Cities And Sealed Games

What are useful things hallowed by time really for?

A long time ago, when I was more closely following the video game collecting scene (I have a decent collection of some of the more popular and fun Nintendo games in the original boxes, and some other stuff, but don’t buy much actively anymore), there was this interesting debate that would sometimes get brought up in forums and such.

There was a small subset of the video game collectors who focused on collecting sealed games. You can imagine how rare these are, especially for titles from the 1980s and 1990s, before video games were widely seen as collectibles. They were just toys back then, basically. Kids would get them for Christmas or a birthday or go buy them with allowance money, rip the box open, thumb through and toss the manual, and get to playing.

The vast majority of the 8- and 16-bit games out there, cartridge-based games that came in boxes, are just loose cartridges now. A small subset still have the boxes and/or the manuals; a small subset of those are “complete in box,” i.e. still have everything they came with: the tray, the manual, the insert or flyer or poster, the precaution booklet. These games are worth a lot more than the loose ones.

And then, finally, a tiny fraction of the copies of these games out there are still sealed: absolutely unopened and untouched, as if still sitting on a store shelf. The most popular games—which are harder to find in good condition, because they were handled more—can be worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars still sealed.

The collecting forum I used to frequent didn’t have many sealed-game collectors, and a few of the guys there were outright hostile to the idea. They felt that sealed collecting was ruining the hobby, turning it into something greedy and speculative. Some of them dreamed of getting their hands on a 30-year-old sealed game and opening it, because that was what it was for. If video games were Holy Communion, they were video-game Protestants; for using, not for adoration.

Against the “truth” established by the market, that the rarity of the sealed games made them highly collectible—and that that high value and collectability demanded that they be permanently frozen in the rare state they happened to be preserved in—these guys insisted on video games being games that were sort of secondarily collectible.

So, what I’m thinking about here is that historic preservation is a little bit like sealed video game collecting.

Obviously, “use” does not mean demolish; I don’t mean to imply that we should not preserve nice old buildings (not every old building is a reasonable candidate for preservation.) What I mean is that in focusing on keeping an old building in whatever exact condition it happens to have survived up to the present day, we’re missing something important and really central about it.

We are allowing time to hallow a thing, in a way which diverges from the thing’s actual history and purpose. Historic preservation places the idea of an old building as an artifact over the actual embodied history of a building and how and why it exists in the first place. Just like the sealed game collectors turn a game into an object to be displayed and looked at and not touched or handled or used.