A dream collection, forever in progress.
A personal rebuild of the classic Nintendo libraries I grew up with, plus curated shelves of other legendary systems. An ongoing tour through my own nostalgia, sourced one shop at a time.
- 587 games
- 275 still hunting
- 65% of the NES library
Rebuilding a lifetime of nostalgia.
My first Nintendo came home from a department store in 1989. Mom picked up the Action Set (Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt) plus a copy of Castlevania II. I'd been begging for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (deep in Turtle-mania at the time), but she went with Simon's Quest and accidentally planted the seeds of a lifelong love of metroidvanias.
That first library is long gone, and the SNES and N64 that followed went with it. This is the rebuild: a forty-year archive of the games that stuck with me, sourced in person. The goal is the full licensed North American NES set, with smaller curated shelves for the other systems. No mail order allowed. That'd be too easy. Read the full story →
Explore by system
Highlights from the collection
My favorite games, then and now. The ones I'd take to a desert island.
The grail
The jewel of my collection.
Taito published Little Samson late in the NES lifecycle, after retailers had stopped restocking the system in earnest. Estimates put the print run at somewhere between ten and twenty thousand copies, most of which vanished into rental stores. It is also genuinely great (critically acclaimed then and now), which is why the few surviving copies are among the most hunted cartridges on the system.
I tracked this one down at Too Many Games in 2025. My buddy Clark was there to serve as witness, and to help talk me into pulling the trigger. No regrets.
A histogram of the hunt.
All games · 590
