BOXING CLEVER

Here’s a collector who wants to get physical

It seems FOMO, the ‘fear of missing out’ phenomenon which apparently grips the social media obsessed youth of today, has now entered the retro world. “The collecting game has changed,” Matt Taylor assures us. “In the past, a console would die and you’d pick up games for it dirt cheap. I have Playstation stuff I paid pounds for which is now worth hundreds but you can’t do that now. There are limited physical releases and if you don’t get them immediately, you won’t ever get them. Or else you’ll have to spend well over the odds – in months, they are fetching triple the original price. I’m getting my games at the cheapest possible price… but that isn’t cheap either!”

As we survey the walls of Matt’s marvellous games room, a lockdown project that has now become his ‘happy place’, we are dazzled by the sheer volume of boxed games he has accumulated. Row upon row of immaculate Super Famicom and Gamecube releases are joined by more modern games for the Wiiu and Switch, the latter being his latest obsession. Given that many of these newer titles can be bought more cheaply as digital downloads, when did this need to own the actual physical cartridge or disc take hold?

“Like most collectors, it wasn’t done consciously,” he explains. “I just started buying games in the Nineties and then never sold them. Weirdly, I did think even back then that Nintendo stuff would be worth something in the future. Mario would be like Mickey Mouse and therefore it would be valuable… but that nothing else would!”

Matt was half-right. He hung on to most of his Nintendo purchases but he now regrets selling off the bulk of his Sega collection over the years, a fact he cannot ignore due to his own fastidiousness. “I love my collection and have a connection to it,” says Matt, “so everything I ever sold on ebay, I’ve kept the photos and logged the sale. The other day I looked at the Saturn stuff

I’d sold, like Darius 2, Darius Gaiden, Guardian Heroes… I now wish I hadn’t kept a record as it hurts.” [That would pretty much kill me – Ed]

He admits to selling mint copies of Metroid and Castlevania 3 for the NES for a tidy £250 each and even offloaded an original Space Invaders cabinet to the National Videogame Museum, though he did put some of the proceeds to good use in creating the games room we now sit in. “I see lots of game rooms online and they feel a bit like a headache, like a shop with things crammed in everywhere. I wanted this to be a nice room, somewhere you could breathe and play games in.”

The room is indeed tastefully decorated, with beautiful reproduction posters of such key SNES titles as Final Fight and Mario Kart adorning the walls, along with some original Japanese flyers for the first appearances of Metroid and Zelda on the Famicom Disk System. It may only house a fraction of his whole game collection but still showcases a dizzying array of carefully curated titles. Does he really get pleasure from staring at all these box spines, we ask?

“I have this vague idea that one day, maybe in retirement, I’ll get to play them all,” he replies, “and if I don’t buy them now, I’ll never get them!”