I missed the boat on the Commodore 64. I never really played any games on it. Sure, I used it in school. But hey - that's different.

Sometimes you are limited to what the family has. I grew up with an IBM PC when it was made by IBM. School typically had a segregated lab. No. No. Not like *that*. What I mean is that Apple IIs were on one side and C64s were on the other. I recall messing around with a "game" on the C64 where you rotate an icon/cursor that was called a "turtle" and could give it instructions to draw some pictures. That was about all we had as far as games were concerned.

So flash forward to present day. I started collecting video games around 2000. I mostly started buying games that I never owned on the systems I still did. Perhaps I missed out on this NES game or that SNES game. I even rounded out the Atari 2600 collection a bit. It quickly grew to other popular systems, and the library of games was growing.

I took a break from the collecting for a little while and came back in the last couple of years. Now I've been acquiring some of the "odd systems." Some of them are niche systems. Others are older computers. These are some of the systems for which you don't see thousands upon thousands of ebay auctions. I now own 2 MSX machines, a CDI, a 3DO, and a Commodore 64.

So let's talk C64. It is a little harder to jump in on this than I thought. Compared to the NES or SNES, you can't just jump on ebay and have multiple sellers, starting prices, etc for the C64 games you want. You have to get lucky and hope someone lists it...with a buy it now for less than $100. My first real score for the system was a boxed lot of several games - Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Pool of Radiance, Heroes of the Lance, Hillsfar, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Secret of the Silver Blades. I have yet to almost play any of these as it took several months of me waiting for the right time to take apart and work on the 1541. Soon after I got the games, none of them worked. I was happy that it sounded like a typical problem with a 1541 floppy drive that could be repaired. I have decent abilities when it comes to game electronics, but finding time to tackle something is tough. This is sometimes an even greater problem when it involves hardware you haven't messed with before.

By the time I repaired the 1541, my C64 kick had died off. Now it is on the rise again. I picked up a complete Archon off ebay....except...it was the PC version (seller gave me a refund). So once again, my C64 kick gets shot down.

What's on the list? Well, I suppose I am looking for a few odds and ends. Some are to play and some are to simply own. Others are out of pure curiosity. Archon, Legacy of the Ancients, Arkanoid, G.I. Joe, The Great Gianna Sisters, Impossible Mission, Wasteland, heck...Transformers (two of them, right?). I suppose I wouldn't mind checking out M.U.L.E. and Elite as well thanks to Matt Chat and a few times where I think "I need to seriously play that some day" as the years roll by.

So is there a good "go to" place for C64 collecting? Is there just a drought on ebay? Should I be patient? Looking for suggestions of markets from you guys as well as games to add to the list. I asked for games a little while back on monroeworld, but I really need to just find out if I should be looking on ebay or elsewhere.