Last night my wife took me to Goodwill so we could get some "new" shirts for work. Expressing my distaste with clothes-shopping, I wandered over to the CD/VHS section to see how many Hanson CDs nobody was buying.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a Boils CD (not that you care who the Boils are, even though they're only one of the best fucking Philly punk bands ever). I would have purchased it, if I couldn't get a pristine copy for $2 more than Goodwill was charging. But it piqued my interest in what other rare gems Goodwill was hiding from me.

And so I began my search. Passing over the mountains of Hanson, O-Town, and ABBA CDs, I managed to stumble upon a copy of Myst. Then I found Return to Zork. Then Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations. Then the 7th Guest. Then Heroes of Might and Magic. Then, finally, King's Quest 7: The Princeless Bride.

Six games, and every single one more than 10 years old. They had an original copy of Half-Life, also, but I managed to pass on that one, since I own a few different copies already.

I'm not sure what I want to do with them yet. Perhaps I'll play them all. Or maybe I'll hold a contest and give them away as prizes. They're all in near-mint condition, so they should play fairly well.

I was inspired by a comment I saw from dvddesign about how he had to sell his NES and games in order to get an SNES. You see, I did not have this luxury. I can't say that the reason I no longer have my NES is because my mother forced it. In fact, she was against it. She thought that if she had paid so much money for the games, she shouldn't get rid of them for such a cheap price. And she paid a lot of money for those games. My two brothers and I had something like 75 games for our NES. Seventy-five games at $50 a pop (except for the copy of Star Force we got for $5 because of a badly labeled shelf) comes to $3750, plus the price of the NES and we'll say she probably spent close to $4000 on this hobby.

So now we fast-forward. The year is 1997, I am 14 years old. My mom finally says "screw it all" and lets us sell our NES and entire game collection so we could buy a new game. We get like $70 total for the games FuncoLand would actually buy. So what awesome game is it that we traded in an entire collection of NES games for? Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. No, you did not read that incorrectly, and your eyes do not deceive you. We seriously traded in an entire collection of NES games for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Not even Turok 2 with its cerebral bore. The original Turok, with all of its awkward controls.

Perhaps it was for the best. Since these games were technically the property of the three of us, none of us could move ahead with our lives without leaving some of it behind. There would be bloodshed over these games. Or I would have had to steal them very sneakily like I did with Final Fantasy Tactics, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (NOT GH edition, bitches), and Rising Zan: Samurai Gunman.

Moral of the story: when you gamers grow up and have children, don't force them to sell all their shit because they have too much shit. Put it in the attic or something. Or else they'll hate you until the day you die.