It's my first post here, so I'll introduce myself!

My name is SonicMegaDrive, age 24(as of 2004). I'm a huge Sega aficionado and a huge admierer of general classic gaming.

I call Maryland, USA my home and I've been a lurker at this site for many years, and finally decided to contribute.

I have 8 games that I call my 'favorites': Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, The Legend of Zelda, Contra, Gradius, Street Fighter 2, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Pretty cliched favorites, I know, but those are the games the molded my gaming tastes throughout the years. Chances are if I'm playing a video game, one of these 8 games was a large inspiration for it.

I admit I do collect for a few systems. Pretty much any Sega system(Master System, Genesis, GameGear, Sega CD/32X, Saturn, Dreamcast...I even owned a PICO once. ). But I also boast fairly nice collections for the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, and PS2.

In real life, I'm an artist. Drawing is my first passion, along with animation(you know, cartoons). I'm very heavy into all forms of animation, be it CG, classic American, or even Japanese animation.

How did I begin collecting? Well, that's a good question. I guess at first I just wanted to have a nice, large library of games to choose from. I was very dissatisfied with the current state of gaming(This was around...I think 1998 or 1999), so I decided to embrace the older consoles. I started discovering a lot of old games that I had overlooked years ago, and eventually, unknowingly, I became a collector.

I hope to become a productive member of the community and to contribute any information I can.