Part 4 – Dopamine Hits

We were mostly figuring out how to keep our jobs, our house supplied, and most importantly, our sanity. My lockdown days were spent making sure the kids paid attention to their Zoom classes rather than rolling on the floor, making myself look more busy than expendable at work and securing the basic necessities through those coveted Fresh Direct delivery time slots. The world of 2020 was wildly broken, society taking a beating, but thankfully eBay still functioned.

I wasn’t spending recklessly with cyroto-bro abandon, eBay was my $5-$10 therapy session. A little ray of sunshine in the form a relic of a happier bygone era. A game I never got a chance to get, one that was lost in a move (or a breakup), coming back some 20 odd years later to fill in a missing piece. Though a few steps removed, each package that arrived had the feeling of sorely missed human contact. Some games smelled of mothballs, some wrapped in newspapers from halfway around the world, but my favorites were the ones with the hand-written notes or random piece of candy.

That is how my collection started to grow again.

A nice little note that came with this game that travelled all the way from Japan.

Part 3 – We Were Supposed to Be Working

Mini shelf made from discarded hardwood cabinet doors.

It’s simple math really, when the lockdown did away with my one-hour commute, I was left with two extra hours every day with which to fart around. I learned some Portuguese, worked on carpentry, even made a trdelník. However, the luster of learning actual useful skills and home exercise soon faded and YouTube’s warm embrace beckoned. Its algorithmic tendrils ensnared my slushy brain and I was pulled down into the dark abyss.

I was a cable TV cord cutter, and it started innocently enough as watching news clips on YouTube. One story caught my attention amidst the barrage of toilet paper melees at Walmart and Karens getting their comeuppance, someone sold a single video game for tens of thousands of dollars (though we would later find out it was mostly concocted by a scammy video game appraisal service and its sketchy auction house business). Maybe because I watched it more than once, or shared it with a few friends, but soon my feed started including retro game hunting vlogs, people showing off the games they bought every week and room tours that housed said games. I was hooked.

Part of me said I needed to go back to doing productive things, like wood working. Part of me said I needed shelves to display my junk. I did both.

Part 2 – The Ennui of Lockdown

By late spring of 2020, we all picked up hobbies and projects to distract ourselves from the onslaught of disheartening news that rained down on us each and every day in the early days of the lockdown. My initial plan was to just make my prison cell/basement home office a wee bit nicer. Anything to add a bit of life to white mold-resistant walls and soul-crushing fluorescent tube lighting.

2020, Return of the Weeaboo. Sega Mega Drive games.

As the days ticked by, I often thought about the “before times”, when we took freedom of movement and world travel for granted. Trapsing through foreign lands buying all sorts of weird stuff that made us laugh or thought was real neat. Hats that look like a swirl of poop, candy that tasted like ramen, and of course video games. Those relics from my far weebier and younger days of worshipping at the altar of Japanese pop culture were packed away by serious “adult” me a few years earlier, now called out to me as much needed reminders of more cheerful times.

One of the first things I excavated were my old Japanese Sega Mega Drive video games from my numerous trips to Hong Kong in the early 1990’s.

Part 1 – The Spark

I can’t say it was ever my intention to create a room full of old video games, but that is how things turned out. Up until March 2020, I wasn’t a “collector” of such vintage wares, I just held on to most of my games from the time they were new. I was perfectly okay with them neatly packed away in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents’ house. Some games sat dormant there for as many as 30 years.

Pictured: The DMG model Gameboy that started it all.

When the Pandemic hit New York and we were all ordered to work from home, I needed a place to work away from the kids. The lone option in our house was our basement, which at the time was more of a junk yard than home office. Pushing aside the moving boxes we never unpacked and the wobbly treadmill the previous owners of the house abandoned down there, I created a less embarrassing background for my Zoom meetings. After a few weeks I grew tired of the blank white wall behind me, so I threw some things in the background to liven things up. The first thing to be added was what I thought was retro-kitschy-cool, my wife’s old hand-me-down DMG model Gameboy (my Gameboy had long been stolen by my cousin a few decades prior).

During one of my subsequent remote meetings, a colleague had commented on how cool it was and asked if the Gameboy still worked. I actually wasn’t sure and then began digging through my old stuff for cartridges, which was the start of this strange journey.