Some people collect stamps, others collect Beanie Baby toys from the 1990s, and there is one man who collects video games. Michael Thomasson recently earned a Guinness record for owning 10,607 video games and a collection of game consoles, including popular and rare consoles.
How Thomasson’s collection started
Thomasson received his first video game for Christmas when he was just twelve years old. The game was called Cosmic Avenger and he had to wait an entire year to get the Colecovision, which was at the time, hard to find. This inspired him to collect every video game console and video game he could find. He owns Xboxes and Playstations and even long-defunct games like Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Pippin and Casio Loopy. It’s been 31 years later and now he owns nearly 11,000 video games. He explained, “I have games on cartridge, laser disc. I have VHS-based games, cassette-based games.”
There were times his attempt to collect were interrupted. He had to sell his collection twice, the first time in 1989 when he was raising money for a Sega Genesis game console, the second time nine years later when he saved money for his wedding. His Guiness-worthy collection took time to rebuild, but he had a method which average two games a day which was under the budget of $3,000 a year which kept him from paying full price.
Impressive Guinness Record to beat
Although he has the most impressive collection of video games (he estimates it to be worth $700,000 to $800,000), he is usually too busy with life to play with the games. Thomasson is the father of a five-year-old girl and he works as game design teacher at a college in Buffalo, New York. He added that he usually gets only three hours a week to play videos games if he is lucky.
Michael Thomasson beat Richard Lecce, who earned the Guinness record in 2010 with 8,616 video games.
