I don't think Donkey Kong is necessarily a good example. First off, for most of us mere mortals, we'll never be good enough to see all the levels more than once through, let alone the dozens of times through that is required to get a respectable high score. In short, most of us are lucky to last longer than 10 minutes, tops, at the game.

As is well known, my two favorite arcade games are Pooyan and Satan's Hollow, and though I'm pretty good at them, I start to reach my physical limits for proceeding much farther into the game. Everyone's tolerance for repetitive gameplay - even multi-board/level stuff like Pooyan and Satan's Hollow - varies, but I argue that for most of us we'll never reach that point because we'll die in the game long before that has a chance of happening (these games are after all designed to make you keep feeding them quarters). I *did* roll over Satan's Hollow on the C-64 on its easiest level in my youth and once I did that, it was no longer important for me to try to reach that mark again. Getting a high score (or today, all the achievements) in a game is plenty of incentive, but I think most times difficulty levels preclude us from testing how long we'd really want to play if we could play "indefinitely" like a Weibe or Mitchell.

I don't like watching other people play games, let alone watching marathon sessions like that. It's very cool in short doses - e.g., hey, that was a cool near hit there - but you have to be really "dedicated" to score keeping to sit there and pore through tape to make sure there is no cheating going on.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.

Yes, this is why I have mixed feelings about the events in King of Kong. On the one hand, I find myself admiring their skill at Donkey Kong; it's impressive to see...for about 5 minutes. Then I start to have a rather sinking feeling and start to wonder if these guys might actually have some sort of problem that keeps them playing these games so long. Assuming I could get to the point where I could play these games for hours on a single quarter, I mean, DAMN, how long could I withstand that before it became excruciatingly boring? I hope I'm not offending anyone who DOES enjoy that kind of thing, but I just don't get it. The only reason I can play certain games for hours on end is that the content at least appears to be changing, and there is a variety of different things to do. For instance, I could easily see playing something like Ultima VII for weeks if not months. But I bet I couldn't play Donkey Kong for more than a half hour or so without losing interest. And this is coming from a diehard retrogamer!

The idea that someone actually sits there and carefully watches all those tapes of them playing for 16 hours...That gives me nightmares. I'd be chewing off my own foot in an hour or less.

I know what you mean, and a lot of arcade-style games from the 80's were designed to be played for a few minutes only. It took a while before we had games like "Legend of Zelda" where you can play all night & see new things the whole time.

I still occasionally get the "wow" factor with the old stuff, honestly. I'm not saying I can place myself back in my youth or pretend that the "future" (the now) never happened, a la Michael's excellent Chronogaming series, but I still get impressed and get great joy when 15, 20 or 30 year old hardware still works and shows me its stuff. A lot of my collecting is related to my seeing all this wonderful, amazing stuff in magazines as a kid, and "only" having one or two computers and consoles at the time, I "missed out" on a lot of these first hand experiences I craved (my friends having say an Apple IIe or an Atari 800XL or TI-99/4a, just didn't count the same), so now I get to experience them for myself, even if it is all these years later. I think emulation is wonderful and it definitely has its place, but there's also something clinical about it, something still "pretend" about it. Of course there are LOTS of issues with collecting, be it cost, space, and getting the stuff working that you really have to want to deal with to make it worthwhile, but speaking as a collector, when it does all work, it's extremely worthwhile.

I don't know, when I hear my TRS-80 speak, when I see an old game on my C-64 do something I forgot it did, etc., it still brings me great joy and gives me that "wow" moment, though perhaps in a different way (wow, I can't believe it did THAT in 1979, rather than hey, this is 1979, this thing speaking is cool). I think because very little with modern technology wows me (it's tough in a world of virtually unlimited storage, HD graphics, surround sound, etc.) there's something really nice about seeing what brought us here, at least for me.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.

I'm with you, Rob, though for me it's BETTER and even more "WOW" looking at this stuff through older eyes. Now I have the clarity and knowledge to really appreciate these things. If I had plenty of space and some disposable income, I'm sure I'd have a nice collection like Bill's. That said, I've barely touched the various consoles I own now. Even my DS is just collecting dust. Likewise, I hardly ever play any of the thousands of retrogames I have stored on my computer, and my X-Arcade might as well be in the cupboard with the fondue machine (I don't own one, but you get the idea).

When I do get some free time, I find myself either playing WoW or, more likely, responding to comments on forums and such. It's just more fun for me to talk about these old games than to play them! I'm sure it'd be different if I had any friends who lived close by that liked them, but that's just not going to happen, and even if it did--who knows? If we all lived in the same neighborhood, how often do you think we'd all get together to play stuff like Midi Maze or Zaxxon? I bet we'd probably end up playing mostly modern games on our 360s or whatever it was. If we tried to play retro games, we'd end up in retro hell, where you have so many thousands of options that you only play a game for a few minutes before moving on to another one. I mean, damn, how many hours would any of us really be interested in playing Pac-Man or Q*Bert? An hour, maybe?

I'm not a collector, but I have no problem with collectors. But something Bill has said in the past is that it's best to go to the original hardware/software to get as close to the original experience as possible. I do not share this philosophy completely, for these reasons:

1. I'm old now. Even if I have the original hardware, with the original games in the original boxes, I will never be able to recreate the same feeling I had seeing these games for the first time in the original time period. I remember being impressed with many a game, from the original arcades to the Playstation 1. Those games look primitive now, even if it's games I've never played until now. It's hard to get "wowed" by the retro games after you've experienced the modern ones. You can appreciate the games, yes, but "whoa" isn't generally going to come. Not for me, at least. I'm not looking at these games through teenage eyes anymore.

2. Emulation is often close enough. If you can't be "wowed" anymore, you can at least enjoy the games themselves. Retro game anthologies available on many platforms can provide you with a close enough, if not superior, game play experience.

3. I just want to play games. If I did have an old game that someone considered historically valuable, I'd sooner just give them the game than charge big money for it! It's not the package or platform that's so important to me, it's the fun of the game itself.

All that having been said, the collectors are doing what I won't: preserve history! We've lost countless works of literature, paintings, and cinema to time, but collectors are in the position to, for once, preserve the history of the beginnings of a major cultural phenomena. That can only bode well for the future, and these rare "treasures" will only increase in value as time goes on! Thirteen thousand dollars may not seem like that much for such a rare "fossil" when the next generation(s) come around and want a piece of history. So, from that perspective, hurray for the collectors!

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I agree. I'd rather have 10 things worth $500 each, than one thing worth $5,000. It's what has kept me for instance from getting a switch-based computer like an IMSAI, since you can't really get them for under $1,000. Of course with patience, soon enough I'll be able to get a modern day clone of that style of system for maybe a quarter of the price: http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?p=246 . It all depends upon what's important to you, the real thing or experiencing something like the real thing. I'm as much about the authentic experience as much as I am about the real thing. That's why I'm investing in a modern day implementation of the Heathkit H8, as well, even though I have two authentic units in various states of function. It just became too expensive and technically difficult to get those two functioning the way I wanted. Of course there's always emulation, but you lose so much in systems that require lots of physical interaction going that route.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.

Well some people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on a game that is very very rare. Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn is less expensive but is more expensive than other Saturn game because of the same reasons. Of course what does all boils down to is that the buyers can say "hey I've got something that is rare and that you don't have" with the purpose of inducing 'envy' and 'greed' in others less fortunate...

PS3: MarkVergeer | Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | Mark's Tube

That's just crazy. I just don't understand collectors sometimes.