I guess this stuff goes in cycles. Behold the ravings of an obsessive collector/gamer.

Binge, purge, binge, purge. Anorexia with a joystick. When new, unopened Atari cartridges were being blown out for a dollar apiece in the early 1980's videogame crash, the teenage me snatched up everything I could get my hands on. Finally, after years of nothing but my secondhand Odyssey 2, the market finally allowed me to buy all the Intellivision and Atari stuff I lusted after as a pre-teen. Treasure of Tarmin, Planet of Zoom, Space Hawk, Tron's Deadly Discs, Gravitar, Beauty and the Beast, Fantastic Voyage ... at these prices, I could play all the "sleeper hits" that I had neglected while focusing on arcade ports like Pac-Man and Defender. My little BASIC programming efforts on my podunk Timex-Sinclair 1000 were neglected in favor of the arcade-style color and sound of the consoles.

These things were great, and kept me game-obsessed until the NES came out. That was the first market-healthy system I had, with decent new games at reasonable asking prices. Super Mario Bros.'s smooth scoring and all-day gameplay kept me glued to the TV like nothing else. Zelda was even worse, and it's amazing that I finished both the first and second quests. I smartly decided to leave the NES at home when I left for college.

But wait! The Atari 7800, an utter failure in the marketplace was being blown out by that time. Finally I could play all the arcade ports that didn't appear anywhere else. Food Fight, Xevious, Robotron, Ballblazer the funky 7800 version of Asteroids with the spinning rocks, Desert Falcon ... and backwards compatibility with my old VCS games. I'm not sure how I convinced my parents to ship me some old Atari games, but they dutifully did it, and they did a fairly good job of picking out fun titles. In the meantime, I continued to scour the toy stores and flea markets for more 7800 and 2600 games. This "old-school" machine was a hit in the group house where I lived, but they didn't like it as much as I did. One guy pointed out that Pitfall consisted of the same little task over and over. he was right of course, but the game still had me in its thrall. The 7800 was arguably more compelling than the NES at the time, and certainly a break from the drab-looking (but excellent sounding) monochrome Macintosh fare of the day.

For my senior year, I foolishly decided to bring the NES. it got a lot of action in our suite, mostly due to rentals and the just-released Super Mario Bros 3. SMB 3 is a great game even now, but then, nothing could touch it. Nothing ... except for the mighty 16-Bit Sega Genesis, which to my eyes at the time, provided perfect recreations of Altered Beast and Golden Axe. The system also had ports of Outrun, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Thunder Blade, Hard Drivin', Roadblasters, and a beautiful, manic game called Sonic the Hedgehog. I really wanted one of these machines, but I stuck with the NES until the disappointing Star Wars game arrived. As much as I wanted to like it, the sie-scroller failed to capture the excitement of the movies, let alone the lofty heights scaled by SMB3. I found a company called Funcoland in the ads section of Electronic Gaming Monthly. They would pay cash for my NES stuff and issue a check, or in my case, store credit which I would immediately apply towards a secondhand Genesis console. I think my Atari 7800 met a similar fate, getting traded to a friend for a tiny sum, considering all the games I had collected for it.

The timing was such that the Genesis machine was waiting for me at my parents' house the week after I came home from finishing my term early. The thing was a great escape from my new world of working all day, since there were always new things coming its way. The video store had a large collection of Sega Genesis games, so I got a chance to try nearly every Amiga port and EA PC recreation out there, not to mention all the arcade ports that were still coming strong at the time.

See a pattern here yet? The next Big Thing down the pipe was the Super Nintendo, which was packed with a new Mario game, which was manna from heaven for the platform geek in me. Its stereo sound with excellent sampled instruments sounded great, and the launch games Mario and F-Zero lived up to the hype. Since it seemed silly to have two game machines (what kind of a geek would do such a thing?), the Genesis went up to Funcoland for conversion to SNES titles. At the same time, Atari's Lynx was looking almost as good, with fine conversions of A.P.B. (All Points Bulletin, the cops-n-robbers game), and S.T.U.N. Runner (a tube-flying antecedent to Wipeout on the Playstation). Since I was no longer a kid and was relatively flush with cash, I needed one of these as well. A Game Gear joined the party briefly for some nostalgic Sonic fun, but not for long.

I think there were a few years where I barely touched any console except for the annual Super Star Wars games, which I would play to completion over the course of a few days. Their gameplay was limited, but they looked and sounded quite nice, especially at the time. The Macintosh was turning into a decent game platform with its high resolution color graphics and CD-ROM drive. Maelstrom, Jump Raven, MYST, Hellcats over the Pacific, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (and the other SCUMM games, eventually) got lots and lots of play, along with all kinds of stupid shit that wouldn't interest me if it were in a book ... but on CD-ROM, everything takes on new meaning. Add a modem, and the infant Internet, and you've got the makings of an obsession. Bulletin board systems, AOL, Compu$erve, Prodigy, school connections to Gopher and more were my toys while in graduate school. I guess I could look like I was working while learning about this stuff ... and downloading all the Mac game software I could find with my then-unusual FTP skills while in grad school.

Fortunately for me, it was near the end of my master's degree program that I heard about X-Wing. I was disappointed that there were no plans to port it to the Mac at the time, despite its superior AV abilities. Unfortunately for my credit rating, I found that the new DOS-compatible Quadra computers could run these games, without giving up the friendly Macintosh environment. Combined with a hot new game called Doom, which had no equivalent on the Mac except those Bungie games I didn't much care for, I was PC-bound. On the Mac. Then came TIE Fighter, and the realization that I'd like these games a lot more with sound. As it happened, there was a new DOS on Mac card from a 3rd party which featured Soundblaster support, and a socketed chip which could take up to a 468-100Dx processor. Since I had more credit than sense, that's what I got, even though I could have bought a dedicated PC with the same money.

It's painful to write about this stuff, since I wasted so much money on experiences which would become so cheap in the years to come. But who wants to wait? Certainly I didn't. Not when there were moody games like Aliens vs. Predator and trippy action games like Tempest 2000 to be had on the Atari Jaguar. I had held off on getting one of these for a long time, since Cybermorph looked scarcely better than Spectre VR on the Mac, but those two games pushed me over the edge. It wasn't like I was going to enjoy Donkey Kong Country as much as these games. So my SNES set went to a mother with some cash, and my once-loved Super Star Wars games went to someone on rec.games.video.marketplace. Sad, perhaps, but at least I was able to get them back easily and cheaply years later.

There are several more years to go, so I'll leave this here for now.

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