As we continue to build up massive archives of video games new and old the question of "when will it end" always looms near.  True, with most hobbies you can't expect to go on forever, there's usually some ending terms or some goal that will eventually be eclipsed.  However with the video game industry the story is really just beginning and ancient history is only a mere thirty years ago.

Of course the driving force behind many large scale video game collections is money, plain and simple.  If you have enough money you can pretty much get any retro or rare video game item no matter how hard it is to come by.  This is why I look down a bit at some collectors, those pack rats who are in it to have it all no matter the cost.  To me this is simply not entertaining and seems to be a terrible waste.  Now, don't get me wrong, I would love to have unlimited money so I could beef up my archive, but once you have that Nintendo World Championships 1990 cartridge.. what else is there to look for?  I take a certain level of pride in that I built a good chunk of my classic video game archive on the cheap, especially the pride and joy of my archive, my NES collection.  Sure it's not as large as many and it's no where near complete at any level but I know that I didn't bust my ass spending mad money over the years to obtain it.  Anyone can walk into a used game store, toss $500 on the counter and buy every NES cartridge in the place, but again... what fun is that?

Large scale archives of even common games and systems are really beginning to fetch decent prices, it seems people are more concerned (or blinded) with quantity over quality.  I see NES lots with 20 or so common games sell in upwards of $100 easy, simply because they're complete and have a good selection of games.  The handheld market on the other hand seems to be falling apart as Game Gear, Lynx, and even NeoGeo Pocket games and systems are being sold off at a tiny fraction of what they were worth just last year.  So if the games aren't an uber solid investment anymore then why even sell them?  The answer, someone is always willing to buy.  No matter the economy or the current value of what you are selling, there's always someone out there that would like what you are offering to them.  The industry remains as diverse and broad as it ever was and no matter what may happen on its bleeding edge, the second hand community will always thrive.

Most people I've known that have parted with extremely large collections or complete system archives have done so because their priorities simply changed.  They needed the money or the space, found someone else that was interested in obtaining their entire collection, or had finally reached a goal they had set and figured it was just time to move on.  Personally I try to keep myself from setting goals that I know I can reach.  I have stated many times that I would like to have a complete NES cartridge set of all the legally released games but as long as I slowly build up my archive on the cheap as I have always done, this will give me plenty of time to meet said goal.  Yeah, it would be nice to pick up fifty or sixty games all in one shot but that would be fifty or sixty less outings searching through boxes of miscellaneous junk at a yard sale or flea market.  I suppose when it comes down to it, that's one of the things I enjoy most about video game archival, especially NES games.  There's just so much out there, I mean, the world was in love with Nintendo at the time of the NES.  There wasn't a single game that someone you knew that knew someone else hadn't played at the time.  I remember reading somewhere that in 1989 something like 7/10 households in the United States had a NES and that the number was growing.  (too bad the SNES came along and began to push video games into what I refer to as the "16 Bit Slump")

I really can't see any reason to sell off large parts of my archive or stop archiving all together anytime soon.  Yes, I have sold off bits and pieces or small niche collections such as my Atari Jaguar.  However I won't ever dump my NES or TurboDuo stuff, same goes with the Super Famicom and the original Game Boy or the Atari 2600.  The past year has been very interesting in terms of financial problems but I've still held true to what I originally said years ago.  See when I was ten years old or so I got robbed and all my NES games except for four were stolen (about 50 titles all together) including the game Dragon Power.  Now, it was the Americanized version of a game based on the classic original Dragonball anime series and one of my favorite games, not to mention somewhat rare.  So after all the dust had settled I pledged to seek out another copy of this game, thus I began archiving NES games I found along the way.  Well six years later I finally came across another copy of Dragon Power in one of the FuncoLand stores in San Jose.  What's funny is I wasn't even looking for it specifically when I was there, I just stopped in, looked at the cartridges and there it was.  I had found it, that was it, I was done.. Dragon Power had been recovered.  Yet I thought for a moment, that I had such a great time on the journey up to finding that game that I might as well continue it.. and now here I am six years after that and not much has changed at all.  I still go to the local flea market or to local yard sales seeking out NES games (and I usually come across other things as well).  The NES was a good chunk of my childhood and is just as enjoyable now as it was then.  So as long as people keep reselling the games, I'll keep buying them.

...Sell my collection?  Ha, I haven't even begun to complete it yet.