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We Have Fury: Pieces of Gaming History End Up In Recycle Bins

Posted by Nadia Oxford

Today I bring you a sadder, somewhat stranger tale of game waste. This one comes from an employee of Best Buy, “DrSpengler,” who haunts a popular Transformers fan board called The Allspark.

Best Buy has a recycling program in place for electronic items. The chain will take your fizzled, your sizzled, your broken televisions yearning to be scrapped. It's a good way to paint your conscience green, since disposing of electronics in the traditional way is a Captain Planet no-no.

So Best Buy has the “Recycle” thing down pat, but it brickwalls at “Reuse.” Employees are absolutely forbidden to take away or purchase items that are brought in for recycling—and there are some vintage pieces of game history that are being crushed into little cubes, here. DrSpengler recalls one jaw-dropping throwaway: a 1985 NES action set, in-box, all cables and pack-in materials included, minus the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt combo. Even the Zapper was grey, the precursor to the more iconic orange-and-grey light gun.

Best Buy is paid to recycle items, and likely ship the boxes by weight, so it's no surprise they don't want employees to paw through their profits. I can't even wholly blame Best Buy for callously chucking a snippet of gaming's past into a marked box. Whomever owned that little beast obviously had no idea what they were holding on to. That, or some collector's over-tidy mother got a good ol' fashioned screaming-at that evening.

MattG, who runs a gaming blog called Press The Buttons, thinks we really need to be more careful about this sort of thing:

This makes me absolutely furious. These items are part of our history. I'm reminded of how television studios used to destroy their old films and tapes to make room in warehouses. The destruction means that we're missing big chunks of our shared entertainment culture. Ever wonder why you never see video clips from the early years of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson? It's because NBC trashed the old tapes in the late 1960s in the belief that old episodes had no value and were taking up valuable storage space. I know there are much more important things to be worked up about, but trashing these perfectly functional treasures really upsets me.

Related Links:

Gaming: A Throwaway Hobby?

+ DIGG

+ DEL.ICIO.US

+ REDDIT

Posted Feb 13 2009, 03:27 PM

Filed under: nintendo, nes, 8-bit, retro, nadia oxford, zapper, action set, waste, throaway hobby

Comments

Roto13 said:

I want... I want to steal it....

February 13, 2009 3:53 PM

C said:

Couldn't some plucky Best Buy employee perform an Indy and replace the NES box with a sandbag of equal weight?

February 15, 2009 4:35 PM

LBD "Nytetrayn" said:

Depends... are sandbags made of recyclable materials?

February 17, 2009 12:00 AM

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John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

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Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines. Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.

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