Surfing Facebook, I’m looking for cool groups to get involved in to spread word of Old School Gamer, when I come across the Console Purist group along with its head moderator/owner, Stacy Burns. I start asking him some questions and the conversation gets to collections and I find out that this collector is collecting EVERYTHING. Not just Nintendo, or 16 bit, but everything he has decided is retro gaming. Not to ruin the story before we get started, but he currently has 8,308 games and 243 consoles.
RYAN: Take us way back to the beginning.
STACY: The first console I played was the Atari Pong at the age of 3. A few years later, my Dad brought home an Atari 2600. That, along with the handheld Pac-Man, were my first loves of video gaming. I didn’t get an NES, though, until 1988. When I did, it birthed in me the gamer I am today. I went from a video game enthusiast to an addict overnight, playing as much as I possibly could each and every day.
Shortly after receiving my NES for Christmas of ‘88, and finding that I had a knack for finishing Console Video Games, I decided to start recording myself playing and finishing them. That led me to finishing hundreds and hundreds of games on VHS. I’m not sure how it happened, but I decided one day to take a VHS with 6 hours of me finishing several games. I then asked one of my teachers to play the tape. After that day, after we finished our work, he’d pop in the tape, and the whole class would watch as I finished game after game. I became known as the Nintendo WIZ, and at my Junior High Graduation, when I was called to the podium to receive my certificate, I was simply called… Mr. Nintendo.
RYAN: Gaming and completing games kept on going for you throughout the 90s. When did you decide that you wanted to truly collect and set these high goals for yourself?
STACY: Before I started collecting, I never had more than 60 games at any one time, even though I had played literally hundreds. I was very good at trading, and so I constantly traded to get the games I wanted to play. On December 25, 1997, though, after receiving my 100th game, I declared there and then, out of nowhere, I was going to start collecting, and never get rid of another game.
When my wife and I would visit game stores, we’d tell them that I collect, which would lead to the inevitable question: “What console?” When we told them all consoles, they would be amazed. It wasn’t until the early 2000’s that I heard of another person who collected every game for every Sega console. It was another year or so before I heard of someone who collected for every console, but even then, their collection was very small. Since that time, I have, of course, heard of several others, but at that time I was doing something entirely new, for me at least, so I can definitely say I’m an original when it comes to collecting.
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Also be sure to check out the review for
The Power of Glove – By Old School Gamer
The Power of Glove is documentary, just over an hour in length, that digs into everyone’s “favorite” old school gaming accessory, the Power Glove for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1989, this was the favorite controller of none, except possibly TriForce Johnson, who appears in the movie (and has a very cool story).
The movie starts out with videos from “back in the day” and flashes forward to have you meet Novak (no, he doesn’t have a last name), who was deeply involved in the project. It goes through the Data Glove’s $10,000 beginnings and talks about the start of Mattel’s first attack on the video game industry through an interview with industry icon Keith Robinson. He talks about the rise and fall of the industry in the early 1980s. The documentary moves along and begins its coverage of the Power Glove in enough detail for almost any fan.
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