Great thread, Steven! There is indeed a great deal of magic infused in our hobby.
Having a stockpile of unexplored pixelated fun waiting at my beck and call is part of the pleasure of collecting video games. There are more than a dozen or so games that I have on my "to play" list, which I will dive into when the spirit moves me (or when my schedule permits). Postponing playing a game heightens the experience for me, and I will do the same for movies I buy. The time has to be right. Looking through my collection at games like Kubuki Quantum Fighter, Kid Icarus, Gumshoe, Duck Tales (haven't beat the game in 20 somethin' years), Journey to Silius, Shatterhand, and Super Mario Bros. 2 (never actually beat this pseudo-Mario game) among other classics makes me all warm and fuzzy inside (and perhaps a bit terrified with Journey to Silius). They are physical tokens of future fun to be had.
I also like collecting and playing games that I played once or a few times either at a friend's house or that I rented. Most of the original games from my childhood collection I am thoroughly acquainted with, but there is a mystery to the games I only faintly met. Hell, I still want to buy Abadox because of the one time I played the game at a Toys R Us on a family vacation. If a game was a friend's, it makes it even sweeter. I own the games from a childhood friend, and I wonder as I play them what he must have thought when he played the game at certain parts: Did a certain stage piss him off enough to throw his controller (he had and has a bad temper)? Did a certain strange looking character cause him to laugh out loud, and did he give it a nickname like he did for so many other characters in video games? What else was going on in his life as he played this game: Did he shuttle the game back and forth between his mom and dad's house when they got divorced, or did he just leave it at his dad's house? So, yeah. I understand and reflect on the nostalgia associated with our hobby, be it actual or conjectural.
My collecting days aren't quite over, so I still have gems lost in my would be past to recover and knock the dust off of. Of course I enjoy buying games I never had the opportunity to own and coveted, but I equally, if not more, enjoy learning about games I never knew about and finding them. The research I undertake on a prospective game is all part of the courting process in my gaming/hobby. This is one of the reasons why I am so glad to be a retro gamer in this day in age with the internet always ready to yield so many sweet secrets from yesteryear.
Today, I consider my blossoming Famicom collecting to be a whole new frontier in my NES collecting, which is
the system I collect. These are not only games I missed in my childhood, these are games that an ocean separated me from, but are now mine for peanuts thanks to video game forums and ebay. Right now, I only have a Famicom adapter (alright, I have three) that I use to play Famicom games on my NES with, BUT in the near future I plan on buying some Famicoms (first the beautiful original, then the AV or a Twin Famicom). I have been postponing buying one for a few reasons (need to reorganize my collection before throwing it into the pile, I hardly have a surplus of money and my Famicom games play just fine on my NES with an adapter, once I buy a Famicom I will feel obligated to build a robust collection of Famicom games, etc.), but the biggest reason is I like to milk the anticipation of collecting as much as I can. When my Famicom comes one day, it will be the fruition of a dream, a small, strange dream, but a dream none the less of having my hands on the source of so much fun of some Japanese child who is now probably about my age.
There are certain animistic beliefs that I like to entertain concerning video game- here is one of them: I like to imagine that all of the fun that children have had with a game or system remains with it over the years like memories of some sort. When I start playing a game that has been in hibernation for 20 or so years, I am reawakening the game and contributing new fun and memories to it. I hold to this "belief" lightheartedly at best, but I still think it adds a little something to the overall magic.