This blog is basically sunsetted, but once a year I shake off the dust and leave it idle in a different position. Every year since 2015, more or less, I like to take a look at video game and computing related materials that I was given for Christmas. Over the years, there has been a natural rise and fall to this pattern -- initially, I received nothing in said categories, then as my preferences became known to generous persons, I started recieving more and more of it, as my benefactors would nab relevant specimens throughout the year while on expeditions to thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets. (I was never the semi-pro thrifter that my gift-givers are, but even I have memories of gradually piecing together Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis units -- twice, after I donated the first units to Video In / VIVO's "Video Games Orgy" all-night vintage games parties! -- from pieces encountered by chance on the cheap in a Value Village basement, fingers crossed that they a) worked and b) wouldn't fail in such a way as to kill the rest of my setup! But it has been many a long year since I have acquired any NES or Genesis parts from a baggie on a thrift shop wall -- you just don't see them anymore, those goods left their initial homes, went into thrift shops once already, and have long since disappeared down the black holes of collectors' vaults while the prices were good! ... and even if you do somehow stumble upon a missing period system component, now it is priced according to what those scarcity-surfing collectors are trying to sell it for on eBay.) (I have related positions to share about people who sell used video games for eBay prices at garage sales , but this digression is already too long.)
I mentioned a rise and fall: first I was given some, then I was given a lot of it! -- my gift-givers found lots of it to give, and they were generous with it. But in recent years, they have been giving less of it simply because they have been finding less of it to give. No more years of "six copies of Donkey Kong", to be sure. Up until recent generations there's been a naturally replenishing ecosystem of games and game materials in the secondhand market -- with every passing year, you would see fewer and fewer artifacts of the very earliest gaming systems (eg. I never saw anything Odyssey-generation at all, only items from the Atari 2600 / Intellivision / Colecovision years) but in their place you would see more and more artifacts from recent systems. In short, PlayStation 2 came out and everyone couldn't be in a big enough hurry to throw out all their old PlayStation 1 junk at rock-bottom prices. PlayStation 3 came out and ditto for PS2 goods. But this slowed down a bit when we reached the PS4 and I think here at PS5 the wild flight has stalled, and maybe will crash. Is this because people are hanging on to their games and systems for longer? (Definitely "this looks like a game from ten years ago" is no longer the obstacle that it was when I was ten in 1989.) Is it because collectors have driven up the resale value of old games? (Partly, but that's just a wart on the back of -- ) Digital game distribution, I think, is the main driver of this imposed scarcity.
* (Also, due to pandemic years, less secondhand shopping has been going on overall. But regardless:)
Growing up in the era of games that you went to the store and bought off the shelf, carefully brought home and whose fragile media you fed into your machine... if that was ever your standard experience, it necessarily feels timeless and, basically, instinctively correct. Of course, in the era of games shipping on multiple discs and requiring gigs of patches before they're able to run at all, it's a silly and very time-consuming way of going about doing things. Save yourself the trip to the store -- just buy the game online and have it install itself (and update itself) overnight without needing to worry about smudging the discs with your fingerprints. If your machine breaks in a flood or house fire, you can buy a new console, log back in and download all of your games again without buying them a second time! And as a funny side benefit, downloaded games are tied to one user's account and cannot be transfered to a new owner. Magically, the secondhand market evaporates before your eyes! I can't say that this phenomenon has inspired me to pay full price for new games (really, now that I have achieved peak game ownership, I have the least amount of game-playing time in my life, and with it, the lowest possible motivation ever to buy a new game at full price) but I'm sure that some corporate accountant is very satisfied with this closure of an imaginary loophole depriving their overlords of imaginary income.
In conclusion, as anticipated, these Christmas gift hauls are getting more and more meagre (no shade on the people giving to me! I own over 1500 physical games, and probably that number again digitally -- if I die without ever being given another game, I will only have made a tiny dent in a minuscule portion of my collection!) and probably I will eventually need to stop making these posts annually because there won't be adequate grist for the mill. That said, I've managed to get a few paragraphs of preamble rolling here and I haven't yet shared even a single photograph, so perhaps I'm mourning this tradition prematurely.
It's not a ton of games, I think maybe a dozen. A game can also feel more underwhelming when you just have it on tiny SD card media rather than a big impressive box. The NES carts were actually slated for my wife's resale concern when I noticed them and asked if I could cut out the middleman and acquire them without having to go through eBay. (Grousing over receiving a dozen games seems a bit of sour grapes, but my being perhaps underwhelmed is more understandable when you understand that I have copies of most of the gifted games in my collection already. I had to start keeping excellent records about what I'd already hoovered up to avoid spending more than I could afford on duplicate copies of games I already had.)
One mug has a pixelart-style snowman on it, and the stainless steel one is of a local company that boasted that it "built the Internet". (As much as any contractor can be said to have done so, I looked them up and their claim appears to be reasonably valid.) The microcomputer mug is period authentic (a spin on the AT&T advertising slogan "Reach Out And Touch Someone", in use from 1971-79) and part of a line of low-effort products their manufacturer cynically threw at the wall during the microcomputer boom to see if anything stuck, then moved on from.
Yeah, he's just going to pretend that he didn't just photograph that giant Skylanders strategy guide twice. I guess if you're going to have all those toys stinking up the room, you may as well have some of the literature needed to sort out which sets they belong to. But really Compute's unauthorized 1990 guide to defeating the first two NES Legend of Zelda cartridges is quite a bit more exciting. Speaking of exciting, I didn't even know that the PlayStation 2 had a remote control! But what could actually be more exciting than a mystery floppy diskette? That's right, nothing is more exciting than that. And someday, when I find my USB disc drive, I'll have a report to make!
Happy holidays 2023, here's hoping that 2024 has some fun in store!
