My roommate stood at the back of a walk-in closet in our new apartment. It was positively cavernous.

“What do you wanna use this closet for?” he asked.

I knew the answer to the question before he even asked it.

“Dude, we can put all of our video games in here! We'll, like, get shelves to line the walls, one side for you, one side for me! And I can put all my movies in here and it will be like our media vault!”

My roommate stroked his chin at the prospect. “I like it.”

So before unpacking the majority of my essential personal belongings, I set about arranging Vault 101 -- a shrine to our mutual hobbies. In short order we packed the room with video games, systems and related peripherals.

As I stood back and gazed upon my works like an NES-nurtured Ozymandias, pinpricks filled my belly. I knew this feeling well: regret.

When I was a young lad growing up in the suburban sprawl of southern Pennsylvania, things were simple. Life was boring, and video games were not. I begged my parents for systems they could not afford. I spent the majority of the year reading magazines weighing out what I would ask for come Christmas. All loose change was hidden away in a novelty-sized Coke bottle for the day yard-sale season began -- the day I could snag games for the systems of yesterday. Anything to perpetuate my hobby.

As a misanthropic teenager, video games were a badge of honor. Instead of taking a pretty girl to the prom, I chose to stay at home, leveling up my Final Fantasy 7 characters far past necessity. I and my handful of equally socially awkward friends had turned our childhood gaming into something of a game itself. You could find classic video games everywhere and mostly on the cheap as most stores were in decline. Sega CD titles for under 10 dollars new. Dump bins of NES cartridges, with sleeves and boxes, for a dollar. My collection continued to grow.

Things took a turn post-high school. Community college and the two jobs I worked to support it assured I had little time for active video gaming. But the few of us that hadn’t scattered to the winds gathered in at local diners, tossing away valuable studying time to compile lists. The Top 100 games of all time. The Top 10 RPGs. The Top 10 characters, stories, and so on. Paper diner placemats with lists soon populated my folders and textbooks between assignments. 

In a personally infamous moment of capricious behavior, I decided to say fuck it all and stopped showing up for classes altogether. I finally had the time to catch up on the pile of shame that had been growing next to my television.

Regret followed predictably.

Weeks and months after the move I frequented Vault 101. I was 28 years old, single, with no family and few personal accomplishments. But I had plenty to distract me from the trappings of an adult life here. I pulled games down from the shelf and pondered playing them. But I didn’t. I never do.

Sometimes I would sit crossed-legged on the floor, my back to my roommate's shelf, and I stared at the titles that line my wall. Ninja Gaiden 3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Resident Evil. Doom. Castlevania. Kirby’s Adventure. My memories of them are indistinct at best -- I can remember playing them, but I can’t remember where or when. It’s like looking at photographs of yourself as a child and listening to someone else tell you the stories behind the photos. They become half-memories, and you aren’t sure if they are really yours as well or a story you’ve convinced yourself is your own.

Each item I added to the collection was valuable to someone, somewhere. This was simply how the collectors culture operated. Say you played a Colecovision game once, at a friend's house, when you were six. You don’t know what the game is called, but you remember it being awesome, and as an adult you desire to obtain it.

It’s nesting for the nerd set.

I tried to dig down and find a sense of accomplishment inside myself for my massive collection of plastic and wires. Part of me felt the shame I should feel. The rest of me tried to compensate. No one knew how close I was to the breaking point.