RETRO GAME COLLECTOR

The trials and tribulations of being a vintage/retro video game collector

As you get older you have realized (or will realize) that a lot more work is involved maintaining your body. Perhaps you used to be able to eat whatever you want and not gain weight or maybe you used to not have to stretch out before doing physical activities. The point is your body changes with age and you must adapt to it. The same goes for old video games that you want to continue playing years when they are past their prime. 

Recently I was able to ship back some of my original consoles and games I had from the 90's and 2000's. I took my time and wrapped everything carefully with the larger style bubble wrap. Still, I had little faith it would ship to me in good condition. To my delight the way I packed everything seems to have paid off. Nothing seemed physically damaged and even the more delicate items appear just the same as when they were shipped. 

Then came the first issue, re-arranging my game room/office required me getting a new TV stand to house my old CRT television (tube television) and these old consoles. I doubt many of you go looking for old or new TV stands that can fit a CRT, but let me tell you... it is a pain in the ass. After searching online for a few hours I found something that I thought would work. Surely enough it did, but it also made me realize that I won't be able to update my CRT with something bigger down the road. This TV stand can only hold 110 pounds which makes sense for todays standards because TV's generally are pretty light. 110 pounds should be more then plenty for most people. This isn't an issue at the moment for me though because CRT televisions are becoming increasingly harder and more expensive to get and I will wait for the right one at the right price. Furthermore, I recently saw pictures of people stock piling CRTs in order to do future repairs on arcade machines, which is understandable. 

Finally it was time to test the systems. My biggest fear was my original Xbox would no longer work. These are known to have issues with age, specifically a leaky clock capacitor. Luckily mine seems fine, but this is still a ticking time bomb. I must get this replaced sooner than later. My N64 seems to work fine but is very picky with games now. I am having to clean most games before the N64 will play them, even if I know they are not dusty (mine are all in cases). Although I have plenty more systems to check, the last one for now was my GameCube which appears to have a lens issue reading discs. It will typically boot up and play, but shortly after I will get an error telling me something went wrong and you can kind of hear a clicking sound like the system is attempting to read the disc but simply can't. 

What does this mean for someone who wants to continue being able to play older games on original hardware? It means I am going to have to learn how to fix these things myself and risk damaging my original systems that I grew up with or I will have to pay to send them to someone I am confident will be able to repair them successfully. 

So why do all this? The goal is to have all of these systems up and running on my CRT where I can play them with little setup beyond plugging in a controller and hitting a button on a system (input) selector. Step by step I will make it easier to capture gameplay footage of older consoles to use here at Nerdthusiast. Oh and also we 💜 vintage games. 

-Matthew Marozzi

Twitter: @fromNJ2CA