Roll call for obsessives!
I have fifty-ish boxes, one or two without the games, each lovingly placed in its own protective-plastic box. (I pursue rare cardboard garbage with seriousness.) I never used to collect boxes on-purpose (seemed too indulgent, which it is) but something really clicked (snapped?) for me this year and now I'm über box-crazy.
There are more I want, but I doubt I'll attempt a full-set. Without analyzing too deeply: box collecting is mostly about decorating a shelf to provide nerd-boners, thus I try to model my collecting habits to achieve that end. I can't bring myself to buy boxed TV Sports games instead of spending that money on something I'd enjoy more. That's not to knock the completionists, I totally "get" the insatiable drive to consume.
I also want to briefly address this:
boxes? really?...leave the cardboard for the homeless
"Just play the games, man, that's what it's all about!"—right?
Tommy here belongs to a group of classic-era game collectors who first-and-foremost consider themselves to be game "
players". To them, paying a premium for retail packaging is missing the point, the software is far more important. And it's true that paying a premium for complete games is almost always, in the most literal financial sense, valuing boxes/packaging above actual game carts/discs. These "true gamer" types resent sharing marketplaces/forums/labels with collectors who seem to value software below cardboard. I also used to feel this way, strongly.
These people think they buy games solely for the purpose of playing them, but they're mistaken. In fact,
collecting original TurboGrafx software at all, in any capacity, is not about playing games. At least not directly. That sounds totally crazy (a seemly reasonable and intuitive reaction: "LOL what do you mean dummy, they ARE the games—of course PLAYING GAMES is the purpose of BUYING them!!") until considering that we live in a world of emulators and Everdrives. A person who "only" cares about playing games doesn't need to buy them in the first place! Shaky ethics/piracy arguments aside (and I won't even get into the "CD-Rs are bad for my laser" nonsense in the face of plentiful replacement parts/repair services), we now have the capability of easily accessing and playing every TurboGrafx and PC Engine game for free, even on original hardware. If all you care about is playing TurboGrafx games you never need to buy them.
This all might still feel counterintuitive because we are used to original software being the only way to access games. That's certainly the case with modern systems. But when you want to play a game and there are viable free ways to do that, it's hard to put much weight into the argument of "I buy classic game software but only because I like playing games."
When pressed, I think a lot of these gamers will admit that on some level, and to some minor degree, they just like owning the original software. They get more enjoyment out of playing original games, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's nostalgia and other times it's psychological thing (some people can't enjoy ROMS for various reasons) But it's still a "collectard" habit, only a less-extreme one, on a smaller scale, and with less-valuable items. If you're paying for classic games, you enjoy them beyond their utility as software. Compared to box-fetishes I think buying loose games is probably "closer" to only caring about the games, but I find it disingenous to claim there is a strong distinction between "collectors" and "gamer/collectors".
The only people who can, in my eyes, criticize box-collectors without some degree of hypocracy are those who just play ROMs, and especially those who don't care about original hardware. (Although I'm sure many of them would probably buy original software if money were no object!)
