Game collection evolution

When Elowen and I bought our house we knew right away what room would house our retro game collection. We started out just by unboxing all our old systems and games. Then, sometime around early 2013, the garage sale hunts began. It became our weekend ritual, and something we grew to really enjoy doing together. Friday night, we fire up a few rounds of DoTA2 and put together our list of garage sales for the following day. Elowen would find most of them, and then I would then map them all out, filter out ones those out of the way, and chart the best route between them. We go to dozens of garage sales every Saturday morning. It wasn’t only for retro video games. It ended up being a great way for us as new homeowners to decorate our house.



Anyway, I have wanted to make this album for a long time now. It really shows how long we have come in the past couple of years, and what you can do with some hard work. If you want a spoiler or are short on time right now, here’s the tldr before/afterimage.

A couple notes before I get started…

1. Please excuse the mess in the earlier pictures! When I first started, I never intended to make an album of our progress. These pictures are usually just from texts I sent to Elowen so she would have an updated pic of the game room on her phone.

2. The collection is self-sufficient. We’ve spent a lot of money over the years to build this collection, but a lot of times we buy in big lots and sell the undesirables/duplicates.

So, without further adieu…

March 2014

When it comes to these first picture, we have lived in our house for about 5 months. Our collection is pretty small at this point. Most of the retro games belonged to Elowen. She was the intelligent one who didn’t trade everything away.



The room looks pretty barren i know. I promise it gets better!

A close up of the majority of our games at that time.

So far this has been everything we brought with us over the years from our apartment. Elowen held onto most of her old video games, whereas I was the dumb one and traded my classics away to Gamestop…

The purchase that started it all

We just so happened to stop by a garage sale on a random afternoon. As we were driving by, we noticed a couple lamps in their driveway that we thought would look good in our house. After I bought those, I went ahead and asked if he had any video games for sale. He brought all this out for me - a huge Atari 2600 collection. What a great way to kick off the collection!

Second screen

One weekend found an awesome complete in box (CIB) Commodore 128 lot that included this monitor. I’d heard that it displays NES games, great so I went ahead and gave it a shot. I popped in Contra and never looked back. The HDTV setup wasn’t going to cut it. We definitely needed the 2nd screen for older games. Don’t worry, the hdtv still gets used for modern consoles!

Hi-Res image

The collection is growing! Little did I realize how fast it would end up growing. That commodore did not stay there for very long…..

Special editions

So I met a guy who sold me each of those special editions for $1 each. I used them to fill up space under the collection.

Good times.

Space issues

Hi-Res image

OK so the house came with this built in furniture. Never when we first started thinking about making this into a retro game room did I ever think space would become the issue it has. I was not expecting us to fill it up. let alone as quick as it happened.

Our latest finds literally spilling over onto the floor. We needed a solution. Around this time, we picked up an old, large TV from Elowen’s parents’ house. As nice as the commodore monitor is, the screen was just too small.

This corner cabinet looks hideous. It was something we picked up from her parents’ house, which did NOT last very long.

God bless IKEA

We made another trip out to ikea to buy some tall standing furniture. This looks much better. It matches the console furniture and the futon. All is well… for now

Elowen and I met a guy who makes these parlor bead sprites, and I felt the were a nice touch to the room.

Shelf

I thought the area above the futon was a little bare, so I screwed in a shelf to fill up that space.

Looking good! We have to do something about that futon though! It’s ugly enough as is. I could use….something.

Ahhhhh much better. We found this Hyrulian quilt on Etsy and we love it!

End of 2014 pano

This marks the end of our first year of game collecting. You’ll also notice some Amiibos! So, I bought a whole bunch of these when they first came out on Amazon. Then I saw that Toys R Us was running a sale. Lazy me decides to hold off on returning the amazon ones for a while. It was a good thing that I did! The prices for amiibos skyrocketed out of control! I sold off my extra ones for a couple goodies: a Jungle green N64 with games and a Vectrex!

For Christmas that year, I contacted the parlor bead guy and commissioned him to make sprites based off of our Ball and Chain personas. Then, I put them all together in this shadowbox. It is the first thing you see before entering our game room.

This is an updated image of the consoles. We had to buy another ikea shelf to hold everything.

New year, new mess



After adding a massive amount of sega CD 32x and Genesis games to our collection, things got shuffled around a lot. The mess started to creep up again.

The remaining Amiibos are set free from their packaging.

I did find some things I didn’t give away, including this gem - my old virtual boy.

N64 labels

So, I’ve seen N64 labels before and liked the idea. Most labels display a N64 logo, which I think is unappealing. If Nintendo were to go back and top label n64 games, this is how I think they would do it. I highly recommend looking for these on ebay if you’re in the market for labels.

Mid 2015 Pano

Notice the new furniture?

So this now houses all our retro Nintendo games - NES/SNES/N64. It is the perfect depth for these games.

Another angle from the same time

February 2016

Hi-Res image

This is the most recent set of photos I have of the game room. I’ll try to highlight some of my favorite parts.

Here’s what’s inside of the cabinet. I’d love to grow our Sega Dreamcast and CD collection more.

These shelves mostly hold disc based games. Left side is xbox/xbox360 and right side is PS2/PS3/Vita.

Artwork by Justin Hillgrove

Our Megaman collection. Hoping to finish the SNES games this year and get a case for MM Legends 2.

Earthbound love. One of my favorite games growing up.

Elowen loves Harvest Moon!





Bonus pictures! Not retro, but related

Board game collection

Our Modern gaming (Ps4/Wii U/XBoxOne) Living room

Our PC gaming/streaming setup

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Well we hope you enjoyed our collection images. Stay tuned for more as we post every week. Garage sale season is almost upon us and we will have lots to share. Thanks for reading!