Since then (the early 1990's) it's grown from a goofey little hobby nobody was proud of into a quite productive bit of the games industry, to a point that it's kind of warped the industry in a way, keeping people from wanting to purchase the "new stuff" because they want things like they were in the 70's, 80's, and early 1990's. Now we get all these little handhelds we needed a PC or the original TV-bound hardware to run back in the 1990's, little RCA plug n' plays, emulation systems with all the games built in....it's crazy.

The Lifecycle goes a little like this...

• Development - Basically, the new technology is in development and not released to the public yet. The media and news outlets are making a storm about it if it's something that has the possibility of being life changing or genre defying.
• Released/Early Adopters - Tech is released and it's extremely expensive. For computers this would be like getting a 486 in 1989 or a IBM PC 5150 in 1981. For Game systems, this would be like spending $225 on a NES in 1986 with ROB, or $240 on a Atari VCS in 1977. Only the rich kids have it, and it's still not caught on yet. A lot of the previous generation is still using the previous stuff.
• Mainstream - This is usually 1-2 years in and once the new tech reaches widespread adoption. For computers, this would be like having a Pentium 1995-1999, or having a NES from 1988-1995. During this time, the technology gets sold a lot, and if it's business applicable, it gets used en-masse in business as well on all productivity levels. This is also when the cache's for later on are built up by people owning them.
• Low-End/Entry Level - This is usually 3-5 years after the technology was new, maybe 7-10 in some cases, depending on cost. This is maybe when the manufacturer will put out one last gasp....like entry level 486 DX4s in 1995, or a NES that same year, or the Atari 2600 Jr in the late 80's.
• Used/On Way Out - Prices are steeply discounted as suppliers try to empty out their overstock of the old to make room for new products. This was like going to Kay Bee in 1990, and buying Atari games and controllers for just a few bucks apiece. in computing, usually it's when the boxes are put next to the cash register with old modems, cards, drive rails, and whatnot. They probably won't have full systems left, but rather, a cache of old shit they want to get rid of for cheap.
• E-Waste - Businesses start liquidating assets, stores start liquidations too, and parents of the mainstream kids who had those previous generation consoles start sending them to the thrift shops, garage sales, and flea markets to clear room in their house for their post-children lives. Society starts to look down on these old products as "ooooooold" and nobody wants them. They start slowly getting cheaper and cheaper.
• Garbage - if the product was popular enough, it might have enough en-masse to lead to disposal, rejection, even by thrifts and flea markets, because "nobody" will buy them. THis makes them incredibly cheap. A great example of this was owning a 486 back around 2000 or so - just buying one cost like what? $5.00 at Goodwill? You could buy VGA monitors all day for less than it cost for a meal at McDonalds. Atari 2600 stuff was like this in the mid 1990's.
• "Outlier Retro" - This is when people like me start to notice this stuff is "cheap" and "unwanted", but we know it still has some "life" left in it, so we start buying, even just taking this stuff, because nobody cares. This is what leads to the "Accumulation" phase for most collector types, because it's so inexpensive it's literally a hobby you can have starving in a studio apartment. It's what I also call "cheap entertainment" or "cheap productivity" depending on what you use it for - video games and computer games on ancient outlier retro hardware is what I call "cheap entertainment" of course.
• Retro In Development - This is when people start to catch on, like XT's and 286s around 2005, or 486s and 386s around 2010, or the NES picking up speed around the same time period - to a point it almost eclipsed the ATari 2600 and lead to that one getting somewhat forgotten. Prices start going up, but they are not reasonable, and a "economy" kinda' forms around the beloved tech. By now, the technology is about 15-20 years old, and the people who "grew up" around it, or worked around it, are a little nostalgic as well.
• Mainstream Classic/Retro/Vintage - So now, the public has embraced this stuff as something "cool" and "vintage" and no longer "oooooold" and "outdated". This is about 25+ years on, and supplies start to dwindle, so prices start going up, and clickbait articles on the internet start including such devices (with some terrible and unresearched knowledge I might add) that xxx techno thing will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams if you find one in your attic. This is where we were with vintage IBM Compatibles around 2015, and with the NES also around that same time.
• Fade Away - As the nostalgic generations grow older, and a new generation only likes the old stuff in question partially - because the majority are going to be nostalgic about what THEY Grew up with, not what YOU or I grew up with. So I'd say, maybe HALF the kids who grew up on GameCube or Wii would be nostalgic about the IBM PC or NES - but they have far less lasting interest in the actual hardware, as 90% of what they are dealing with, is living through software or emulation. Far fewer will be willing to shell out the cash for the vintage technology items in question, and many who do are seeing it as an "investment", even though the bubble is full now and probably will not rise beyond that.
• Museum Piece - As the elder geneation that grew up with that technology gets old and dies, that particular technology starts to become so rare it is worth a lot, but it's also less desired, and becomes more interesting as a muesum piece, than it is as a personal artifact for daily use. Stuff is so old, getting parts and getting service done is hard to do. Websites no longer carry the full gamut of relative information TO service that stuff. It becomes a dying art. By the time I would turn 70 years old, we'll probably be seeing NES consoles and IBM PCs in the Smithsonian, not on the desktop of some old guy who grew up with them. That's just reality.

