As someone with a relatively modest income it’s occasionally hard to justify a leisure purchase. I’ve heard stories of my fellow collectors who break the bank trying to complete physical collections of products and god bless them for trying!
And when you think of geek collectors compared to someone who owns artwork, antiques, cars, the overhead on a respectable collection is considerably less. Let’s be honest to own the entire Nintendo Entertainment System library of games (licensed) requires space for 831 cartridges (according to pricecharting.com for number of licensed cartridges). So given that each cartridge, is approximately 1.5 cm (and not two like Wikipedia would have you to believe), you would only need 10.7 meters of shelf space to display every game, label forward on its side with 12 cm clearance.
Now if I’ve measured my bookshelf right (a fairly standard IKEA model) I can put 57 cartridges in lengthwise and 34 across meaning I can fit 1938 NES cartridges in my shelf. So over twice the number. Now if I go by that price charting website again it claims that the average price for an NES game is 15.86 as of December 2013. This doesn’t factor in titles like the NES World Championships as they weren’t made commercially available plus only the top five games on that website’s list break the 2000 dollar mark so it’s a bit of a skew.
Compare the fact that a 20,000 car is an average family mid-range purchase and worth equivalent to the highest NES item I could find then, there isn’t much to complain about if you compare car collectors to game collectors.
So know that when I make my next statement that I make it from a place of knowledge and true perspective because I’ll say this without fear or resentment: collecting Transformers toys has gotten too rich for my blood.
