I came to a decision recently and have decided to sell my Nintendo 64 video game collection. While its only one part of my collection, its still a hard decision to part with it. Years of hunting through garage sales, thrift shops, trade groups and online auctions helped me amass a large collection that was nearing 200 titles. You see, I was going for a full Nintendo 64 library which is only 296 titles deep. I thought it was a reasonable goal, but at some point I lost the drive to keep adding to it. What changed?
Family life
The peak of my interest in Nintendo 64 collecting was 2014, which happened to be the year my first daughter was born. Extra time and disposable income we had prior to her birth was now getting allocated to my daughter. It became much harder to justify picking up $50 games that I might never play when I have a beautiful daughter to enjoy who consequently needs diapers, clothes and toys.
Price hike
I started from the top down with this console, targeting the most expensive games first and working my way down to picking up the cheap games last. Most console libraries are increasing in value and the rare games are appreciating the fastest. Clayfighter Sculptor's Cut being the most expensive game on the system constantly evaded me and I kept losing any auction I bid on. After getting discouraged I picked up a few other games that were on my radar and by the time I came back to Sculptor's Cut, it had increased in price by over $100. It felt defeating that the most expensive game was suddenly out of range. I just wasn't willing to spend that kind of money on a game I'll likely only play once or twice.
Shelf decoration
The Nintendo 64 was popular when I was in college, so I have strong nostalgia for the system, but really only for the games we played in college, like GoldenEye, Mario Kart, Conker's Bad Fur Day and Ocarina of Time. Most of the other games have just sat on my shelf for the past few years and I've had zero desire to pop them in.
Time to let it go
So I decided that the resources I have tied up in those games would be better suited elsewhere. In reality, I plan to invest in more cryptocurrencies with the cash I get from this sale. Its going up on eBay tonight and I'm OK with it. I have a hard time letting go of stuff I collected as part of a collection, let alone an entire collection itself, but I understand I cal always track these games down again in the future. They're not doing me any good right now, but there's collectors out there who will give these games a welcome spot in their collections.