Organizing Tips for Game Collectors
More than one way to organize Gameboy games? How are NES & PS1 related?
Part of being a video game collector, you need to figure out ways to store and organize your collection. Here are some tips for organizing your game collection:
First tip is kind of obvious and self explanatory. Shelves are going to be your best friend if you want to display your collection. Bookcases, Multi-media storage, or custom shelves is the method I would go personally. Bookcases may not fit your games to their exact dimensions but you can put figurines and collectibles in front of your games to personalize your collection more on the shelf. Multi-media storage units will fit most games and movies on there perfectly. The issue with bookcases and multi-media storage is the price of them. Depending on where you buy the unit, they can be somewhat cheap like $49-$79 for the BILLY Bookcase @ Ikea. I’ve been using the BILLY Bookcase for the past couple of years and it works really well for games, movies, and comic books. Or they could be $223.99 for a Multi-media Storage Rack @ Wayfair. My recommendation if you’re looking for bookcases/multi-media storage is to shop around and compare prices. You’ll also want to measure how much room you have for this potential bookcase/multi-media unit. Everyone’s room is different, so you don’t want to buy a massive multi-media storage rack if you can’t fit it in your room. Custom shelves are a much cheaper alternative if you know what you’re doing and have the tools to do it. Buying the supplies with a little bit of labor and sweat, you’ll be spending a fraction amount of money compared to buying a bookcase or multi-media unit. Also, since these are custom built to your liking, you’ll be able to optimize the shelving unit and fit as many games on there as possible. Personally, I don’t have any experience building shelves myself but here’s a blog post where this guy made a custom shelf for less than $40 in supplies.
Next tip is probably a bit strange but sometimes you just have to work with what you got. Some people have a lot of extra room in their dressers with empty drawers. So you can use this space to put some of your games in here. My best friend, Damian (our podcast), does this set up and it works well for him. You can fit a lot of games in a dresser drawer but keep in mind the amount of weight you’re putting in here. Dresser drawers aren’t meant to hold a ton of weight so be mindful of how much you’re stuffing into the individual drawers.
Now instead of a dresser, you can also just buy plastic drawer bins to put games and accessories in.
Damian also has this set up where he’d put his games in these plastic drawers and I sort of adopted this set up for my game room but for my game controllers and accessories. It works well for me and I keep the controllers in plastic bags to keep them from stretching against each other.
Another organizing tip is using plastic bins for loose cartridge like Nintendo Entertainment System games and Nintendo 64 game. Obviously, if your collection of loose cartridges is massive, this solution will probably not work for you. For me however, I use a plastic bin for my N64 games since it makes my life easier when browsing my N64 collection. Instead of pulling the games out one by one in my entertainment unit, I can just pull this one plastic bin with all my games inside. It’s a nice way to have all of your loose cartridge games in one spot.
A quick tip that I don’t see a lot of game collectors talk about is the dimensions for NES cartridges, DS/3DS game cases, and PlayStation 1 games cases are all similar sizes.
So, if you’re trying to find a spot to display your collection of these titles, you can put them all on the same shelf if you’d like. This also means media shelves for CD’s could fit NES, DS, 3DS, and PS1 games nicely. One tip I have for PS1 games is to not put them too tightly together on a shelf. PS1 jewel cases could end up getting cracked because of the tightness. So leave a little bit of wiggle room when putting your PS1 games on a shelf.
These next set of tips are dedicated to original Gameboy and Gameboy advance loose cartridges. It’s kind of hard to store Gameboy/Gameboy Advance games on a shelf without a separate storage unit. The first one I recommend are these plastic pencil bins.
They fit Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games perfectly and you can sort through them with relative ease. Another storage unit for Gameboy games is this mini 3 drawer unit. They fit loose handheld games perfectly as well. You can even fit Gameboy manuals in the drawer if you have any in your collection.
The last Gameboy tip I have is the 9 pocket trading card pages. This probably sounds a little freaky but you can actually fit Gameboy games in each slot. If you’re doing Gameboy Advance games, you can fit two games per slot. This method is honestly pretty cool, maybe if I had more Gameboy/Gameboy Advance games I would do this since they would look pretty cool in a binder. Since my collection is relatively small, I’ve stuck with the pencil bins or the mini drawer.
A quick tip for any Genesis collectors looking for ways to store your loose cartridges, you can use cassette storage units. PeteDorr explained this in a Collecting Tips video, showing how Genesis games fit into cassette tape slots due to their similar dimensions.
This last tip isn’t really meant for hardcore collectors but more for people who don’t have that much room and/or don’t care about the game cases. Since game cases take up a lot of space compared to just the disc, some people are perfectly okay with storing their games in a CD/DVD binder and putting the game cases in their closet or elsewhere.
Depending on the type of binder you get, you can hold a lot of games in here. One convenient spot for your game collection. The only problems I have with this method, outside of it being a sin among hardcore game collectors, is not knowing your collection without opening the binder up to check. When you have over 100 games on the shelf, in their cases, you can glance over to see what’s in your collection without much effort. If these same games were in a binder now, there’s no way you’re going to know on the top of your head what games are in there. You’ll have to open up the binder to remember what’s in your collection. This is where creating a spreadsheet would come in handy for keeping track of your collection. Another problem I see with this method is organizing the games alphabetically. If you get a new game for the binder, do you put it at the end of the binder or try to shuffle through and re-organize the entire binder to put this one new game in? Obviously, you could just organize the binder how you see fit and avoid this problem all together. This tip isn’t intended for people who are hardcore collectors. This tip is for people who are limited on space but also want to have the games physically.
Sources
Siccooper 2013/2016 Room Tour Videos (Custom Shelves)
MetalJesusRocks 2017 Room Tour Video (Plastic Drawers)
PeteDorr’s Collector Tips (Gameboy/Genesis)— — — —
Travis “tvsonic” Vuong
Business e-mail: travisvuong56@gmail.com
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