Has anyone ever been robbed? How did you recover?
Hey guys. I haven't posted here in a long, long time. I'm really glad to see things are still going strong. I know this is a long read - sorry. Thank in advance to everyone who takes the time.
I started visiting Digital Press 15 years ago (jesus) shorty after I'd graduated high school and started college. It was 2002 and the world was still pretty oblivious to game collecting. I was finding NES games for a quarter at the salvation army, we hadn't been mentioned in any major media yet (Game Informer or wherever we got our first mention?) and I was living in Cleveland, OH. I was just a kid really, 19 years old, trying too hard to be cool on the internet, and excited to explore collecting the games I'd grown up with. I loved this place, the people and the hobby - the excitement of getting a good deal or tracking down a grail, the nostalgia of rediscovering old titles and fun of playing hidden gems I'd missed.
Life takes you strange places. Mine took me to a couple of different states, eventually landing me in NYC. I went through some hard times, and money grew tighter, so I back-burnered my hobby, but I carried my collection with me. I always figured that when I settled down and bought a place, I'd take it up again, and I'd check in here from time to time, posting when I had a question, and just lurking when I didn't - until five years ago.
Five years ago, I was living in Brooklyn, thanks in no small part to some friends with big hearts who had given me a place to stay rent-free while I was going through extremely hard time. They got me on my feet. It was exciting, the direction my life had taken, and I was extremely grateful, and eager to pay that forward. I was working as a manager of a local cafe, and one of my employees - who I considered a friend - had to quit to go home and stay with his mother who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He was going to lose his lease. Was there any chance, he asked, that I might be able to put him up for a couple of weeks when he got back to town? I told him yes, of course. My couch was his. This man's name was Dakota. And yeah, I'm using his real name, because fuck him, but I'll at least do the courtesy of not using his last name.
He stayed with me and my roommates for nearly a month, until we finally had to ask him to leave. He'd overstayed the time we'd allotted, and there'd been some weirdness as well. Food had gone missing that belonged to my roommates. Keep in mind, he never asked for food. He'd stained our floor with grease form his bike and covered it up instead of trying to clean it. I believed (but couldn't be sure) that a small amount of money had gone missing from my wallet. He asked me to loan him $1000; weirded out by his behavior, I declined. If you read the thread title, I'm sure you know where this is going.
A month or two after he moved out, I went looking for a game in my SNES collection - I no longer remember which - and I couldn't find it. Odd, but not unheard of. I can be pretty scatterbrained and I'm not the most organized person. I went looking for a different game. That was gone too. That was when I twigged something was up.
Long story short, he cleaned out every well-known, high-profile game I owned - and a few that belonged to my roommates. I know it was him because of the specificity of the knowledge - he had a player's eye, not a collector's eye. So, he took everything by Square, for instance, but left other high-priced titles like Actraiser, Soul Blazer and Purikura Daisakusen which would have gone for as much or more. Original pressing Silent Hill? Gone. Every Zelda game? Gone. My childhood saves of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana I went through with my now-dead best friend? All gone. He took me for probably a thousand dollars or more (prices at the time, anyway) but more than that, he stole my childhood memories and destroyed my sense of trust. I'm paranoid all the time now, whenever we have guests, even people I know well. Because I thought I knew HIM well. And I basically stopped buying games. I've been contemplating selling what's left of my skeletonized collection - just moving entirely to emulators. It's too hard to face starting over, but I'm having trouble letting go of what little is left.
He occasionally tries to add me on social media. Maybe he wants to apologize, or maybe he wants to keep pretending he doesn't know what he did and try to take advantage of me even more. I don't know. I just block him. I can't imagine I want anything to do with him, other than to possibly rearrange his face. I did reach out to our mutual co-workers when I found out and warned them. He'd been shady to a couple of them, too. If I'd had any shred of doubt it was him prior to that, it was quashed.
I'm sorry this has gotten so long. Honestly, it's hard for me to talk about, and most people don't understand. But I feel like people from this community will know where I'm coming from and can share this a little with me. I just want to get it off my chest.
And I'm curious - has anyone had this happen? How did you react? Did you get back on the horse - start rebuilding? Or did you give up? Becuase I do miss it, but it's hard for me to contemplate starting over when I've been hurt this bad by someone I knew.
Thanks for reading.
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