The Things That Were Actually Yours

On physical collections, the shops that are gone, and the things that were genuinely yours.

Do you remember what a game shop smelled like? Not metaphorically. Actually smelled like. Plastic, cardboard, a faint hint of carpet and something electric in the air that had no name but every single person who walked through that door recognised instantly. You were twelve, maybe fourteen. You had money in your pocket that took longer to earn than you care to admit. And the world inside that shop was the whole world.

Sometimes you knew exactly what you wanted. Sometimes you had no idea. Both states were equally wonderful. The not-knowing meant you could browse for what felt like hours, picking up boxes, reading the back, putting them down, picking them up again. The knowing meant a different kind of thrill entirely. Do they have it? Is it in stock? Will they have to order it? And if they had to order it, that was somehow not a disappointment. That was an event in itself. Something to look forward to. Something to return for.

You paid in cash. The person behind the counter looked up the number on the box, disappeared into the back, and came out with something sealed. Fresh. Untouched. Yours.

You barely made it home.

And here is the thing about that. You did not tear it open to play the game. Not immediately. First came the booklet. That small, folded, impossibly dense little object that somehow transported you somewhere else before the cartridge ever touched a console. The artwork. The character descriptions. The controls you would memorise and then immediately forget the moment you actually started playing. If your parents drove you home you had already opened it in the back seat, hunched over this tiny document, already inside the world of something you had not yet experienced. You were playing the game before you played the game. That was the magic. Right there, under a seatbelt, on a Tuesday.

You were playing the game before you played the game. That was the magic. Right there, under a seatbelt, on a Tuesday.

I remember a family holiday to Austria. I had my Game Boy with me. The chunky one. No backlight, because backlight was a luxury that belonged to a future nobody had thought of yet. Too much sun through the car window made the screen disappear. Too little and the same thing happened. You negotiated with the light. You shuffled across the seat. You pulled a blanket over your head. You plugged in one of those small reading light attachments that clipped to the top and made the whole thing look like a small broken lamp. Did it bother me? Not even slightly. That was just how it was. And how it was, was extraordinary.

Those car rides. That Game Boy. That booklet in the back seat. Those are not just memories. They are evidence of something. A relationship with objects, with ownership, with the physical fact of having something that is yours in a way that a file on a server can never quite replicate.

I am not entirely sure when the shift happened. It was not a single moment. It arrived gradually, the way most significant changes do, until one day you looked around and something had quietly disappeared. The MP3 player arrived. Then the streaming service. Then the app. The idea of owning a thing began to feel old-fashioned, almost quaint. Why own when you can access? Why carry when you can stream? Big companies in music, in games, in publishing, looked at this and saw what it was. An exit ramp from physical media and a direct route to something infinitely more profitable. A subscription. A licence. The illusion of ownership without the inconvenience of the object.

It never fully grabbed me. I kept my shelves. Games in their cases, records in their sleeves, CDs in a tower that took up too much space and that I would not part with for anything. I liked that my record player made the choice for me once I lowered the needle. No algorithm. No shuffle. No skip. The song that came next was the song that came next. I loved that. I still do.

Why own when you can access? Why carry when you can stream? The illusion of ownership without the inconvenience of the object.

What I find genuinely heartening is this: so do a lot of other people. Younger people, increasingly. You see them in music shops now, flicking through records with the same focused look I remember from those game shop afternoons. You see them with modded devices, with cassette players, with handhelds loaded with cartridges they tracked down specifically. It is not quite the same as walking into that shop with your hard-earned money and coming out with something sealed. But the instinct is the same. The desire to have something real. Something physical. Something that exists in the world and not just on a server somewhere that could, theoretically, revoke your access on a Tuesday afternoon with no warning and no apology.

The game shop I grew up with is gone. The building is something else now. Something practical and forgettable. I walked past it not long ago and stood there for a moment longer than I needed to. You cannot mourn a building. But you can mourn what happened inside it. The version of yourself who walked through that door with money in your pocket and the whole afternoon ahead of you. The feeling that something wonderful was about to begin.

I still have the games. I still have the records. Some of them go back further than I care to say. There are scratches on a few of them that I know the exact origin of. There are cases with stickers I should have never put on them and never once regret. They are not just objects. They are evidence that I was there. That those afternoons happened. That the magic was real.

That is what digital will never be able to give you. Not because the music is worse or the games are lesser. But because you cannot hold a file. You cannot put it on a shelf and look at it on a Tuesday evening when you need reminding that life has been, more often than not, genuinely wonderful. You cannot hand it to someone and say: this one. This one mattered to me.

You cannot hold a file. You cannot put it on a shelf and look at it on a Tuesday evening when you need reminding that life has been, more often than not, genuinely wonderful.

We are finding our way back. Slowly, imperfectly, with some distance still to cover. And I believe we will get there. Because the need to own something real, to hold it, to build something that is genuinely yours on a shelf in a room in a life, that need never actually went away.

It was just waiting, the same way the best music always does, for you to come back to it.