Michael Thomasson is the king of video games, according to the Guinness World Records. He now holds the largest collection of games numbering 10,607, at the time of the official count, dethroning the previous record holder Richard Lecce, who held the crown since 2010 for owning 8,616 games.
Clearly, Thomasson's collection is beyond what most gamers know today. It is beyond the realm of PlayStations and Xboxes. Even far beyond Nintendo's Family Computer or the Sega game consoles.
"I have games on cartridge, laser disc. I have VHS-based games, cassette-based games," the 31-year-old gamer from Buffalo, New York, said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Thomasson, who teaches video game history and design at Canisius College, received from his grandparents "Cosmic Avenger" as his first game when he was 12. He was only able to play the game a year after, on the Colecovision console.
Thomasson considers his first game as the best gift he has received and since then got serious in collecting video games. At the moment, the man with the biggest collection of video games estimates his pile to be worth around $800,000 at most. This is a realistic estimate since he disclosed that he spent $3,000 annually to buy video games.
Meanwhile, Lecce has extended his greetings to the new Guinness World Record holder .
"My congratulations to a fellow collector. It's very impressive and I'm very happy for him," Lecce said in a phone interview with AP.
"Everything from the original artwork to the actual code that was written for the games to the actual box art and the whole marketing plan," he said. "It's just a very undervalued and underappreciated art form," Lecce added.
While Thomasson owns the popular game consoles, he also had the odd ones such as the Casio Loopy that was released in Japan in 1995 and specifically designed for girls. He also owns Apple's Pippin.
However, Thomasson had put a brake on his game collecting habit, a few times. He sacrificed his collection in 1989 to come up with money to buy Sega Genesis. In 1998 he again parted ways with his first love to exchange 'I dos' with his then girlfriend JoAnn.
Thomasson also has a confession to make. Though he has nearly 11,000 video game titles at home, he said he hardly finds time to play them all.
"I probably get three hours of playing in a week. If I'm lucky," he said.
