Improve your video game collection by focusing on franchises
One of the great things about video game collecting is the wide range of things you can focus on. Your game collection can be loose carts, boxed, complete or factory sealed. You might only collect for one brand like Nintendo or Playstation. There’s so many things you can focus your collecting on.
The above photo is part of my Pac-Man collection, which I’ve been building for years. In this series I’m focusing on subsets of video game collecting, which are alternative areas that you can target to add variety to your collection. Today I’ll be talking about collecting game franchises.
What do you mean, exactly?
In short, I’m referring to collecting games and memorabilia for specific game series, like Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy or Sonic the Hedgehog. Concentrating on your favorite franchise(s) helps you focus on a singular set of games (or merchandise) to aim for, which is great for anyone who becomes overwhelmed by the massive amount of games and collectibles out there. But even narrowing your search down to a single franchise can be daunting. Imagine trying to be a Pokemon collector, tracking down not only every game in the series but the amount of Pokemon merchandise is staggering, from the card game to countless toys.
Why is franchise collecting helpful?
In short, it sets a goal. I’ve had issues in the past of collecting every single game I could get at a good price. While this can build your collection quickly, you also end up with lots of filler on your shelves. It’s how I ended up with like 20 Madden games, but in reality I pick those up because I think a shelf full of obsolete Madden games is amusing, especially when I find them at garage sales for 50 cents.
Concentrating on a single franchise or a handful of your favorites helps you to focus on the game series that you love the most. You’re not trying to track down a wide range of games from a wide number of systems.
Tips and advice from a long time collector
Its hard for me to tell someone what they should or shouldn’t collect. Who am I to say that its silly for you to collect every game in the Petz series? That being said, I can offer my advice:
Try collecting hardware variants as a subset of your collection
Rather than a franchise, it can be fun to hunt down and build a collection of hardware variants. There's a wide variety of colors, themes and models of consoles that can add an interesting subset to your video game collection. Even though I rarely play them, I've been building a collection of Nintendo handhelds. With the different colors and models, there's plenty to keep me in the hunt for years to come.
Collect series that you love
While hunting down games based on their rarity or value can be an enticing challenge, if you have no love of those games you’re really just acquiring expensive shelf filler.
If you’re a completionist, avoid massively popular franchises
Games and merchandise in the Mario, Pokemon, Sonic and Mega Man franchises are easy to come by, but the staggering number of games and collectibles makes trying to complete a collection a massive undertaking. If you insist on being a completionist, choose something reasonable like Contra or Persona, which has a reasonable number of games and collectibles.
If you insist on a popular franchise, narrow it down
I love Mario and want to collect it, but there is far too much Mario stuff out there to hunt down without quitting my job and leaving my family. Instead, I’ll take on a much more reasonable challenge like collecting the Mario Party games. This is much more reasonable and still gives me a sense of accomplishment when I get closer to the my goal.
In the end, collect what you love
The bottom line is that game collecting is about curating and enjoying games and merchandise from those games. You can collect however you want to, but setting some basic rules and make your collection more focused, more impressive and give you a greater sense of accomplishment.
What do you think? What’s your favorite gaming franchise? Do you collect certain franchises or a bit of everything? Let’s discuss!
Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!
Image Sources: Original photos by retro-room
I'm a bona fide hoarder when it comes to collecting, but my main focus since I started taking collecting seriously has been horror games. They're fascinating to me, whether they're the well-known Resident Evil or Silent Hill series, or the weirder off-shoots like Clock Tower and Illbleed.
Horror collecting is a great place to start, in my opinion, because it's very easy to build up a sizable treasure trove for very little investment. The classic PS1 Resident Evil and Dino Crisis titles, for instance, are all quite common in the $5-10 range. PS2 has a huge library of options available at dirt-cheap prices, like The Thing, Extermination, and Shadow of Destiny.
At this point, I've filled nearly all the gaps in my collection for US games (the elusive Kuon for PS2 is the last one I need to complete that particular library) and turned to importing titles like Michigan.
The best part about it is that so many games have some horror elements that you don't need to limit yourself strictly to survival horror titles. The Persona series, for instance, is inherently horrifying in its implications, and games like Nightmare Creatures, Doom, and Alien Trilogy have the player standing alone against hordes of terrifying monsters in suitably gothic or futuristic settings. Great article as always, @retro-room!
nice post
This is actually really good advice and a mantra that I follow myself! Collecting video games really can be overwhelming and in my mind focusing on a franchise or series is really a great start.
For example I love survival horror games and decided I wanted to try and get a complete collection of them. Which is huge when you consider all of the consoles they appear on. So I started with all the Resident Evils with my main goal being I really want the long box variant of RE1. After getting each mainline game I moved on to Silent Hill and now I'm on the lookout for the Fatal Frame games. :)
It's fun and can be rewarding once you finally complete a series! The kicker is that some of the series have that one title that's super expensive and difficult to find (I'm looking at you Revelations: Persona!!).
Glad to hear it! I decided to start hunting Resident Evil games too. There's a good number of them, though nothing too bad and not a whole lot of merchandise to worry about either. Survival horror is a nice goal too and manageable, since not many new games are coming out anymore. Though many of the titles are bit expensive, like Kuon, Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose on the PS2.
Pac-Man was the first series I really focused on. There's so much cool and odd new and vintage Pac-Man merchandise and a large, though not overwhelming number of games to collect. I actually need a bigger space to show off all my Pac-Man goodies.
I forgot to mention one of my most interesting subsets is video game movies! Even though most of them are pretty bad, I love adding these movies to my collection.
This is probably a good idea to keep from going broke collecting games. Too many people try and buy every game they find when there are so many games out there they're never realistically going to be able to collect them all.
This is a nice idea. I don't have any franchise collection that I can claim to be complete, but I had my fair share of games from the Silent Hill, Tomb Raider and The Sims series (yes! Including most expansions, PSP versions and even the Medieval spin-off).
Due to lack of room and new expenses (baby), years ago I decided to sell a lot of them for peanuts. Now I'm a broken man inside.