About

Altopraxis here, and I want to tell you how I ended up running a collector's edition database, because I think it's a fairly typical story for anyone who's ever bought one of these things.

It started in a basement somewhere in Queens, New York. Some kind of vendor setup, folding tables, fluorescent lighting, that specific damp smell every old NYC building gets, and a teenager with no business spending money there. That was me. What I walked out with was the Arc the Lad Collection, and I loved it the way you only love something when you're young and you've never seen anything like it. A documentary disc, a stack of CDs, little paper standees, an artbook. An absurd amount of stuff packed into what is, by today's standards, a pretty compact set. Up to that point a video game was a plastic case with a manual in it, and now suddenly there was a whole world spilling out next to the disc.

And then, for about twenty years, nothing. (If you're reading this and gasping that the PlayStation is that old, yes, you are also that old, and I'm sorry.) Life happened the way it happens. There were kids, then diapers, then rent, then after-school programs, then the whole "you need to start saving for college" panic that nobody warns you about, and none of that math involved a $99 box of soundtrack CDs. The PS1 went into a closet, the hobby went with it, and for two decades it just stayed there.

Then the PS Vita pulled me back in, and I still couldn't tell you exactly why. The form factor, maybe, or the JRPGs piling up on it, or just the fact that I could play for fifteen minutes in bed without setting up an entire television situation. Whatever it was, once I felt steady enough, I started buying Vita games harder than I needed to. Which is how I ended up with Ys VIII, which is how I ended up with my first collector's edition since the basement in Queens, and which is how I learned the thing every CE buyer eventually learns: you cannot stop at one.

So Ys Celceta came next, and after that basically every Vita CE I could justify, and after that I moved on to the PSP. From there it kept branching out into Pokémon, fighting games, more RPGs, weird import stuff, and the whole time I kept hitting the same problem. There was no single place to actually browse this stuff. CE info was scattered across forums, defunct blogs, single-purpose websites that hadn't been updated since 2019. So I built this. Hope you enjoy it.