienism in this world...