A long time ago, when I was in high school, I got into some pretty big trouble. I had to pay a lot of money back for reasons I will not go into, but what is important is that I didn’t have the job to pay back this money.

Even at that time, I was a pretty big game collector, but dabbled mostly in PC games (an addiction that began largely in middle school). In possibly the worst string of decisions I’ve ever made in my life, I sold a large portion of my PC gaming collection to deliver on my promise. For all I knew, the best parts of my PC gaming collection acquired before 1997 was in shambles, irreversibly broken apart, and largely worth forgetting.

When I was in college, I began collecting games of multiple platforms, vowing never to sell a game I loved ever again. I knew what kind of effect this would have on my life from a practical viewpoint, but I never wanted to repeat the same mistakes I had made in the past. Most of my collection focused on console gaming by this point, but I picked up the odd PC game now and then.

This was about the time I decided to try and rebuild parts of my collection I had given away to friends, sold to stores, or lost in moves. I started with Nintendo games I never bought as a child, but rented copious times. I then moved on to the Dreamcast games I sold when I bought my Playstation 2. I eventually graduated to late 90’s PC games I had sold to make the money in the aforementioned story. Success was common and gratifying, and I was more than a little elated to find so much of it. I became a master of garage sales and small import stores. I was the man whose treasure had been the trash of another man.

But then, I hit a roadblock. I had made a list of games I could not cross off the list. Large scores of games were out of print, and either never got reprinted, or never got included in a classic collection. Plenty of them had had Playstation ports that were easy to find, but it wouldn’t be the same to me. I would know it wasn’t the same game; that was enough for me.

Eventually I gave up and began building my collection with a focus on console gaming and, when I moved to Japan after college, a focus on “Japan only” releases.

Years past, and I moved back to the US in April, hoping to start a new career and a new life. I had been collecting games in Japan separate from my collection in the US, and while I was sad to leave the country I loved so much for the three years I worked, the move back to the US was my chance to finally combine my two collections into a behemoth. The problem was location.

My Japanese collection, as of today, is still somewhere on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. Half of my american collection is sitting in climate-controlled storage. This weekend I went to my father’s house; not only to spend some time with him, but to pick up the other half of my american collection, which sits in a box in an empty room on the second floor, wistfully waiting to be unpacked.

On my way out the door to pack the car with what boxes I had found, I saw a wall of boxes I didn’t recognize.

“What’s in there?” I asked. I assumed it was doodads and holiday decorations that had been packed up years ago.

“That’s all your stuff from when you were a kid,” my father replied. “We had to take it out of storage and store it in the garage.

I checked all of the boxes, but only one had the word “games” listed on it. Not really knowing what was in it, I loaded it into the card with the rest, and went on my way back home. What I found when I finally opened the box 45 minutes ago, though, was nothing short of astonishing.

PC games that I thought had been lost to the sands of time had been carefully preserved by my parents all this time. Whether it was by accident or purposeful sentimentality is a mystery to everyone involved, but what I found inside made me tear up. Just a little.

I have no idea if any of the games on 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppy disks still work, and I don’t have a computer that has drives that support either anyway, but just having them on my shelf is a wonderful reminder of my childhood as a gamer, and how far the industry, myself, and our whole community has come in the last 15 years.

Here’s to you, nostalgia.

(Source: hdrlying.com)