Here’s a pointless and, honestly, embarrassing fact about me: I sort my video games in reverse chronological order of when I originally got them. I’ve been doing it for over twenty years at this point, and I don’t know how to stop.
It made sense in the beginning, I swear! Back then, I just had a small stack of Nintendo DS game cases on top of my dresser. I got Super Mario 64 DS alongside the console, and a few months later—thanks to some Nintendo Power magazine articles hyping it up—the now-forgotten puzzle game Polarium.
The key decision was when I put the case for Polarium under the case for SM64DS. And why not? SM64DS was “first,” so stacking it that way made some sense, at least. And then I eventually did the same thing with my next DS game, LostMagic. And the next, and the next, until eventually the stack was too tall to stay stacked on my dresser, and I just… turned it sideways and stood all the cases upright on a shelf. That had the unfortunate side effect of putting the games in “reverse” order, but I didn’t care, because I already knew where in the sequence each game was.
Maybe I should have cared when I made that switch from “pile of games” to “showcase on a shelf.” Because by not caring, I had unintentionally canonized this as being The Way I Did Things when it came to putting all my video game boxes in a row. Nintendo Wii games? Same thing, even though they started on a shelf from the beginning! 3DS games? Same size as the DS game cases, so those can just be added onto the same backwards-growing shelf-stack. Switch games? Screw it, I’ve been doing this stupid negative sequencing for too long now, I may as well keep doing it for consistency at least.
In the Switch generation, I’ve done a lot of skipping around and buying older games later in the generation. Like how I didn’t play Pokémon Shining Pearl until long after Pokémon Violet. So now I can’t even say my games are in reverse publication order. It drives me crazy.
Okay, not really. If it really bothered me that much, I’d have just put everything in alphabetical order ages ago. On some level, I love that I’ve somehow been able to maintain the order of these stacks for twenty years, through multiple moves, and now they’re a great representation of my personal journey as a gamer.
I can look at my shelf of DS games and see all the wild variation in the early years as I explored new genres, and how that branching out kind of hit a brick wall as soon as Pokémon’s 4th generation hit. I can see how I was overly ambitious with the Wii, with the multiple games I bought but never played. Never even unwrapped from the plastic, for some of them. I can see how I was a lot more conservative with the 3DS, my system with the smallest library, just games I knew for sure that I’d sink hundreds of hours into each. And then a lot more experimentation and exploration once again with the Switch, in part because the Switch generation has lasted so dang long.
The Switch 2 was finally officially announced a few hours ago. I really hope Switch 2 game cases are the same size as Switch 1 game cases, so I can continue stacking Switch 2 games behind the Switch 1 section of my games shelf, and I can thus continue this atrocity against common sense organization for another twenty years.
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