Emerging from the Shadows

I’ve been quiet lately, and with good reason.  In my last post, I alluded to the possibility of buying up a friend’s enormous video game collection, and that has happened.  Between being up to my eyes in work and trying to sort through and clean up almost two truckloads of games and gaming-related items over the past few weeks, I’m finally done with my inventory and am still organizing and preparing to start photographing everything tomorrow.  Over the next few weeks/months, I’m hoping to start a series of posts featuring each of the 20 console types and their games/accessories, complete with photos and other ramblings.

For some backstory about the collection, the person I bought it from is an old high school friend.  Joe always had some kind of handheld bleep-blooping away on spares and at lunch in the cafeteria, and he eventually got hired on at EB Games, the Canadian equivalent of Game Stop.  Since we took the bus home together, he often boasted about his game collection and all the trade-ins he was getting, and I always listened enviously.  I had applied at EB Games in my youth and had never even gotten an interview there, so I was a little jaded about his success.  At the time, I was so busy with other extracurriculars that I didn’t dwell on it too much.  After high school, he eventually moved away and we kept in touch sporadically for about 15 years or so until I randomly sent him an email last summer.  My boyfriend and I had been planning to go to a swap near his city, and I was curious about whether or not he might be interested in meeting up either at the swap or afterward for supper to touch base.  At that point, he told me that he was no longer collecting and was hoping to sell everything he had – at long last!  He said I could have first perusal of his stuff before he put things up on eBay and promised an inventory in the months to come, but his wife had a baby and a whole year passed with no progress.

I waited very patiently until this Spring when I sent Joe an email to check in and see how he was enjoying fatherhood, and he immediately rekindled the conversation about the collection.  He invited my boyfriend and I over to see everything, and we did a few weekends ago.  Though we were disappointed that he had already parted with some really cool games (Snatcher for Sega CD, dammit!), we struck a deal, and it took two separate trips with a large rental vehicle to get everything home.  The grand total of games lies somewhere around 600 across 20+ platforms, and that’s not including guides and art books, swag and press kits from two years at E3, among many other things.  Though I don’t love every single thing we got, I sure love a lot of it and there are certainly some gems in there.  There are also a ton of things I’ve never seen and had never even heard about until a few weekends ago, and I’m so excited to sit down and get all this out there for your viewing/reading pleasure.

Of course along the way, I’ll intersperse these collection-related posts with spontaneous thrifting ones, as well as update on other swaps we attend.  I’m also hoping to find some time to get back to streaming and LPing in a timely fashion.  My boyfriend is on a stream quality tirade, trying to integrate our Framemeister purchase and upgrading our stream output to SCART quality rather than component.  He’ll be soldering some harnesses and connectors for me, so that’ll give me some breather time to get this collection stuff sorted in the meantime.  So much is happening, but it’s all good stuff.

Thanks for coming along on this adventure with me, and thanks for reading.  I’ll do my best to catch up on all your posts in the coming days.

-GG