I wasn't yet working for GameSpot when my girlfriend and I moved to the Bay Area last May, so as much as we both loved the idea of paying exorbitant rent and not being able to find parking, we passed on living in San Francisco and ended up in Mountain View, which is better known as the home of Google. Now that I'm working for GameSpot and our lease is up, we decided to move closer to San Fran so I could do something other than work, commute, and sleep. Last Saturday was moving day, and even though we paid people to pack and move everything, it somehow managed to be as painful as ever. Part of the "fun" of moving is trying to figure out what you do and don't need to take to your new place. My method of discerning what makes the cut is pretty simple: All of my stuff is awesome and most of my girlfriend's stuff is lame. She played along with the plan for awhile, but it was kind of difficult to chastise her for having too many shoes when I've got an unopened bottle of Tomb Raider wine from 2002. Yes, I've got a somewhat extensive video game collection.

Anyone who has ever collected anything, be it dolls or baseball cards has had to deal with the reality of their collection at some point or another. You can try and keep everything but eventually you're going to have to make some difficult decisions on what things are important to the collection. I have had to face this quandary twice in the last nine months. Last May I started with the easy stuff. I gathered up my various game-related pamphlets, flyers, and catalogs, and put them up on eBay. Then I turned my attention to the boxes in the garage that were filled with E3 paraphernalia. Five years of show newsletters, press kits, key chains, t-shirts, bumper stickers, (crappy) demos, pens, and other assorted trinkets got the eBay treatment. I didn't make much money on the auctions, but I like to think that my stuff found a good home in the back of someone's closet. Goodbye backpack from Sony's 2003 E3 party; I'll miss you. Don't worry Metal Gear binoculars; you're safe on the shelves. Fear not tennis ball can with a copy of Virtua Tennis for the PSP still sealed inside; you're not going anywhere. For some reason I had a bunch of broken NES-era peripherals. Those were donated to the trash can. I probably didn't throw as much away as I should have since "awesome" peripherals, such as my U-Force and no less than three NES light guns made the move to California.

Getting rid of so much stuff in May allowed me to delay some difficult decisions, but the February move brought them back to light. We're talking heavy stuff, like what to do with my collection of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines. I already had a few years worth of EGM in 1999, but for some reason I hopped on eBay and bought about 75 back issues. It was a lot of fun flipping through them reminiscing about long-forgotten games and seeing coverage of systems like the Sega CD, Atari Jaguar, and 3DO. It's hard to believe, but there was some genuine optimism when those consoles were released. But as much as I don't want to part with the August 1993 issue with Aero the Acrobat on the cover, it does cost money to lug these things around and they do take up quite a bit of space. Yep, I kept them.

Thanks to the preponderance of game compilations and the success of downloadable classics it has become more difficult than ever to evaluate what parts of a video game collection are indispensable. Do I need Super Mario Bros. for the NES, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy Color when I can just buy the game for $5 on the Virtual Console? What about all these old sports games? You'd have to pry R.B.I. Baseball and Super Tecmo Bowl from my cold, dead hands, but it's hard to justify having 14 versions of Madden when I only play the latest one. It's a safe bet that I'm not going to bust out Madden 2005 so that I can play as the Bears and relive the Jonathan Quinn era. I even have a few games for systems that I don't even own, but you never know when a CD-I is going to appear on your doorstep, so it would be foolish to part with them.

There are plenty of systems that aren't seeing their games re-released, so it makes sense to hold on to them. Keeping the Dreamcast and its best games is a no-brainer, but when am I going to be so desperate for entertainment that I break out the Virtual Boy? And then there are systems that just aren't much fun to play anymore. Why do I own one Atari 2600, much less two of them? Some of my systems have never even been opened because they're worth so much more that way. I must have had visions of a future where I did nothing but sit around and count my money when I bought the killer trifecta of a Pikachu Nintendo 64, WonderSwan Color, and Pokemon Game Boy Color, and then stashed them away unopened. Somehow I doubt I'll be retiring early because of those savvy investments. I'll admit that there's almost no chance that a broken Atari 5200 is going to be the missing component of some supercomputer that solves all of the world's problems, but who am I to predict the future? I'm keeping it!

A few pieces of my collection take up a bit more space than the others, but If Ricky Schroder can have an arcade on Silver Spoons, then I'm certainly not going to part with my dual screen Play Choice 10 arcade cabinet, or the Jurassic Park pinball machine that I wanted so badly I opened a savings account that I dubbed the "pinball fund." Ignore the fact that I've dropped over $2,000 on it and it still doesn't work properly; one day it's going to bring joy to everyone that plays it.

I've always been quick to point out to my mom that it's ridiculous that she holds on to old mason jars, and I've never been shy about telling my dad he's crazy for saving our old Epson printer* that was hooked up to our Apple IIe. After all, I know how to cut things loose, and I'm never going to have a bunch of semi-useful, half-broken items cluttering my house. At least that's what I always thought. The two Game.com handhelds on the shelves say that I'm wrong.

* My dad's reason for keeping an ancient dot matrix printer: "What if I need to print something on 17-inch paper?"