My Personal NES Collection and Its History

Like most kids of the 80s, I enjoyed the awesomeness that a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and a Gameboy brought to my life. I had a modest library of solid games at the time, but as the 90s rolled in my interest in console games waned and I moved on to computer games. At this time I handed my NES and GB libraries off to my nephews, and from there, I believe they traded everything in at Funcoland for a Nintendo 64. For the next two decades, I stayed out of the entire console arena and focused on PC gaming, admittedly I missed out on a number of amazing titles by going that route.

Fast forward to early 2017 when I was flush with childhood nostalgia, partly from all the vintage NES YouTube channels I would frequent, but also from missing the tactile aspects of old-school gaming. I set out to, at the very least, recreate my original NES library. I first picked up a cheapo knock-off NES console from Amazon. I then proceeded to load up on a handful of NES games from Lukie Games and GameStop. The knock-off NES left a lot to be desired so, I got my hands on an actual NES console (the top loader NES-101 to be exact) and modded it to incorporate RCA connectors and a power light. 

In recent years, there has been an uptick in reproduction games, fan-made ROM hacks, and new games made to work on the original Nintendo. One such game is Micro Mages which I did get my hands on via Kickstarter which is a pretty fun game. There are also reproduction boxes and manuals and even reproduction games featured heavily on Etsy, and a ton of retro-themed NES merch that I find all over the place including at brick-and-mortar stores. Prices for the games and hardware fluctuates, but the prices lately have been higher than what they were a decade ago.

The current list of games that I’ve procured thus far

(*) Denotes the games I originally had as a kid.
(**) Denotes new games.