If you've ever gone full Indiana Jones while staring at a huge collection of videogames – by which I mean being driven to exclaim "That belongs in a museum!" – you'll be pleased to hear that a museum is now where you can find one of the world's biggest collections of Japanese games.

Today, WIRED can exclusively reveal that the Strong, an institution in Rochester, New York that encompasses the National Museum of Play and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games among other divisions, has acquired a massive collection of complete sets of games for classic Japanese consoles. And when they say complete, they really mean it: Spanning over 7,000 games, the collection features the entire libraries of games for 18 different platforms, including the Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System), Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), Nintendo 64 and many more. It's an exhaustive, painstakingly assembled collection that should have any admirer of classic videogames going green with envy.

__What's In the Collection?__The Strong's recent acquisition of over 7,000 Japanese videogames includes the complete libraries of the following game platforms:

Famicom (NES)

Super Famicom (SNES)

Famicom Disk System

Nintendo 64

Virtual Boy

Nintendo 64DD

Nintendo GameCube (sealed)

Sega Master System (also including European, US and Brazilian releases)

Game Gear

Mega Drive (Genesis)

Super 32X

Mega CD (Sega CD)

Sega Saturn

Sega Dreamcast (sealed)

PC Engine (sealed)

SuperGrafx (sealed)

PC-FX (sealed)

Pioneer Laseractive (sealed)

And now as part of the National Museum of Play, it will be accessible to the public. In the video above, I go deep into the basement archives of the Strong to look at the collection while it's still in the process of being cataloged by the museum's staff.

If this collection sounds at all familiar to you, that's because it made headline news last year. It was the life's work of a French game enthusiast known simply as Andre, who went by the handle "Adol" on various gaming collector forums over the years. Last July, he attempted to sell the whole shebang on eBay for the exorbitant price of $1.2 million. This news was crazy enough that it broke out of the gaming media and spilled over into mainstream outlets from the Los Angeles Times to the Huffington Post.

That was where the story left off in the national media. Thing is, the buyer never paid up. Enter the National Museum of Play, which struck a deal with Andre to acquire the collection. (It won't say how much it paid, but noted that the amount was significantly lower than $1.2 million.)

Thanks to the museum, one man's private hoard is now a publicly accessible resource. No, that doesn't mean that anyone can walk in off the street and go pawing through all the rare Virtual Boy games. Researchers can access anything in the collection by contacting the museum, setting up an appointment and letting them know what they'd need to access and why.

The Strong isn't just putting these games on a shelf to collect dust. While I was at the museum, they showed me some of the preservation activities they work on each day. Assistants in the lab spend hours capturing video footage directly from each game running on a genuine system, to have an alternate means of preserving the game content. And each game is entered into a searchable online database, so you can confirm that the Strong does indeed have a copy of Wonder Dog.

The Andre collection is just the latest addition to the Strong's already extensive archives. Over the next month, WIRED will release more videos of my adventure at the National Museum of Play, taking a look at what's inside the rest of the museum's archives.