And with that, collecting itself, has a lifecycle....

• Cheap Entertainment - So maybe you're the 12 year old kid who liked old stuff, like me, or the 22 year old college student whose nostalgic and bored. That's where it all begins. You got a pocket full of money, and not enough for the latest and the greatest console or computer, but you do have enough for "last year's model". So you go to the local garage sales, thrift shops, flea markets, and you obtain that which you desire.
• Curiosity - So then you take your hobby to the internet, and find out there's not enough information on it yet, but what there is, is interesting! There's so much more to the techno-thing you got your hands on that you start to do research out of curiosity. This was like me printing out reams and reams of dead trees at the Auburn Draughton Library in 1996 to find out about Atari Cartridge label variations, or how many actual NES games were actually released in the USA (about 400). Reading about certain things that might interest you creates sort of a "want list" - and that "want list" will grow as you read more and get ever more curious. Also, you're usually still pretty young, so you don't feel that it's "Bad" to accumulate all this stuff, because to you, you're bored, you're poor, you're a *gasp* loser, but hey, you'll have a lot of fun with a bunch of cheap old technolgy.
• Binge Collecting - So stuff is cheap and you start your collecting journey without any real criteria. This is how all us young folks end up with so much of this shit. Because we buy little by little, over years and years. And there's two schools of thought on this. The lamestreamer school is "oh, you're being a hoarder", but those "in the know" however, know for a fact that this has some pretty surprising, and positive, financial outcomes in the end.
• Purge - Remember those "postiive financial outcomes" - well - I did my binge collecting between 1996 and 2018 - I sold the majority of that shit, for over $1000. Total, I spent maybe $300 at most for everything over the course of over 20 years. That's quite a profit TBH for low-effort, passive, non-criteria based collecting. Laugh all you want that I had 384 Atari 2600 games - if I had the NES collection I'd have everything except a couple at that point - but I was sure laughing all the way to the bank with that sale.
• Tactful Re-ACcumulation - What we find is after we purge, especially if we purge everything (kind of what I did with my computer collection in 2010), is after awhile, we miss it. So we get back in the game, but since we have had a period of time to build our own personal preferences and favorites, and know what we want, and maybe even kept SOME of that stuff, we can begin getting only the things we want, rather than focusing on buying everything that's not nailed down. Sentimentality and preference takes precidence over how much of an "investment" it is at that point, or how "cool" it makes us look. Because whatever you get, you are in the "long haul" to keep using until the day you die - most likely.
• Slow Purge Till Death - As we get older, certain elements of our favorite activities slowly become either more difficult, or off-limits. To a point that we don't quite understand why we're still doing that which we are doing. For example, CRT Collectors have it really hard because of not just the amount of space CRT televisions and computer monitors take, but also because of the fact when they get older, lugging that CTC chassis or that Zenith ZCM-1490 that weighs 50LBS despite being a 14"x14"x14" cube is no longer going to be fun. The electronics aspect of it will start to become a chore as eyesight gets worse and your hands get less steady with old age. What once seemed like no big deal will seem like a tremendous waste of engery - because you're not young anymore. Also, external factors make a difference, like the cost of electricity, the availaibility of electronic hobbyist parts, especially older chips and components that are no longer being made. Some of us may end up whittling down to mere Emulation after awhile, because it's just less of a hassle, and less of a injury risk to be doing that past a certain point. To be working with actual hardware and software, you have to be rather dedicated to it.
• Death - Then, there's when you die. If you don't have family, you know there's a high likelihood everything you can't take with you is going to get scrapped as just "old shit" by the government. If you do, they don't necessarily care nor understand why dad or her dead husband was banging away at some mid 1990's gray laptop at 65 years old when he could have had the "newest and latest and greatest". BUT, the Estate Sale is a great way to ensure this stuff lands in future generations, and possibly even a museum - personal or public, for future generations to at least see, if not enjoy themselves. Thats why the slow purge is so important, to make sure the devices and software live on in the hands of those who actually care, and not died in the hands of lamestreamers, or people interested in burying the past because there is "nothing to learn from it" or "nothing interesting about it" to them.

