An Introduction to Game Spec
My background and plan for this newsletter
Hello, and welcome to Game Spec! I’m Vic, a long-time video game collector, and this is my newsletter about video game collecting.
About Me
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started collecting video games since I consider myself to have been born “a collector.” I was the kid who kept the boxes and manuals for the first Game Boy games he received for his birthday. To take it a step further, my favorite games were kept in drawers because stuff on a shelf was liable to get damaged by friends or family. I kept my games and rarely traded them in. One of my good game collecting friends and I affectionately refer to our compulsion collect as “The Illness.” It’s definitely one I was born with.
In addition to obsessively caring for my games, I was always very interested in all games, even older ones that others had since forgotten. The Sega Genesis was my first system, but I was always very excited to play NES at a friend’s house. One of my most vivid memories is first time I encountered an Atari 2600 in the mid-90’s and played Pac-Man. (I had already enjoyed the original in arcades) I was intrigued by the hardware and was still able to enjoy the game despite its faults. I never forgot that experience, which is why my interest in the 2600 led me to both interacting with online classic gaming communities and buying games on Ebay in 2003.
It has been a spiral1 since then, as the number of games I own has increased over time. (More importantly, the rate of increase increased) At this point, my collecting habits are approaching a steady state. I have most of what I want, or more specifically, most of what I want sells for more than I am willing to pay. I still buy games regularly, despite having enough to last me forever. (Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 games - I never bothered to count) The tendency to always “need” more circles back to why I enjoy calling my collecting habit “The Illness”. I wish I could kick the habit, but I have given up on eradicating it to focus on limiting it. These days, I typically pick up cheaper and more recent titles, and the funds for those often come from selling something else I (painfully) removed from my collection.
Besides being a collector for many years, in the past I have administrated a game collecting forum and spent years managing an independent game store. My enjoyment of collecting games is rooted in a love of playing them, but sometimes the endeavor of collecting is equally engaging. If that resonates with you, I bet you will enjoy future editions of this newsletter.
Game Spec
I made Game Spec to have a creative outlet about something I enjoy. Furthermore, there is a considerable lack of meaningful discourse about game collecting. While there have never been as many game collectors as there are now,2 I don’t think discussion around the subject has scaled accordingly.
As the internet has evolved over the past decade and smaller communities have died and been overtaken by the giant social media platforms (Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, etc), it seems like the quality of discussion around game collecting is at an all-time low. Go take a look at the questions being asked by people on said platforms - most of them were answered decades ago! (There is a lot to unpack in this phenomenon and it could make for its own newsletter)
I want Game Spec3 to help fill this void. I don’t have an audience in mind, or a plan for this newsletter. I am simply writing this for myself, and I will focus on what I find interesting. Future editions will be much less about me and more focused on video games. I sincerely hope my musings resonate with others and someone out there will find this newsletter informative or entertaining. I welcome feedback and articulate criticism. Thank you for reading!
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Downward or upward direction, depending on your perspective!
[citation needed]. I’m not so sure this is true. In fact, it seems to me that many categories of games are collected much less than in the past. But with prices at all time highs, the best general conclusion I can draw is: the number of people who value physical games from past generations is at an all-time high. Whether those people can be called “collectors” is a debate for another discussion.
Why the name “Game Spec?” I wanted a short name with few syllables, and “speculation” can yield a negative connotation among some game collectors. I will focus on larger general trends I see, although I am bound to write about specific game prices.