The Devastation Caused by Someone Throwing Away Your Games or Hardware or Ephemera

[Nz17]

Who here has had their precious stuff careened into the garbage by a calloused associate, "friend," or family member? A fondly remembered console crammed into a compactor? A rumble pack pushed into the rubbish can? A tittle tossed away into a trash bin? You get the idea.

I have, and I HATE it. I have a lot of stuff stored where my parents live with no other place to store them for now, and my dad loves to throw away other people's stuff. I and others in my family have often had to rescue things from our own garbage cans that he has thrown away which don't even belong to him.

The latest I can think of (unless in an unlikely scenario someone has hid the console away in a closet somewhere), my dad threw away my 3DO when nobody was paying attention. I pray that it is still somewhere in that house, but it being tossed like common garbage into a trash compactor truck and crushed into useless plastic and broken circuitry is its most likely condition. Ironic considering that my uncle rescued the unit from somebody else's trash can before it suffered a similar, seemingly unavoidable fate.

By the way, this is the same Dad who has turned my precious late 1980's / very early 1990's Super Mario Bros. NES stand into an ash-covered ashtray holder. :-/

[celerystalker]

A few years ago, I stayed with my parents for awhile after my lease was up on my old place and I was getting married in a couple of months. During that time, my mom threw away the outer box to my Mother 3 limited edition set and the inner plastic tray from my NGPC Rockman, which I'd left out while I was asleep, as I was on overnights. She meant well, trying to surprise me by cleaning up my room for me, as she knew it was rough for me to be crammed back into my old room for a couple of months. She was under the old mindset that packaging is just trash. I was pissed, but tried to calmly explain to her that in this case, packaging is rather expensive, but she thought I was being ungrateful. I had to show her ebay auctions of the kind to make her realize that if she wasn't sure, she should just stay away from my stuff (most of which was in storage back then, fortunately).

That box still frustrates the hell out of me. If anyone has one, I have a spare SNES Earthbound box I'd trade for it...

On a side note, I actually wore the Franklin Badge that came in that set on my tux in my wedding. Guess who didn't get hit by lightning that day?

[megasdkirby]

Someone on the Selling subforum is selling ghe Rockman box, if that is what you need.

[celerystalker]

Someone on the Selling subforum is selling ghe Rockman box, if that is what you need.

I have the box for Rockman, it was the plastic inner tray that got thrown out on that one.

[SparTonberry]

My parents threw out the boxes as games I got as a kid, but the only one as an adult that got tossed was my Mr. Driller GBC box/manual (glad I didn't have the cart in there!) :P
Not something I had a huge attachment to but still disappointing as I'd otherwise kept all my newly-bought games complete since I was old enough to start buying games.

[Tanooki]

Sometime after the 3 visits I made to CA when I for the first time lived in here in KY I had my mom's original fairchild channel F system with over a dozen games all in their boxes and also my philips(magnavox) CDI system in the garage there for safe keeping. A good year or two later when I did move back there or a time (so this was like 6 years ago now) without any warning my dad was on some kick throwing crap out in the garage as my mom is a huge pack rat, he found where I had the stuff stashed, warned no one, and threw it in the trash cans. I went looking for the stuff when I moved back to CA for a few years and it was gone and I was pissed off. The fairchild may have been ugly but it worked well and I liked the stupid simple games, and the CDi I still had some of my games for it at the time (only having sold off Link and Hotel Mario) and wanted to use it again for the games a little but mostly as a very good CD player. I got no apology, just basically told tough shit, shouldn't have left it down there. Honestly I didn't think he'd throw my mom's system out, and the CDi I had forgot to pack away when I moved and remembered it years later. Today I wouldn't spend much of anything on either considering how much the good stuff on the CDi goes for now. :(

[Koa Zo]

I once had a very nice condition Intellivision II set, It was in a specific Intellivision console/display case from the 80's and I had all the "good" games boxed and complete. at least a dozen of the games I had purchased as new at a game convention in the late 90's.

One of my friends had a house with a large detached garage which we would hang out in. These guys weren't active gamers, just D&D and playing music in the garage, then one day we got to reminiscing about all our favorite old games. They got excited to play some Snafu, and Tron and Sea Battle and Lock n Chase and some others.
I brought the Intellivision set over with all my best games. We played it a little bit but the other guys got bored of it pretty fast. Anyhow the guy who lived there, Mike, said I might as well leave the set there just so we can play occasional games of Snafu or whatever... and we did a few times in the next couple weeks.

Then one day I'm over there and notice the Intellivsion isn't there. Mike tells me I put it behind the refrigerator last time, no I didn't. I look around behind the fridge and elsewhere and it isn't anywhere. After bugging him about it, he says oh his wife was cleaning things up and she might have put it up in the house. He says we'll check and get it later. When I go to leave later he says it's late and the kid is sleeping or some excuse that he can't rummage around in the house then. He's avertive the next times I'm over there as well, then one time I'm pushing him about it he tells me it's in the main garage attached to the house and I can go look for it. That garage was like a storage dump, boxes pilled upon boxes, I looked for a bit and was convinced it wasn't in there. I asked his wife and she's just like "I don't know what you're talking about."

Neither admitted to it directly, but it came to light later that the bitch sold it all on eBay.
Not devestating, but that was the begining of the end of our friendship.

[Emperor Megas]

Something sort of like that happened to me. Around 2000, when the Dreamcast was new, I was helping a friend move some stuff into his apartment and he dropped his manual for Panzer Dragoon Saga. He just picked it up and tossed it because it fell into the ground where it was wet. I was like, it's probably alright, but he was just like, 'Meh'. I care about stuff like that, but not enough to tell anyone else how to feel about their own stuff, so I didn't say anymore about it.

Well, he ended up giving me a lot of his Saturn games that year, and Panzer Dragoon Saga was one of them. It always bugged me that I didn't have the manual because he threw it away, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Years later, after the game shot up in value, I managed to secure a new manual for a reasonable price.

[TheBenenator]

Hasn't happened to me yet, but you can be damn sure that if it happens I'd be filing lawsuits. Throwing stuff in the garbage that doesn't belong to you is theft. (Keep receipts, folks!) :rockets:

[Nz17]

Indirect confirmation: the 3DO wasn't in any of the nearby closets nor attics nor on any of the nearby tabletops, shelves, nor counter-tops. Sadly, the fastest, likeliest, and most destructive answer must be the correct one: he threw it out and the 3DO was destroyed in a trash compactor truck. :bad-words: