Strange dreams about video game collecting - what are yours?

[Buapo]

Once in a while, I'll have an interesting dream about hunting for video games. The funny thing is, a lot of times the items that I discover don't even exist (at least to my knowledge). I recently had another one of these dreams, so I figured I'd share while it's still fresh in my memory.

In this dream, a friend and I got word of an electronics store that had closed down and left a bunch of stuff behind. It wasn't insanely large, I'd say about the size of your average dollar store. We just walked right in, and the place was a mess. I started digging around for interesting things, and started digging up old video game stuff that they just left behind.

Among the items, I found:

1. A SNES controller, with a Game Genie function built in, so you don't have to put anything in the cart slot. There were three or four of them, boxed.

2. Very strange turbo-style NES controllers that had red leds in them for the functions.

3. A pirate multi-cart for the NES that featured all the NES Mega Man games. It had a poorly made pirate label, and even a box. The artwork reminded me of Mega Man 1.

4. A large, cardboard display for "Darius Gaiden" that hung from the ceiling.

5. A sealed (but with torn plastic) copy of The Legend of Zelda for NES.

6. Loose "dogbone" controller for the NES.

7. A "Super FX" developer's kit, which apparently allowed you develop your own SNES game that utilized the Super FX technology. There were four of these, all in their original box, and they had the Super FX logo prominently displayed.

8. Loose manuals, boxes, and cartridges for plenty of SNES and NES games that I've never heard of. And I couldn't match any one particular item with another.

9. A whole bunch of Sega Genesis advertising, but strangely no Genesis stuff.

I could go on a while longer, but I feel like I mentioned the most interesting items.

So, please share - have you ever had a strange dream about the hunt for video games? Finding rare, or in my case, NONEXISTENT items?

[ryborg]

Oh yeah. As someone who's been going to thrift stores constantly for the last 15 years, I always have big-score dreams there. It happens IRL just frequently enough to make it realistic in the dream. Then I wake up and I slowly realize that none of that happened and I really don't have a gold NWC, a dozen game-used jerseys from the 1990 Bills season, etc etc

[Drixxel]

Discoveries of video game stockpiles containing weird, nonexistent titles occur once in awhile in my dreams. The most recent zany dreamfind was for a Ben Stiller movie adaptation on SNES but I can't remember which movie it was supposed to have been based on. The idea of a Ben Stiller-themed 16-bit platformer is unpleasant.

[Buapo]

Then I wake up and I slowly realize that none of that happened and I really don't have a gold NWC, a dozen game-used jerseys from the 1990 Bills season, etc etc

That is the worst part... waking up and realizing you have NOTHING of what you just had your hands on.

[Dr. Dib]

The only one I can visually remember occurred sometime this summer. I was anticipating a trip to California and dreamed I stopped in a thrift store that had walls of video game consoles and games. I remember trying to decide where to spend my money and having a tough choice on choosing between CIB consoles I already owned for $30 or consoles I didn't own, like the 3DO, for $40 or so. Then I still hadn't looked at either wall of games.

Afterwards I woke up and was saddened that this was just a dream.

[thom_m]

I once dreamed I stole a whole box of NES games from some bratty neighbor kid I actually don't have. In the dream, my brother convinced me to give the box back even though the kid was an idiot, but (as far as I remember) his house was on fire when I tried to. hee was so pissed, yelling on the street with his family as their house burned down. And so I kept the games - since he thought they burned anyways. I was really upset when I woke up and didn't have them...

I also dreamed once that I had a Twin Famicom. Needless do say I also got really frustrated the next morning.

[nebrazca78]

Once in a while, I'll have an interesting dream about hunting for video games. The funny thing is, a lot of times the items that I discover don't even exist (at least to my knowledge).

Excellent dream memory! That's a lot of different stuff to remember.

Discoveries of video game stockpiles containing weird, nonexistent titles occur once in awhile in my dreams.

My video game dreams come in two varieties: non-existent Master System games and hardware and Xbox 360 FPS dreams. The SMS dreams are always about going to someone's house and seeing that they have all types of sweet SMS stuff that I've never seen before. The last one was about going to some kid's house and him having tons of SMS games that don't exist. I was wheeling and dealing with him but I woke up before a deal could be finalized.

The one before that I was at someone's mobile home by a river and they had SMS games with huge circuit boards, like 20 times bigger than normal. It was just the circuit boards, no cartridges to hold them. It was amazing and yes, it does suck to wake up and realize these things aren't real.

As for the 360 FPS dreams, this just happens when I play a 360 FPS for about 8 hours or more in a day. Not very exciting, I just keep playing the game in my dream.

[Buapo]

One of the other odd items I remember was a second generation SNES... but it didn't have the normal A/V plug, it ONLY had an RF output. Needless to say, I wasn't excited about that find.

[raptor94k]

Once in a while, I'll have an interesting dream about hunting for video games. The funny thing is, a lot of times the items that I discover don't even exist (at least to my knowledge).

I can assure you that The Legend of Zelda for NES exists.

But seriously, I often wondered if other people had these dreams or if I was the only crazy obsessed one out there. You guys are lucky though, my dreams always suck as they parallel what always happens to me in real life.

I'm usually in a store that I wouldn't think sold video games when all of a sudden I find a bunch of really awesome stuff for NES, SNES, Genesis, etc. (My dreams are usually not bias towards any system in particular). So I grab a bunch of stuff that I don't have (sometimes the titles don't actually exist) and I get really excited. Then I look at the price tags and realize they are all priced at market value. And I put them all back because I can't afford them.

[Rickstilwell1]

I hate the dreams when I find something rare that I've always wanted then buy it and put it on my shelf, only to wake up with it not being there. The worst dream was setting the Entex Adventure Vision on my game system shelf of the time. Before that, when I was a teenager and didn't have the NES toploader yet, I had a similar dream.

[dnehthend]

haha, so glad to find out I'm not the only one with these dreams, I've been having them since childhood and continue to

[Zebbe]

My brain fucks me by always making me dream about Darxide, even at times when I haven't longed to have it for a very long time.

[Tempest]

I once dreamed I found a boxed Congo Bongo for the Mattel Aquarius. Now THAT was weird.

It played pretty well from what I remember though.

Tempest

[shopkins]

I have these, too. The things I find are always strange games that don't exist, often weird gold carts or oddly shaped carts or licenses of comic book characters in stores that are fantastically stocked with such things. I remember finding an Avengers game for GBA, for example.

I actually have these kinds of collecting dreams about comic books, too, sometimes, because I collect them just as rabidly as games. I remember dreaming once that I found Wanted, except I had never read Wanted so the version in my dream was weird and different from the real thing. I also dream about finding hauls of comic book longboxes in flea-markets and going through 50-cent bins.

Oh, and last night I dreamed I found a rare, I guess it was an eight-track tape with Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow songs on it, but it was bright yellow, an octagonal cylinder, and it had a door on it that opened to reveal controls for the songs and how they sounded. I remember two prominent buttons, one for "Extra Grass" as in bluegrass sound and one for "Extra Bass." Yeah, I know that doesn't actually rhyme, but it never occurred to me in the dream. I was playing a non-existent Sheryl Crow song on it when I woke up.

And I do have the "I'm still playing the game" dreams, too, if I've played too much. Usually it's just the elements of my life that would have shown up in the dreams anyway adapted to the gameplay, so I might have a stealth-action dream about going back to college and remembering that I forgot to go to a class for an entire semester and now I have to take the final.

[GameMasterBobby]

Dream Number One:

I was a kid at the time, and Super Smash Bros for the N64 was popular. My friends and I loved this game, and played it all the time. The characters and levels were taken from various Nintendo games. The object was to throw the other characters off the edges of the levels, which was difficult at first, but you could beat them up to make them easier to throw.

