Texas native Patrick Scott Patterson is a video game advocate, historian, and preservationist. He works tirelessly to ensure the legacy of the industry and culture so they are not lost to time. Patrick took time out of his busy schedule recently to answer a few of my questions about his history with gaming, the state of retro game collecting, and much more.
B W > What was the first video game you played, and what were the circumstances?
PS P > It was September 1981, and I was just shy of turning six years old. It was a Pac-Man in the laundromat my mother went to at the time. I was being rowdy in there like an almost six-year-old tends to be, and she told me to go sit down and be quiet. She sat me next to the game, so naturally a bright yellow cabinet with cartoons on it would attract me. I got up to see what it was, asked for a quarter and the rest is history. I can still visualize that moment like it’s happening now, despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you anything else that happened in my life around the same time. That Pac-Man moment struck me in a way that has continued to this day.
B W > When and why did you start collecting games, as opposed to simply playing them?
PS P > That really depends on how you want to define all of that. Technically, it was as far back as the mid-1990s when I started hunting games older than the then-current cycle, but being just out of high school I didn’t have the means to pick up nearly as much as I would have liked. In the years in between, I dabbled in it here and there but only seriously started hunting again like I did in the ’90s early last year, and this time I have the means. – Read the rest of this article on page 27 by clicking here!
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