Thanks to everyone who bid on old Game Boy World materials, I was able to pick up what appears to be a very well-kept 19″ Sony PVM medical monitor with RGB passthrough. It should be here next week, and the requisite RGB cables are currently en route as well, so I’m looking forward to going where no man has ever cared enough to bother to go before: Capturing high-definition RGB video of NES light gun games.

I admit, I felt a small pang of something as I boxed up other people’s Game Boy games last night. I am not a collector, and I never intended to build a library of complete Game Boy games for myself as part of the GBW project, but there are some pretty nicely packaged pieces being offloaded here that I’ll miss having around. There was a time where I very briefly thought, “Maybe I should keep this collection,” but reality set me straight.

For one thing, I’ve already hit a wall for being able to acquire boxed games—I still haven’t found a complete Boxxle II after half a year of searching and asking, despite constant cries for help online and even a pretty healthy bounty I’ve offered on collector forums. And further out in 1990 we have the likes of Amazing Penguin and Fish Dude, which I can find complete easily enough but at such high prices that it becomes impractical. I probably won’t sell enough copies of the Game Boy World 1990 book over its lifetime to be able to offset the $1000 or so a boxed Fish Dude costs, so it becomes kind of impractical, you know?

There’s also the issue of space. Our house has three times the square footage of the place we rented a couple of years ago in San Francisco, but that doesn’t mean I want to stuff every inch of it with video games.  I’ve dedicated one wall of our home office to my game stuff, but that’s as far as it goes, and boxed games fill that space in a hurry. I want to get caught up in the trap of obsessive collecting for the sake of acquisition, where I own a bunch of stuff that lives in boxes somewhere. I have much more important things to invest in, such as health insurance for my wife, so the 2’x3’x4′ media cabinet where I keep my chronogaming resources will be the limit for me.

So, farewell, my CIB friends. We had some good times together, and you were all totally professional in your modeling work. It was a pleasure. If you ever need a reference, feel free to cite my work.

Except you, Boxxle. You set such a bad example for everyone who followed.