Quote Originally Posted by Gemini-Phoenix View Post
I was just about to say the same thing.

It's not as if these collector's are opting to choose between buying sealed games or eating / paying bills. That would just be silly. They're not heroin addicts you know! They're normal people, with families, girlfriends, social lives etc... It just means they're not wasting as much of their time playing the games, and probably have more of a social life than most "Normal" videogame collector's / gamers




Very true. They're there and can be played at any time we choose, which is entirely different to them not being there at all... Having a game there which we choose not to play is entirely different from not having a game to play in the first place. The games are bought with the intention to be used - They just haven't been used yet...

There are probably collector's out there who buy cart only NES games and choose not to play them - How is that any different? I would even bet that there are even collector's out there who enjoy collecting the games for a system which they may not even own!!! I personally enjoy collecting coloured vinyl records, yet I no longer own a record player, but that doesn't mean I can't still collect.


I still don't understand why being a collector of sealed videogames carries such a taboo? It's only within the last few years that it's began to gain acceptance, but even now it's still quite a taboo subject amongst collector's circles.

For example, Jay Leno has a garage full of classic cars and motorcycles which he doesn't use - How is that any different? Yet being a classic car collector isn't taboo. Likewise, stamp collecting is a very popular hobby, yet many stamps are used and / or no longer legal to use or from other countries, but nobody critisizes stamp collector's for their chosen hobby, despite how pointless it may seem to some
I generally agree with your points above, although I think as someone pointed out earlier, the taboo and anger some people have with it has been against the rise of this small group of collectors essentially slabbing and reselling to each other, resulting in greedy sellers posting games on Amazon and Ebay at equal prices which never sell. Unfortunately, the forum which was announced in this thread is the hub of this whole movement which has to a lesser extent spilled over to Nintendoage. Outside of those two sites and literally a couple dozen collectors, I don't know anyone who slabs or overpays for sealed stuff.

I should also note that you are incorrect about Jay Leno. He actually switches cars just about every day and even drives the ones that make no sense to drive like a steam powered one from the early 1900s. Having worked on the NBC lot for a while, it was always fun to walk by his reserved space every afternoon to see which one of his hundreds of cars he had driven into work that day.