Ancient Web: Matt Henzel’s Gaming Timeline Kept the Receipts from 1983

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Matt Henzel can explain his video-game collection with a stack of evidence: an old Christmas list, a school drawing of Mario, photographs of console boxes, and a receipt for an astonishingly expensive Neo-Geo.

Read Origins of a Diehard Gamer.

Henzel says he started playing video games around 1978 and collecting in 1982. His timeline opens with a family Wonder Wizard Sharp Shooter, a television game featuring a light gun, and a Tomy Digital Derby toy. He remembers trying to make the gun register shots by pointing it toward the living-room mirror.

The account then moves through his childhood in upstate New York. A 1983 family photograph captures Henzel, his older brother Greg, and a friend in video-game T-shirts. A birthday party supplies Pac-Man decorations, while schoolwork reveals how much time its author spent drawing game characters.

A receipt turns nostalgia into evidence

For 1986, the archive has a Christmas wish list annotated with prices and catalog references. He remembers waiting for a copy of Super Mario Bros. and drawing its underground maze from memory. Later photographs show a growing collection of cartridges and game systems.

The December 1990 Neo-Geo entry is especially detailed. Henzel recalls paying $550 for an AES Gold System, using wages from a department store and neighborhood jobs shoveling snow or mowing lawns. He includes a surviving receipt, remembers opening the system on Christmas morning, and explains why the huge expense mattered to him.

Another section contains a rental log from December 1991 through August 1993. These are the sorts of ordinary records most families discard, now annotated years after the fact and given a permanent hyperlink.

The broader Video Game Obsession site has existed since 1996, but the timeline includes later observations and newly uploaded artifacts, so its historical subject is not the year the page was first published. It is the collision of contemporary family records and an adult collector's recollection.

Some memories will be subjective or imperfect. The photographs, lists, and receipts help readers distinguish those memories from the objects that survived.

Explore the gaming timeline and the parent hardware archive.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.