The Video Games thing started with the internet. My older Gen X sister got internat access through her college and got a new Windows 95 computer with Netscape Navigator on it. I'm plopped down in front of this thing dialed into the internet one day and given a chance ot learn how the Internet works.

Me, being the snarky soon-to-be-teenager, having heard that the internet was "all the free information in the world, kinda' like a encyclopedia wiht a computer" - I decided to try and stump this internet thing. I thought of the oldest, mot irrelevant, silly, ridiculous thing I could put in the Yahoo! Search box.......

Atari 2600

And what did I get in return....only about 170,000,000,000 reaults with Yahoo! AND Alta-Vista. Seriously, 170,000,000,000 results? On the internet? In 1995 no less? Seriously. I was shocked the entire first page of my Yahoo! search was chock full of Atari pages and classic gaming pages, written mostly by bored college students who probably bought their Atari from a Value Village, St. Vinnies, or Goodwill for the price of a Cars record with like, 12 games, 15 controllers, and 2 RF switchboxes. Today I'd expect that and even more, but in 1996, LOL!

And you could tell it was all 20-something Gen Xers making these sites. The first one I clikced on was a picture of a chick in exercise wear and an Atari T-shirt on a Nordic Trac on a page called "The 2600 Connection". Yeah, every few months, they had some other smokin' lady on their page in Atari swag! So apparently, some Gen X chicks DUG Atari!

Next page I go to is a website with a picture of Grover on a toilet for some dumb reason! I Shit you not! But that's not the main event - the main event was this guy's "Classic Gaming & Retro Page" I think it was called, had just about every game system made since 1972!! Stuff I'd never heard of like the Magnavox Odyssey 1 & 2, Emerson Arcadia, Telstar, Zircon Fairchild Channel F, The Mattel Intellivision, The Sega SG-1000....I mean, here was all this crazy stuff on his page I'd never heard of that existed, because it was ALL eclipsed by friggin ATARI back in the day. And this guy's page rattled off the 2600's specs like a Computer specs sheet on Dell.com - 1.79MHz MOS 6507 CPU, 128 BYTES of RAM, 2K to 64K ROM Cartridges for "data storage", the TIA (Television Interface Adapter) for the "GPU"....I mean christ. That's where I learned these things were basically little rudimentary computers!

So after a few months, I finally did my first "e-commerce" on the internet, and bought my first "collector" era 2600. From some guy named Joseph Pelitri. I bought a 2600 Jr. with Combat and E.T. and one CX-40 Joystick for like...$15....$27 total including shipping. Back then, you could not just one-click PayPal and buy shit. You had to e-mail the person, talk to them, they would package it up and tell you what it cost. Then you went to the Grocery Store - the customer service/money services dept - and got a "Money Order" - which was a piece of paper you purchased to act as a liason for your money. Once they cashed that, they'd ship whatever you bought, with the courier of THEIR choice, and you wated a month or two even for whatever you purchased to arrive! NO TRACKING!!

After a long wait, my 2600 JR. came in. And that's when I got hep to the thrift shops and Flea Markets.

Every weekend I'd go to the Auburn Draughton Library and use the open and free internet-connected PCs there to research Atari stuff hardcore. I learned about label variations, different controlers, that the Driving Controllers I lost with my first 2600 as "Defective Paddles" were actually some rare thing for Indy 500. Speaking of Indy 500....

Opelika had a Goodwill, a Salvation Army Thrift (which a huge back section where random stuff ended up), some swanky thrift shop that was somewhat "expensive", another thrift shop that looks like it was hosted in a disused Daycare....

At hte Daycare store I bought soon thereafter a Woody 4-switch with several joysticks, paddles, a broken BOSS joystick, and a bunch of games including Combat, E.T., Frogger, Amidar, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pitfall!, and some others I can't remember. Going back to what I mentioned though, I got Indy 500 with it.

That's where I started fuxxoring about with Atari controllers. I figured out if I used a Joystick, I could kinda-sorta controll the cars in Indy 500 with them, so I decided "What if I connected these to a "pot" - like a Guitar Knob" - so I did, and what resulted was kinda' hilarious, but it worked. Basically, I could play Indy 500 a LITTLE BIT with these controllers, but I did not have the full 360 degree turning capability, I just had the ability to turn the car left or right - kind of like a real car actually. I used a set of broken paddles to achieve this.

I fixed the BOSS joystick using my new guitar modding capabilities. I routed out a piece of pressure treated pine, wired in the Atari connector from a broken joystick into it, and then covered the wood in duct tape, and screwed it in with 4 galvanized wood screws. It became my favorite joystick for awhile.

A few blocks away I had a school friend named Daniel who had a "Vader" 2600 - the black 4-switch that was actually called an "Atari 2600" - in box, without the pack-in game or controllers. Some dolt jammed a small earring in the cartridge slot...I think at some point I amanged to retrieve it without damaging the catridge connector with some soldering picks. Then I found the controller jacks were janky, so I redid the solder on them, then drilled through the jacks and put nuts and bolts through them so that they would not move - from then on out, the console worked reliably. I gave it to my lithium bandmate Hawk at some point. He probably still has that thing. I bought that system for $15.

That's when I started kicking up cheap NES consoles at the thrift. I spent about $10 on a trip that yieleded me a replacement for my cat-piss destroyed Yamah PSS-170 keyboard, a Pre Computer 1000 like I used to have - not sure why I wanted it, and not one but TWO NES-001 consoles, one with the door ripped off, the other in decent condition. I still had my cartridges and my controllers - and I STILL have my O.G. game pad, which now is marked "One" - has a hole in it, and is the one I use for "Let's Plays" on YouTube most of the time.

But when it came to the NES, THRIFTS were not the only place you could still get stuff...apparently, some stores STILL had NES stuff on the shelves at the time, DIRT CHEAP.

One regret I had was passing up on a $35.00, new-in-box, Top Loader NES from Kay-Bee at a mall in Myrtle Beach back in 1997. I did because I felt I'd get in trouble for buying an NES on a Band Trip.

Our local Wal-Mart had some NES games left at the very bottom of the games case. These were Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Rocketeer, Alien III, Metroid (the later yellow label version I still have today), and Little Nemo: The Dream Master. I bought ALL of these up.

Classmates started giving me games. Antonio, a frenemy of sorts, gave me a copy of Donkey Kong Classics (Which I still have), another classmate had a pile of ATari stuff I still have, her name was Kelly - I think I got Berzerk, Haunted House, and some others during that haul. I also though, was getting scammed by some kid named Kenneth over Dragon Warrior I-IV. Which I wanted because I had borrowed a copy of Dragon Warrior IV from a friend in Auburn at the time, and wanted the whole collection - even then. and IV was like $45 loose at the time.

I went to the Phoenix City flea market and got Adventure. I rmemeber being torn up over that trip because everyone was now starting to catch on and charging stupid prices for common-as-fuck Atari equipment. See kids who are reading, even before e-bay was a huge thing, people at thrifts and fleas caught onto this stuff and started charging dumb amounts of money for it.

One source of consternation was a Atari 2600 HEavy Sixer - an original 1977 in mint condition, with the games and manuals, which was ruined by a bad copy of Ms. Pac-Man a few years later. The case MAY wtill be in my childhood bedroom closet, but I would not bet on it.

What drove this collecting.....

Anotehr part of collecting for me, was because I did not have a computer of my own at home. My sister's are really from a different dad, and their dad was a wealthy guy who bought them nice new PC's while they were in college. I lived with my mom which was a self-described "Upper middle-class household with lower-middle-class income".

