In classic video games the most exciting discovery was an “extra life” — a talisman offering the chance to start over and play again. Now the golden age of the Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog is finding its own extra life, in the basements and TV rooms of nostalgic adults who stalk garage sales for hot collectibles.

Meet the Gaming Geeks.

“We call it the sickness. Some of us have the sickness harder than others,” says Jordan Charman.

The sickness Charman is referring to is a love for retro gaming. It’s a passion the 28-year-old Hamilton resident shares with many others via his YouTube show A Rock and a Hard Place, a weekly Wayne’s World-esque romp that he hosts using the alias JRock the GameRocker.

Retro gamers typically start collecting in their mid-20s, says Leon Kiriliuk, a longtime game collector and a software developer for IBM.

“Now that they have some disposable income, they’re buying these games back,” he says. “They might buy the 20 or 30 games they grew up with but, as with any hobby, you start with 20 or 30 and you continue.”

Kiriliuk briefly recovered from “the sickness” while he and his wife were starting their family. Now that their children are 6 and 3, he’s back at it, even though he owns every single game ever officially released for the popular Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) — all 676 of them.

Amassing that treasure trove was relatively easy to do when he started 15 years ago. Games for discontinued consoles were practically trash.

“Back then. I was buying (games) literally in bulk, no different than buying it by the pound, almost,” he says.

Not so anymore. Kiriliuk says the retro game collections have gone mainstream. Some titles now sell for hundreds — even thousands — of dollars. GameSpot reported that a copy of Stadium Events, considered the rarest NES game, sold for more than $35,000 (U.S.) on eBay in January.

Gamers can find more affordable titles at one of at least two-dozen retro game stores that have popped up across southern Ontario. Unlike online auctions and garage sales, stores usually offer protection against dead discs and cartridges.

Another option is the twice-annual Waterloo Video Game Swap. More than 1,300 people attended the most recent edition in March.

Leon Kiriliuk

Leon Kiriliuk keeps most of his collection locked away in a storage unit to keep his East York home clean (and his kids away from the loot). Deep down in the furnace room, however, is a workbench where he brings old gaming systems into the present. He adds LED backlighting to GameBoys and retrofits old systems to work with HDMI cables.

“At 6:30 the other morning, there’s somebody at the front porch,” says his wife, Sarah. “Who is it? Some guy drove all the way from Mississauga to give Leon money because Leon had retrofitted a system with HD-compatible blah blah blah.”

Sarah Chamberlain

Chamberlain formerly worked at 1-Up Games and, although she works at a pet store now, her taste in games is not so cute — she’s especially into horror titles, such as the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series.

For the 27-year-old, collecting the games of her youth means focusing on consoles such as PlayStation2 and the original Xbox.

There are more women involved in the retro gaming community than you might expect, she says. “Pretty much all of my girlfriends are huge gamers,” she says.

Her boyfriend, by contrast, is a casual gamer at most, but when visitors come to their Hamilton apartment, “People come in and they’ll instantly assume it’s his stuff.”

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Jordan Charman

Charman, 28, goes by the name JRock the GameRocker while hosting his weekly YouTube show about gaming, A Rock and a Hard Place. A warehouse worker by day, the Hamiltonian got bitten by the game-collecting bug a few years ago and it ramped up when he quit smoking and wanted to use the money for something fun.

Finding elusive gems is every collector’s dream, but when asked what his favourite discovery has been, Charman’s answer is the camaraderie among retro gamers.

“I’m part of this online community called the Cartridge Club, which is sort of like a book club but for games,” he says. Members play games and then talk about them in online forums. “It’s unreal how many people are into it. There are just so many people out there.”

Pete Diak

“My family didn’t have a lot of money,” says Pete Diak. “We only had the game (our Nintendo system) came with. To be honest, I didn’t know other games existed.”

Diak organizes the Waterloo Game Swap and now owns what is probably the largest collection of video games in Ontario, including every cartridge ever released for the Nintendo Entertainment System and three other 1980s and ’90s consoles.

His most prized possession is a copy of Stadium Events, considered the rarest of all games released for the old NES and something of a Holy Grail for collectors. He nabbed if for the bargain price of $1,000.

Matt Fox

Matt Fox, 39, is a veteran collector with 14 years under his belt. He’s alarmed to see the value of vintage titles climb into the hundreds and even thousands. “Not only did the boom happen, it got silly,” he says.

Fox benefits from the boom, as part owner of two Hamilton retro game stores, 1-Up Games and Super 1-Up Games.

He hopes the value of his collection doesn’t tank the way comic books and baseball cards have, since it “is going to be bequeathed to my daughter.”

Chang and Gar Wan Toy

Like a certain pair of plumber brothers, Chang and Gar Wan Toy go to work in similar outfits in different colours. And although eating magic mushrooms does not double their size, the super Toy brothers are rapidly increasing the footprint of their Spadina Ave. retro game emporium, A&C Games.

The business started as an experimental corner in the family convenience store up the street. Eleven years later, their hobby has grown into its own soon-to-be-6,000-sq.-ft. store that’s a destination for local game lovers.

They are constructing a tournament room at the back of the store. Chang Toy shakes his head at the notion of collecting but not playing, as some retro gamers do. “Video games are meant to be played.”