So, uh, it’s twenty to three in the morning and I find myself on TV Tropes (again) and contemplating playing Tropico 5 some more when a thought occurs to me:
What did I do with all those PlayStation games I owned back in the day?
I’ve been a gamer all my life, though my family was never well off when I was coming up. I distinctly remember the Christmas my dad unboxed the Commodore 64, which we owned deep into the nineties.
From there it was either the leap to PC (see above re: crushing poverty) or a console, so it was a second-hand MegaDrive which came with one of those mega-collections. Many afternoons were spent promising one another that we would not betray each other to Mr Big at the end of Streets of Rage - and doing it anyway - or being really upset that Super Hang-on wasn’t Road Rash.
I digress. I saved up for a year to buy my original gray PlayStation. Very rarely would I be able to scrap up enough cash from birthday and christmas to afford a real game, so I subsisted on demo CDs from games magazines (remember those?), rentals, and borrowing games from more well-off friends and classmates.
Eventually, I got a job. I had money and I bought games. I bought good games, and average games, and bad games, and games that were practically unplayable. I played Final Fantasy VII, TimeCrisis, PaRappa the Rapper, and Metal Gear Solid. I played Command and Conquer, Tekken, Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto. I played Suikoden 1 & 2, and two other games to fit in the list of four. I paid real money for these and other games, often from bargain bins and CashConverters, and trade-ins (before pre-owned was a thing) and I generally found something enjoyable about all of them.
And then there was DreamCast, and I was all up in that business. I still have it. It still works, though the plastic has turned kind of... yellow. The GameCube was traded in for a PS2 eventually, and the XBox360 is a more recent addition to the Tomb of Doom.
And all the PlayStation games just kind of... vanished, along with the console itself.
Where do dead consoles go, and those millions of CDs?
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