When I went to my sister's home, I got to download emulators early on and run them, or even DOS ports of popular console games like Adventure. You had Craig Pell's "Indenture" which was a DOS port of Adventure that'd run on pretty much any PC you put it on. We also had Stella, and NESticle, which were the gold standards of emulation back then.

Through Emulation I'd learn of more games, like Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns, the other two Dragon Warrior Games, Mega Man 1-6, and all these games I'd missed out on because I was not aware they existed. And we downloaded them because it was hard enough to find current versions of them on current hardware, and what eversions we could find of some of them, were stupid expensive once a group of people started finding that choice of game attractive.

For example, when the Atari 2600 was gaining traction, the one game released by Purina - yes, the Dog Chow company - called "Chase the Chuckwagon" was some kind of amazing mystery. Hearleded with some kind of expanded interest for god knows what reason. It seemed stupid when you actually think about it - a game about chasing a Chuckwagon branded about Dog Food....but it seems just about anyone would make a game based on anything whether it was US Games "Tax Avoiders" or the literal "Fuckery" that was an entire host of Playaround/Entex X-rated Atari titles released around 1981-1982 that were sold from behind the counter in little vinyl pouches. Most of these games, however, were bad.

Sometimes you'd try those games out and have a huge laugh, other times you'd try those games out and find a new favorite. Like when we decided to download the Entex/Playaround games in 2001 while hanging with some other bandmates for amusement. The fact anyone would consider a 2600 game for such "visual" forms of entertainment was beyond any one of us. Almost every single one was horrible. Custer's Revenge for example, was so terrible, I'm surprised when AVGN reviewed it it did not incite Cancel Culture as early as 2007! The graphics were so laughably horrible these could have literally been rated PG-13 at worst in some cases, if you did not know what was going on. None of this was at all tittilating by any stretch of the imagination, it was actually horrid comedy, sort of like laughing at the crude and inapropriate images inside a vadalized text book in middle school, or the Red Hot Chili Pepper's sock thing.....seriously, if it was 1982, and you needed THIS for entertainment, maybe it was time to redo your whole wardrobe, find a sense of some fashion, and hit the bar scene!

But outside of the realm of quetionable game ideas, you found some real diamonds. Fast Food is a great game, AND Hilarious. I mean, you're literally some of the best animated jaws in video game history - in a 2600 game - and the whole game is one giant burp/belch/fart joke! Basically you float around a playfield consuming tater chips, ice cream sundaes, and jellybeans, too many licorice jellybeans though, and then the screen turns blue and goes "BURP!". LOL. When you win every round it says "You're Getting Fatter" - LOL. It's fun to play and Ludicrious at the same time.

And there were others I found too through emualtion. Lost Luggage was a game where you had to collect luggage coming off an Aircraft. There was another one I think called Master builder where you literally built a structure. Dragon Warrior II and III were so close to I and IV that I wanted all 4. MotoRodeo was a Monster Truck game for the 2600 I still have not found to this day. One of my bandmates fell hard for Jawbreaker, and I even found Krazy Kreatures for the NES through playing it on a modified Xbox.

These lead to all sorts of long lists of games you want. And back then, you could sample them on emulation, but playing them on the real hardware was a real treat because it's as-intended.

A Bit about The Rise of Emulation

Retrogaming and Retrocomputing started to come in it's own at the turn of the century. The first time I started to hear those terms was around 2000-2001 on various gaming forums I was a part of including AtariAge, RetroGaming Roundtable, DigitPress, and so on. It was still kinda' less as "official", but we knew we made it when the manufacturers started to crack down on ROM Sharing and Emulation.

It seemed from about 1998 onward, every few years, we'd see a mass exodus of ROM sites getting shut down or C&D'd, mostly by Nintendo. Then the problem would fade out and then come back again once we thought we were all safe to be partaking in the Emulation festivities.

The trouble with Emulation is most people did it because they wanted the games, could not find them at their local thrift or online (or at least, at a reasonable price), and some of us idiot Millennials got REALLY Greedy about ROMs and Abandonware at that time.

