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.