The Guinness World Records recently awarded a 43-year old man for owning the world’s largest collection of video games for for a total of 10,607 titles.
Michael Thomasson, 43, Buffalo, N.Y., started collecting as early as 12 years old when he received a Cosmic Avenger for Christmas – his very first video game. That moment drove him so eager to get hold of every video game he could afford.
To date, he prides himself for having a nearly 11,000 video game titles which have him earn the “Guinness World Records 2014 Gamers' Edition” for having the largest video game collection.
He stores his precious collections on the basement of his house in N.Y. He told Bakersfield Now, “I have games on cartridge, laser disc. I have VHS-based games, cassette-based games.”
Aside from his thousands of video games, he also owns several devices to play them on – including the most recent ones and the incomprehensible game consoles like the girly Casio Loopy, which was released in Japan in 1995 and the Pippin, a flopped console released by Apple the same year.
When asked about the ancient Colecovision unit he has received along with his very first video game, he told Bakersfield Now: “It’s my first love so it’s sentimental.”
“They looked good, they played good. For the time they sounded good, for the bleeps and blips of the 80s,” he added.
So far, Thomasson already have 10,607 video game titles, but it could have been more if he hadn’t sold some of them. He sold his first collections in 1989 when he had to raise money for a Sega Genesis and the second one was for his wedding in 1998.
Immediately after those two heartbreaking restarts, he strictly started rebuilding his collection on a strict $3,000 per year budget, allowing two video game purchases a day.
The budget implied that he never paid for the original price.
