John Zeitler

It’s hard for me to say what exactly happened with the Turbografx. Don’t get me wrong, it works– flawlessly, in point of fact– but, well, I can’t say it was on the “Reclamation” List because I never actually had a TG-16 back in the day. In truth, the Relcamation List is literally empty now: anything that I had in the past that I could consider worth having back, I have found again, and the things which I don’t have exact copies of I have found in other media (for example, Chrono Trigger DS instead of the SNES cartridge). I’m beyond Reclamation and now into… Hm. I need a new word for the list, preferably one that starts with R. Relic List? Rarities List? Redoubtability List?

A lot of folks question my fond remembrance of the Dreamcast and its library of games. “It wasn’t that great,” they’ll say, or perhaps “the PS2 was better and had more support.” Both of those are, in point of fact, true… but at the same time, there were a few titles that just didn’t get brought over from the machine that I think should have. For whatever reason, I’ve often felt that the system’s version of the venerable Tetris game, The Next Tetris Online, was and is the best implementation of the game; Grandia II was ported terribly to platforms other than its native DC, rendering it virtually unplayable anywhere else; it took nearly ten years for a decent port of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 to be released; it has the only known console port of Railroad Tycoon II, etc. etc. The point is, for each one of these games, the argument that it has to be on the DC becomes increasingly subjective. When you get to some of its exclusives, like Evolution, Espionagents, or Super Magnetic Neo, you can find some genuine crap (even if Espionagents has a certain charm to it).

I still think the Dreamcast has an important part in gaming history. Even though it died early, it had some good games that got ported over, some that didn’t get ported over, and it launched a series or two that endure to this day. Without the Dreamcast, the 2K Sports series would not exist– they were originally Sega’s in-house sports developers. The DC also played host to the home adaptations of Pop’n Music in Japan, leading the way for the Playstation and PS2 versions. Power Stone created a genre of brawler; Rez introduced Tetsuya Mizuguchi to the world; the first console versions of Unreal Tournament, Quake III, and (almost) Half-Life showed up on the DC… the list goes on.

Really, this is all tangential to my basic point– that the Dreamcast, while not a particularly spectacular system, holds a place in my heart worth the effort needed to collect for it. Now, pardon me, but I’ve had this game of Tetris on pause for far too long…

In 2002, I started what would eventually become the capitalized “The Collection” from some pretty humble beginnings: I had a single “CD tower” of Playstation 1 and 2 games, probably about four feet tall and barely a foot wide. I also had a handful of boxed up retro systems, and maybe a dozen or so anime DVDs (with a modest amount of VHS tapes as well). Obviously, I expanded; as most of you all know, I also had to sell off roughly 95% of my games and anime during a downturn between jobs. Today, the Collection is the largest it’s ever been, and it’s in no danger of having to be sold off anytime soon.

I don’t like to brag– particularly not about stuff that I own– so that’s not the purpose of this post. Most folks don’t see their piles of video games and movies and suchlike as collections– they see them, primarily, as just “stuff”. If they want to get fancy, they may refer to it as a “library”. Really, though, these are cop-outs: if one is really serious about becoming a collector, then there can never be a point where you just have a pile of discs. You have to start early, so that it doesn’t get away from you. I’ve been throwing around terms like the Reclamation List and all that for years now without really explaining the thought process behind it all; I figure, now that the majority of the work is behind me, it would be a good time to take a look at how I built up even this modest collection and how I go about expanding it.

I should note, though, that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to be a collector of DVDs, games, whatever. That’s fine. It’s not something that everyone can do or has an interest in doing. The thing is, of course, that some folks out there do want to be collectors, and there’s some stuff that I wish I knew when I was setting out. That’s the purpose of this post (actually, by the time I’m done, it’ll probably feel more like a lecture).

So, without further delay, let’s start with ( The Ten Commandments Of Collecting… » )

In the end, taking up media collecting as a serious hobby can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be really nerve-wracking if you’re not prepared for it. Obviously, I’m not setting myself up as an authority or anything, but these are all just stuff I’ve found out since starting the Reclamation project. It all comes down to what you get out of it; if you want it just to have it, or if you want it to watch/read/play it all at some point.

I’m going to confess a dark secret: the first game system I wanted wasn’t the NES.

It’s the fall of 1987, and my parents are asking me what I wanted for Christmas. The only thing on my list was the Atari 7800, which had Ms. Pac-Man. That was my game, that was what I wanted more than anything else. It wound up under the tree that year, with about a dozen games to go with it, new in box. The other games were 2600 cartridges, including the infamously horrible port of Pac-Man. Still, they ran on the machine, and I was ecstatic. We had to leave the machine behind pretty soon afterwards, though, as we were heading up to my grandmother’s house to celebrate Christmas. My uncle had given the family the NES core set that year.

The rest, as they say, is history. I went home and was thrilled to go back to the 7800 and its capabilities and library. For a year or two I was more enthralled with the Atari than the Nintendo, to the point of turning down a new NES game in favor of two Atari titles for my birthday the coming year. Eventually, though, my cousins and friends started showing me the hot games they had for their machines, the 7800 library started drying up in stores, and in a sad, sorry moment of fate, I sold off the 7800 and its pile of games at a garage sale once the SNES was out.

I regretted the decision probably a week later.

Today that mental anguish, however minimal it was, ended as I proudly took home a gently used but still functional 7800 and four games (total was $40). I was initially alarmed when I remembered that I couldn’t connect it to the main TV in the living room; but I’d also received a lower-end TV a few weeks ago that did indeed have the appropriate connector, so I connected it, fired it up, and found myself back in the dawning weeks of 1988.

I’d call that a pretty good starting-over.