A Shelf for the Games I No Longer Own
- Lee Murray
- May 17, 2026
- 4 min read
I sold [GAME] for [AMOUNT] in [YEAR], and I think about it more than I should.
It was a [DAY OF WEEK] — [WHERE: maybe a friend's bedroom in Sale Moor, the market on the high street, your mum at the front room holding the box up like is this one going?] — and [WHO/WHAT MOMENT: lending the cartridge to a cousin who lived across the road, watching someone else's hands close around it on a market stall, that strange polite negotiation with a kid at the school gates]. [ONE SENSORY DETAIL: the label peeling at the corner, the case smelling like the loft, the weight of it in your jacket pocket, the sticky residue where a Toys R Us price sticker had been].
That was the last time I held it.
Most of us don't own the collection anymore
Most retro gamers I know don't actually own their childhood collection anymore. Not really. Bits of it, maybe — a NES that survived the loft, the one cartridge with your initials scratched into the label, an Amiga that won't load anything but still gets switched on once a year out of stubbornness.
The rest went. Lent to a cousin and never given back. Boxed up by a parent who thought you'd outgrown it. Sold in a Tesco bag at a car boot for less than you paid for chips on the way there. Traded in at the local game shop for some glittery promise of the next thing — a PlayStation, a Saturn, a Game Boy Color, whichever shiny new bait the shop window had on it that month.
And then you spend the rest of your life half-noticing that the games that mattered most exist mostly in memory.
What eBay can't reissue
Here's the bit I didn't get for years: buying [GAME] back isn't the same as having had it.
I tried it once. Found a copy on eBay — boxed, all instructions, mint condition — and paid more than I should have for it, because of course I did. When it arrived I held it for a while and the truth landed slowly: it just wasn't my one. The handwriting on the label wasn't mine. The case didn't have the dent in the corner where I'd dropped it [WHERE/HOW]. The smell was wrong. It was an honest, original, untampered copy of a [PLATFORM] [GAME], and it might as well have been a different game altogether.
That's the bit I keep coming back to. The cartridge was never the artefact. The memory was. The cartridge was just the bit of plastic that made the memory tangible — the proof. Once it's gone, eBay can hand you back the plastic, but the proof has to live somewhere else.
So I built a shelf
So I built myself a shelf for the games I no longer own.
It lives on this site. Most of the things on it I'll never replace, because the replacement wouldn't be the same. Some of it I never owned at all — games I rented and didn't want to give back, games at a friend's house I'd stay an extra hour to play, games I only read about in magazines and couldn't afford. It's not a wishlist. It's a record of attention. The games that earned my Saturday afternoons.
You can see mine, if you're curious.
I built it because I needed somewhere to put the cartridges of the mind. Somewhere that wasn't a Google Doc, or a Stickies note, or the kind of "favourite games" list you start writing on a forum and abandon two entries in. I wanted a shelf. I wanted the visual weight of seeing the platforms stacked up, the eras lined up next to each other, the years I gave to them.
Each game gets a cover, a platform, a condition if I can remember one, and — if I want to — a private note. A bit of writing nobody else sees. The thing I'd say about it if I had to explain to someone who'd never played it why it mattered.
Most of them I haven't written yet. But the shelf is there for when I do.
The shelf is part of Insert Coin membership. If any of this has rung true, you can build your own — track every cartridge you've owned, the ones you lost, the ones that got away — at /account/collection/.
