The Ultimate Game

In the mid- to late 1980s, my older brother and I were big in going to card shows. We collected sports cards, mainly MLB and NFL, but we also had NHL, NBA, and we even collected sets of cards from Garbage Pail Kids, TMNT, X-Men, and so on. My older brother also worked hard at building a collection of comic books and he went out of his way to get a few decent ones into his collection like the first X-Men and the first Wolverine and the first Batman. Our collection was tens of thousands of cards and a lot of different sports memorabilia — such things as signed rookie cards of Mike Singletary, Walter Payton, Ken Griffy Jr., Robin Yount, and so on.

I was more into video games then, as well. My older brother wasn’t as much, but he liked the idea of trying to collect and build up a video game collection, as well.

The years went on, and in the early 1990s, we had a massive collection of game consoles, games to go with them, and our sports cards. We had tables we’d set up at card shows and we’d sell, trade, and buy. At the time, we had probably amassed over $50,000 in merchandise.

I was about thirteen years old, and I came home one day and everything was gone aside from my Sega Genesis, a controller for it, and a couple of games.

My older brother cleaned us out — all of our sports cards aside from a handful that I had secretly stashed that I really liked, all our sports memorabilia, all his comic books, and all of our video games and consoles… along with $600 I had in my room, hidden away (clearly not well enough).

He took the following game consoles:

• Three NES systems, along with the NES Power Pad, Power Glove, six controllers, and over a hundred games
• Two SNES systems, four controllers, and nearly a hundred games
• One SNES Famicom system, one controller, and maybe half a dozen games we had for it
• One Atari 2600 and every single game
• One TurboGrafx 16, the two controllers, and about a dozen games
• One Gameboy and around fifty games
• One Sega Genesis 32X adapter and the dozen games I had for it

The police got involved, and since I couldn’t officially prove it was my older brother that took all this stuff, I could at least prove that he only took $600 out of my room because he also knew where it was stashed — stupid me for letting him know. The police gave him twenty-four hours to return the $600; otherwise, he was going to be arrested. The very next day, the $600 was returned.

I never did see any of the other merchandise returned. Apparently, my older brother, who was sixteen when this all took place, wanted a start-up fund to get into the weed business.