For sale: Collection of nearly every videogame console ever made

[pesco]

Originally published at: For sale: Collection of nearly every videogame console ever made | Boing Boing

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[Grey_Devil]

This would be great to get in the hands of a video game museum, though i doubt they’d have the funding to spend on it all.

[VeronicaConnor]

This is often thought of in the retrocomputing community as well, but if you actually ask museums, they say “hell no we don’t want it” (but more politely because museum people are really nice). The fact is they don’t have the space, and almost none of this stuff is nearly as rare or interesting as enthusiasts think it is. Almost none of it has any historical value or significance. Furthermore, with few exceptions, millions and millions of each of these models were made, so they aren’t rare or hard to get either. Even the special-seeming stuff like the Fairchild Channel F is actually not that rare. You don’t see them around, but people have them in their attics and they come up for sale regularly. The other stuff considered “valuable” by enthusiasts is things like the special gold Zelda edition of the N64 that they only made 100 of or whatever. Neat, but it has no value to a museum because it’s a marketing stunt, not an artifact that gives context to a historical moment in gaming. Museums are not completionists, they are teaching history. “Special editions” serve the former, not the latter. The rest is just junk.

[Grey_Devil]

There are some museums that are specifically created to preserve gaming history, so those are the ones i had in mind. I doubt a typical museum would be interested, though i do think that game preservation should be taken more seriously

[VeronicaConnor]

Those are the ones I’m talking about. And retrocomputing museums don’t want your trailer full of “rare” Apple II stuff either.

I’m heavily involved in retrogaming and retrocomputing preservation, and trust me, we’ve talked to all the video game and computer museums. They don’t want peoples’ collections.