Collector’s Corner
Readers take us through the retro keyhole
Our latest collector, John Paul Sutherland, has a Nintendo collection that will make you weep
some players become interested in retro gaming as the games they loved age, while others grow up with one eye already on the games of the past. John Paul Sutherland is the latter kind. “I’ve always been interested in retro games, my brother Peter and I liked to pick up NES cartridges from the market even when we had a
SNES and an Amiga 500,” he remembers. Actively collecting is a recent development, though. “I started building this collection about three years ago, inspired by my friend Ras’s Transformer’s prototype collection, the rising costs of N64 software, and my mate Robbie telling me that my future children would not bother picking out Super Mario World from a list of ROMS on a screen.”
There’s a lot of Nintendo mentioned there, and that’s no coincidence. “I became obsessed with Nintendo since Super Mario World became the first game I 100 per cent completed, and subsequently genuinely loved,” he reminisces. “I have bought every single Nintendo console on release day since the Nintendo 64 and it’s a difficult habit to shake! I used to import a lot but that’s not so necessary nowadays.” Despite this, John Paul isn’t exclusively a Nintendo collector. “I started dabbling a bit with Saturn, Neo-geo Pocket Color and Game & Watch, but high prices have meant that progress has been slow on that front!”
John Paul’s approach to game condition is a pragmatic one, putting the experience of the game over cosmetics. “Pretty much all I have amassed is boxed, and nearly always complete,” he explains, but continues, “I make odd exceptions for things I don’t see in the wild very often or things I’m really curious about, and I will usually try and find a box for it later.” He’s also the kind of collector who tends to stick to buying what he’ll play, and avoids a common pitfall that many of us have experienced. “The main thing I found is not to buy things just because they are rare or expensive,” he advises. “I have owned rare items in the past like Panzer Dragoon Saga on Sega Saturn and Garou: Mark of the Wolves on AES but they never gave me the same joy I got from Mario 64 or the Zelda games.”
Like many collectors, John Paul has felt the effect of rising prices in the retro market, and tries to buy smartly to mitigate that. “I would love to go back to the days where I could buy boxed SNES classics for a fiver each but that’s not going to happen, so you just have to be more patient, or collect for consoles that are in a price trough,” he explains. “Xbox, Wii and DS are very cheap right now, and they all have some cracking games.” Despite this price consciousness, he doesn’t have a hard ceiling on price, saying, “I don’t really set any limits on what I would spend, but for me it’s got to be near the going rate at least.”
As you’d expect with such a young collection, there are still gaps John Paul would like to fill. “I’m after a complete Zelda collection, and there still are a few special editions I still need…” he volunteers, before adding Paper Mario and Conker’s Bad Fur Day. “I don’t have them yet because I’m just trying to be patient and get them all for good prices,” he says, though he concedes that he’s “going to be waiting a while”. We just wish we had the same patience…