It wasn't my only creative rearrangement. I did the same thing with my own copy of Super Mario RPG, which I had saved up to buy brand new for seventy-nine bucks. Oh and I also had Earthbound new in the box with its manual and I used the manual so much the pages fell out and I don't know where the box is and I guess that thing sells for like hundreds of dollars now? One time I cut the cardboard flaps off my boxed Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for SNES and then taped them to the insides of my Chrono Trigger because the Chrono Trigger flaps were getting kind of weak and I wanted to reinforce them, cause I liked that game a lot and I wanted to take good care of it. That was not the end.
I all but destroyed my Link's Awakening player's guide by folding it open repeatedly on car rides and tucking it into the back of the driver's seat. Once I pried apart a copy of Rocko's Modern Life instead of getting the right screwdriver for it cause I wanted to see what it looked like inside, and I wanted to see now. At one point in the NES era I decided it would be fun to "play video store" and I stuck labels with numbers on them to the sides of every boxed game that I had so that I could create a numbered database. A dork from the beginning.
I covered my PlayStation with stickers and grip tape cause it looked sweet. When I loaned cartridges to people I'd write my initials on the cartridge, but not the plastic. The label! One time I rounded up a variety of games I didn't want anymore and threw them all into a garbage bag and drug them to the used game store and walked out with a gigantic wad of money that I wasted on crap. Super Metroid, Uniracers, Family Dog... well okay I don't miss Family Dog. (I bought back Metroid and Uniracers a couple months later.) I wrote my gaming wishlist into the back pages of my NES manuals with heavy markers. I took PlayStation games that were packed into double-sized cases with a demo disc and moved them into single-disc cases because I liked to keep my demo discs separate. I'm sure that guy who bought my Final Fantasy III would be pissed at my casual disregard for the sanctity of my items.
Now that I live 6,000 miles from where I grew up and have moved house something like eight times, only a tiny bit of what was once, at various points in time, my "collection" now remains. But what's interesting is that all these item-destroying things I ever did are still things I remember. I can't tell you how many perfect-condition PlayStation 2 games I have, or ever had, or what they were really. Even now I'm not entirely sure what games are on my shelf! But the ones from back then, those I have memories associated with. If I ever mention these things to "modern collectors" they spin in their waking-life graves, dead alive. "Oh man, what a shame!!" And there's a part of me that thinks "OH! the money I could get for them now." But I remember playing every one, I remember all that stuff. And I don't want the money.
In 2006 I had the chance to interview the two guys who wrote the music for that game, that game that had the music I liked so much that I'd hold my tape recorder up to the TV while I played so I could listen to it whenever I wanted, Chrono Trigger. Afterward they offered to sign some stuff that I had brought, and predicting just such an occasion I had indeed brought it along, my very own Pac-Man 2 franken-box. They both signed it. It's not in mint condition, it's not complete with all the handouts, it's probably worth less to a collector than one that's better. But when I look at it now, and I open those flaps, I see the other game's flaps underneath, and I remember that I put them there because I liked Chrono Trigger so much that I wanted to take care of it. Six years now since Mitsuda and Uematsu signed it, it holds the memory of my experience meeting a couple of childhood heroes, too. I don't want to sell it. I wouldn't trade it for one in perfect condition. I wanna keep it for my entire stupid life.
I used to look up the values of my baseball cards in Beckett Price Guide. I'd tell my dad that some thing I got was worth forty dollars! And my collection all together was worth hundreds and hundreds! Then I'd ask him if he wanted to buy it. He'd offer me something like five bucks, and I'd protest—"it's worth way more than that!" No, he'd tell me, it's only worth what someone's willing to pay for it, and I am willing to pay five dollars. Then he asked me if I wanted to sell it. And I'd say no and he'd say well, what about for ten dollars. Then twenty, then thirty. How much would it take for me to part with these things I had put together? I realized that I didn't want to sell them for anything, they were mine, my Rollie Fingers with the crease down the center, my hideous Fleer sets, my scratch-off cards that I had the audacity to scratch off instead of keeping them in perfect mint condition.
I might not have all those things anymore, those Super NES boxes, those baseball cards, those graffiti-marked cartridges and destroyed player's guides, to get my ruined-investments money from, but what I definitely have now is my money's worth. They became something more than just things as I beat their physical forms out of them. I've got things that aren't things, I've got memories that only I would ever want and nobody can ever buy.