I was so obsessed with this game that I dreamed about it. I was in my house and the characters were jumping and flying around in my house, beating each other up and tossing each other around. Because they weren't confined to a TV screen, none of them could get killed. They did retain their same sizes, so they were very small compared to the size of my house.

I got attached to the characters, and worried if they could find a way out of the house. The world is so big, and they were so small that they would easily get lost and never make it back to civilization.

Dream Number Two:

I was a preteen or a teenager at the time. I randomly had a dream that there was a fighting game released for the Gamecube. It was a traditional fighting game: two character would fight until one either lost all it's health or fell off the stage. I never cared for fighting games, but this looked cool because it had Link for the Zelda games in it! I just had to have it!

A few months later Soul Calibur II was released, and it was exactly like my dream. Surreal.

[Auto-Fox]

I once dreamed I went to a retro-gaming convention that was showcasing a bunch of un-produced console prototypes. I got to try what was essentially a "Virtual Boy beater" from Sega that never saw the light of day. Pretty much what you'd expect, it was a wired head-mounted display attached with a LONG cord to a box with a CD drive for the games.
It had two cool things about it. 1, the graphics were in color. 2, it used motion tracking of some kind, and could "see" your head and hand movements (you wore reflector gloves, and the helmet had a reflector, all of which were tracked by a tripod-mounted sensor).
It was... interesting. To the best of my memory, the game showcased was an early beta of "Sonic The Hedgehog VR", the only piece of playable software made for the system before it was canned. It wasn't just Sonic characters, though. I think there were also Virtua Fighter and NiGHTS into Dreams characters too (the last one being very appropriate, I think).
The graphics were interesting. As far as I can remember, there really weren't any polygons involved, despite it being a 3D game. It was all "Mode 7" stuff and scaled sprites, like an old raycasting engine, or one of those old "super-scaler" arcade games by Sega.
Anyway, it was all pretty awesome. In the dream, I got to play the game, which I remember being actually pretty fun to just wander around in.
Of course, then I woke up, and was immediately sad upon realizing such a thing likely doesn't exist.
Still, with all the vaporware Sega's produced over the years...

[joshnickerson]

Occasionally I'll have a dream where I find some awesome stuff, but then right when I start to gather it all up, I realize that it's a dream and get so annoyed that I wake myself up. Then as soon as I fall back asleep, I'm back in the dream and at that point I just ignore it and walk out of the store.

Yeah, I'm not sure what in my diet is causing those meta kind of dreams either.

[buzz_n64]

I had 2 game collecting related dreams last night. In the first dream, my ex-mother-in-law said she is going to have all of my video games when I pass away. I told her no, and told her that she didn't even know what most of that stuff is anyway. In my second dream, I was revisiting a Goodwill I used to frequent back when I lived in Vegas, and found many boxed GBA and other games in bins, but the games were in the wrong boxes and some carts were scattered on the floor. Some game carts were in odd colors.

[slapdash]

My "favorite" videogame-related dream involved going to a rummage-sale and finding a cache of Bandai (Japan) games for Intellivision. IRL, I knew Bandai had released the Inty in Japan, but as far as I knew, they only sold US games. But in the dream... Well, actually, I never got any game titles, but they didn't just look like the US carts with "Bandai" slapped on them. Mmm...

[Buapo]

I'm really enjoying reading all these. It's making me feel... normal. Heh heh.

As a slight addendum to my original dream, I went into total "greed" mode. I grabbed the largest cardboard boxes I could find, and start filling them with absolutely everything. Other people started arriving, so I was trying to get absolutely all the good crap into the boxes.

As I was scrambling, I grabbed the loose dogbone controller, but passed up an SNES controller, as well as an SNES mouse... both of which were beat to hell from being on the ground.

I remember picking up one of the boxes with stuff in it, and it weighed a TON (as video games tend to do, while in bulk), but then I woke up. Darn it!

Though, there really is no feeling greater than being the first to discover a hidden gem. I was really excited, for example, to find Sonic CD (complete) for $3 at a county fair. Certainly not dream material, though.