The LEGITIMATE reasons for it was that we wanted to preserve these games for future use well beyond their hardware's percieved lifespan at the time. There's no telling how long an NES or Atari 2600 might live, and no telling how serious DIYers would get in the future at that time. And you can't just jam a video game on the ISA Bus of a PC or plug it into some other console unrelated and hope it works to get to it. The first signs of any sort of attempts to make NEW hardware for this stuff that did not involve some kind of NES-on-a-Chip type thing that plugged into your TV's A/V jacks was Ben Heck! I watched him develop the VCS Portable all the way from the beginning of his site in 1997 at age 14, all the way to him getting on whatever "Geeky" channel he was on on TV in the mid 2000's. I think that really opened the flood gates for people to start making legitimate, new, "Retro" hardware.

And the legitkmate want for this was further exascerbated by Nintendo seemingly not giving one iota of crap about the past. Nintendo did not want us going back to their old 8-bit counterparts of their software, they wanted everyone to buy a Game Boy Advance, or an N64, and get the new retconned version of the games we wanted. Nintendo was about as strict about their IP as Disney is. And that alienated a lot of people. Eventually they wisened up and got things like the Virtual Console and whatnot (but stuff like that has introduced new problems).

As I watched the NES rise in fame, I watched th 2600 start to dwindle a bit. See, now all those Gen Xers were a decade into their careers, in their thirties, with little feet about the house, and dogs, and spouses, and regular lives like I have now. They did not have time for this shit anymore. And the ones that did, were the hangers on at old sites. And none of this was cheap anymore. Just 5-7 years before, an Atari 2600 cost me $15 for a box chock full of stuff, now things were getting ridiculous. HEavy Sixers for $200 on e-bay, cartridges going for $5-10-20 that used to be mere CENTS to buy in the 1990's. But the prices started coming down soon, and the interest started to wane, while the NES stuff started to rise in value.

And this is what drove this madness - because now, we, as collectors, could actually make a buck on our collections. Nothing major (not even close to what I made "Cashing out" in the 2010s). I saw no loss of benefits. I get to play and own more games than I could possibly play in my lifetime, and then when I got tired of dragging all this shit around with me - I could cash out on it and make a cool $500 or whatever.

How things got really crazy...

When I got started in this madness, I was a penniless teenager making chump change on my own. But then I entered my early 20's, moved out on my own, and got a career in I.T. I was also single, had no pets, and needed to be on nobody's timeline...

The CreepingNet most people on my YouTube channel knew, was a single man, playing in rock bands, doing I.T. work by day, messing with guitars mostly, and playing video games as a hobby. Nobody even knew about the finance side of it.

Having sizeable enough income for awhile meant I could start collecting again once I actually got on my feet. So every weekend for me was the same ritual - wake up around 10am, shower, get dressed, put on my walking shoes, and then walk to the thrift shops in Everett/Lynnwood, and look for old computers, old game systems, old video games, and maybe guitar stuff if at a decent price (under $200). I would then take a break taking lunch - usually at iHOP, Izzy's Pizza Buffet, some botique Itailian place if I was really ballin' that week, and maybe go through my newest accumulations while I was there. Then by about 6pm, I'd be at home, messing with my newest aquisitions, and maybe making YouTube videos about them enthusiastically - and have em' done by Sunday so I could post the video before the weekend was over, if possible.

Odl video games were among the CHEAPEST I coudl find. And by then, SNES, Genesis, and Intellivision had gotten so cheap I was collecting for those as well. I had an SNES with about 15 games, a Genesis with 3, 2 Game Boys with 3 games between them (one color, one pocket, later a Grey Brick and a Red Brick), an Intellivision II with 20 games for it I got for my b-day in Lithium and then accumulated more games over time - almost all in the boxes. I could go as cheap as just $5 and come back with a nice haul of stuff depending on the shops I went to and what was there, and how clued in.

Computer stuff was the second cheapes.t I really missed out on a niche by not doing what LGR did later as well as he did it. This was the stuff I snagged the most, and I had so much oddware including a Microsoft Mouse 2.0, a copy of PIX graphics software new in box, CAD Sosftware, a Magneto Optical Drive with 5 things of "Discs" for it, an army of 8-bit and 16-bit ISA cards, typing tutors, boxes upon boxes of PC stuff. Some places, like one local computer shopp, let me have this old crap for free. I'd take it in by the bucketload, sometimes even walking home to get my truck to fill it up. I even found CRT monitors including an IMTEC EGA and a NEC MultiSync JC-1401-P3A with Boeing stickers on it, and even full systems including my Tandy 1000A, a Tandy 1000 EX, a AST PRemium 386/25, countless towers including an Ex-Microsoft AMT branded unit, a Holt Office Systems 486, a CAT Computers 486, and even a ginormous 486 tower beast.

The negative part of this was a bit personal. What I can disclose is that at the time I did not feel I had much of a future to be quite frank. I kind of saw myself reaching age 30, still alone, living in the same Studio Apartment, probably clogging my arteries and fattening myself up on Pizza and Chicken Strips. The Dating Scene was a disaster, even then. All my jobs in Seattle save for maybe Microsoft for awhile - felt like a dead-end - and I kept having to deal with rising rent on a Unit that was worth only what I paid for it when I moved in in 2006 at $450/mo. While this sounds sad, that's the thing, I had no plan for life past 30 at that point. So collecting rampant amounts of video game stuff and then auctioning it off was a way to pass the time and enjoy myself even if I was poor, supposedly undateable, and gainfully but stagnantly employed. The dissappointment of early adulthood in my age group cannot be understated. My bands and later marriage would give me purpose - but prior to that, it was just a string of collecting, stupid booty calls everyone kept asking me about to my chagrin, and a lot of "Biding my time" because I really was at a point of "well....where do we go from here?". I think a lot of collectors can really relate to these feelings.

So passing out playing Dragon Warrior III, or pulling Keurig-fueled All-Nighters working on 486s and 386s, and building looney home networks for fun, was what I did, while playing old 80's New Wave records in between bouts of writing and recording my own music. And I'd cycle around my various hobbies for years, sometimes selling, but not as often as I probably should have.

About Collecting and Relationships

The problem with collecting in the time I did, was it was a very aimless and somewhat questionable hobby. There was no real big money in it - like Comic Books or vintage toys from the 50's-70's, or Vintage guitars (which I was pretty much under the bar of entry for). So nobody really did it back then FOR the money. That's a new thing I'll mention in another section.

The thing was, I got into a relationship, and I was willing ot give it all up for that relationship because other parts of my hobbies jived so well with her. So in 2010, I gave up a good chunk of The Creeping Network, sold off a bunch of video games, and I would slowly downsize over the course of my thirties. This is where I had to start building some self esteem and some inner strenght to know when the other side of things - which really was not her, it was more some toxic "friends" in the group around us that were the cause.

Not to veer to far off topic but one reason I started to really hate Seattle during the 2010's was the massive influx of Millennials who were driven by new shiny stuff, and putting on nasty airs about myself or even possibly my wife regarding our collecting hobbies. They wanted to stream music stolen from the internet via bittorrent or from Spotify - all the current stuff neither of us liked. I also hated how they critiqued everything I had, while their richer parents kept funneling in funds for their mortgages, leased rides, and children. The truth was, a lot of boomers and older Gen X really sheltered their children from reality when they became full-blown adults, and those kids never learned to handle things as adults, and some of them I know for a fact are paying for that sheldering now when the bank of mom and dad closed for business. My retro computing and retro-gaming was something of major critique.

The first problem was retro-computing, which once just drew the ire of my Call-Of-Duty and Skyrim playing co-workers if I even mentioned it at all. Nobody understood why I enjoyed playing older DOS games on hardware from the 1990's. All in all, I did not care what other's thought, but the biggest issue is when people in the social circle started to think me "insane" for doing things like playing DOS games on 486s and collecting Atari 2600 games. This was particularly spearheaded by their husbands and boyfriends, some of which used it as a tool to drive a wedge between me and mine with hopes of getting a chance with one of us. It's not what they think that bother's me, it whast they DO with those thoughts that bothers me. I can think about killing a man all day long and it's fine, everyone does, but if I ACT on those thoughts, that's when we're in trouble. What they were doing was effectively trying to kill our relationship with petty bullshit.

