How Video Games Shaped My Life

From virtual Harvest Moon to real life Harvest Moon all the while funding my quest for self-sufficiency.

I started gaming pretty young. In 1997 I first played Final Fantasy 7 at 7 years old. LIMIT BREAK!!! This continued with FF8 & 9 in 98' & 99' I got to enjoy so many epic titles at a young age and I am most grateful for that.

I started collecting games when I was 16. As you can see it got a little crazy, and this is only a portion! A whole other closet was full of all kinds of gaming treasures. I've even owned a Panasonic 3DO, micro gameboys, boxed power glove and many more obscure things. I was shocked when I found out how much this stuff sold for and justified further game collecting by that means. I'd buy big lots to obtain specific titles and end up with doubles/games I didn't fancy which I sold for profit that would fund my animal sanctuary costs. I'd meet so many fun gamer people in the process excited that I had what they were looking for. This added a whole lot of excitement to my life and helped me to socialize as well!

My entrepreneurial skills were born of Neopets playing in the auctions. Which I find to be pretty funny what with the prevalence of realpets in my life. After college I played it again for about a month for the first time since I was 11 and made this account lol http://petpages.neopets.com/userlookup.phtml?user=finalfantasys

At one point I had about 400 NES games 60ish complete in boxes. It took me almost a decade to get it to this point. You could say I had a hoarding problem, but this proved to be a really great problem to have. Just to give you an idea the biggest hitters I found in my collection were Zombie nation which sells for a whopping $375 and a DK edition CONTROLLER $200 on ebay. I literally have no idea how much I paid for either of them. I sold them for much less than ebay and shipped them across the country to ecstatic collectors.

Soo much fun times playing multi-player games such as Conkers Bad Fur Day & Mario Party on the biggest screens xD

When I moved into the trailer I narrowed it down in that time to just the cabinet - I had the entire Zelda & Final Fantasy series (mint/original print/complete) including the handhelds & guides. Nearly all of Harvest Moon of course and much more. Before moving out to the forest I had someone buy up the majority of what I had left that I was willing to part with outside the cabinet. About $4000 worth to be precise! This was a HUGE help when it came time to move to the forest shortly thereafter. It's amazing how the universe provides in it's mysterious ways. And then once there I finally decided to sell it all to fund my solar setup as well as a $1600 vet bill. I'm still selling the last little bits, it's a nice small albeit random bit of supplemental income as I adjust to new avenues such as goats milk & honey, blogging as well as labor and eventually working with horses.

This is the cabinet currently - housing books, supplements, goat milking equipment, cat food and just some handheld gaming stuff.

Anyone whose held onto these types of things/collected will understand how hard it was to let go of the cabinet, but it was funny explaining to people that I was making my real life harvest moon dream come to fruition. No way was I going to be able to afford electricity required to run consoles & TVs.

And now I've got my gaming laptop loaded with emulators and even adapters that allow me to use the official controllers. Funny enough I obtained my gaming laptop by trading - you guessed it! Gaming stuff xD I actually still have the photo of that lot:

You can imagine my surprise when someone inquired asking if there is anything I'd like to trade for and he just so happened to want to trade me a high end computer for a chunk of my hoard.

Of course there are many other ways in which video games have shaped my life, such as developing reading skills, fueling imagination, honing my reaction time, filling my life with incredible music, giving me a love for farming & homesteading and so much more. Some people think gaming is bad for people but I'm here to prove otherwise as it's GREATLY enhanced my entire life.