RetroGaming added a BIGGER Picture. To myself, I was just an adult enjoying his free time after work blowing up aliens or whatever on a TV screen. To them, it was like this "stunted maturity" thing that they could not comprehend. I feel a big problem with Millennials, and maybe some other age groups, is they tend to think that my past-times should have been constant fucking, constant alcohol and weed abuse, and constant, outward Social crap - or creating babies we could not afford. I really did not care until people started giving me hell about it. Because for some dumb reason, I was supposed to be a stoned, alcoholic, unwilling father, and not a married, clean nosed, gamer guy.

There was a lot of toxicity at that time that really cultivated where I started going with this later on. The biggest problem with 30-somethings I see is they are so uptight because they don't "feel like adults". Unlike them, I learned my lessons about "your time will come" early through my own stupidity as an early 20-something when it came to all the shit they'd obviously not learned about (such as getting in bed with someone). Truth was, by then, I knew who I was, I felt like an adult, and was becoming increasingly annoyed with the "mock adulthood" most of my peers were living at the time that lead them to sometimes be really mean and cruel to me. So what does this have to do with collecting computers/gaming stuff? well...read on...

Maybe the ONLY Thing that hurt, to me, was that I realized I was not getting any younger, and here I had 384 atari games, 15 computers, 152 NES cartridges, and I spent a LOT of time putzing about with all this random shit, in between work, and gigs, and committments, and relationship stuff, to keep all this stuff working and appreciate it enough. I also had some other reasons I care not to share here, but in the end, by about 2017, I'd started cashing out. So for over $1000 - I managed to downsize to a collectoin I could manage, and started to focus only on the things I WANTED to use, not just every random piece of hardware or software I found at a thrift shop at a budget price. Some of that stuff went to good homes, other stuff went to other sales places, some I lost $$ on, but mostly, I gained a massive profit from it. I did not do this because money is more important, I did this because the sheer amount of stuff other people were not using because I had it, so I sold a lot of it. And some of that stuff is nice to see in someone else's hands being used, rather than sitting on a shelf collecting dust - such as the pile of Atari games I put at the top of this page. This bring me to.....

The Mature Gamer

One thing I HAVE held behind my back as a collector, from a LONG Time ago, entering into middle age, is what WOULD I do if I made it past 40? Because now, life is more than half over, and I don't need all this shit cluttering up my home when I'm elderly. In your 20's, you have all the time in the world to fuck around. In your 30's, you still have some time, but in your 40's, the clock of demise - for a lack of better terms - becomes a bit more noticeable. This gives me 20-30 more years to DOWNSIZE.

A lot of things have changed from how it was when I started. Atari 2600 stuff has stabilized to reasonable, not great, but reasonable prices, and is making somewhat of a comeback due to the 2600+. The NES stuff has peaked out and soon too will stabilize. I've lost interest in reliving the mid 1990's console wars due to so many nice wounds from my own generation that makes reliving the 1990's with full accuracy a bit irritating, plus I'm more into PC's from the late 80's/early 90's than I am into things like SNES.

So the first thing that changed was a focus on only collecting the games I want to play on particular consoles. Since I have some particular favorites, and they can be seen in my collections pages for each. So I kept the NES and Atari 2600, and only collected the games I wanted for those specific consoles.

For computers, I narrowed down to three - one 8088, one 386 that could cover the 286-early 486 era, and a very very fast 486 that could cover the entire gamut, including some early Pentium things. I also have 4 laptops - 2 NEC, 2 NanTan, the NAnTans have DSTN Screens, the NECs are Active Matrix. I'm trying to preen a Versa M/75 into my ultimate MS-DOS retrogaming laptop - 640x480 Active Matrix Screen that ages well, huge HDD, WSS + SoundBlaster, Touch Screen. All that fun stuff - the problem with that, is getting it to the point that it actually has all that working.

Software for the computers is starting to be hosted on an in-home Server, rather than on piles and piles of optical and magnetic media. HDD's can be reloaded at a moment's notice from base-level backups made over FTP or USB-to-IDE Host Bridges. This means I can collect a LOT of PC games and just FTP/download/copy them over as I wish.

Eventually - the tiers will be dropping certain systems and stuff as I get older and as they get more valueable and less likely to be something I'd want to upkeep. The rest of everything is all emulated using a mix of old Wii, PC, and a Raspberry Pi 4B - and out of the three, I'm finding old Nintendo Wii systems are winnning out for this purpose for the most part, save for PC.