Why I love collector's editions

I never used to get the point of a collector's edition.

A friend showed me his shelf once and I looked at it the way you look at someone's vacation slides, politely, with no real opinion, while quietly waiting for the moment when I could leave. He had statues taller than my dog. I did not get it.

Years later I do.

The way I think about it now is this. A gamer's whole interface with a game is the screen, and that's a strange thing when you actually sit with it.

The music, the visuals, the world, the story, the characters you spend forty hours with, all of it lives behind glass. You never touch any of it.

A collector's edition is a way to drag some of that out into the room with you. It can sit on a shelf and exist without you booting anything up. It stops being purely a memory and starts being a thing.

The thing that does it for me

Take Ys VIII. You get a map that looks like the in-game map, but you also get a journal supposedly written by Adol himself.

Sitting on the couch reading something the protagonist wrote is a completely different feeling than hearing his name in a cutscene. It's the difference between watching a show about a person and finding their diary in a drawer.

That's the thing that does it for me. It collapses the distance between you and the game.

Publishers, please try

Beyond the in-world props there are the artbooks and the CDs. This is the part where I have to complain a little, because publishers have gotten lazy here.

A lot of "artbooks" are now a handful of marketing renders pasted between covers, with a foreword nobody read on the way to print. The CDs are often a five-track "selection" of the soundtrack instead of the actual soundtrack, though the case will still say "Original Soundtrack" on the spine, because of course it will. (I see you. We all see you.)

But when a publisher actually commits, which is to say Falcom usually, NIS often, occasionally Atlus when they feel like it, the book and the disc end up being the things you keep going back to long after the credits rolled.

That's not a bonus. That's the game continuing.

The buying pattern

The buying pattern that comes out of all of this is embarrassingly predictable for me at this point.

I'll start a game, get two hours in, realize I'm too into it, pause the controller, and immediately start looking up whether a CE exists.

Sometimes there's nothing, and I have to grieve. Sometimes there's something but it's $300 used on eBay, and I have to grieve in a different way. And sometimes I find one that's actually available at a reasonable price, and at that point I'm gone. Wallet out, game paused, I'll come back to it after I've ordered the box.

The part I shouldn't admit

Tied up in all of this is the exclusivity thing, which I'd rather not admit to but which is impossible to pretend isn't part of it.

Knowing only a few thousand copies of something exist and that you have one of them does something to your brain. The smaller publishers like Limited Run, Strictly Limited, and Pix'n Love basically run on that brain chemistry, and I have given them a lot of money over the years to prove the point.

Why it lands

So yeah, I have a lot of games. Most of them are just games.

But the collector's editions hit a different part of me, and they hit it every time I walk past the shelf.

When I flip through the pages of an artbook and see all the rough sketches and the early character designs and the music notes scribbled in the margins, when I see the work that went into the thing I love, it lands harder than another save file ever would.

It's a small, slightly ridiculous celebration of a video game sitting on a shelf, and I am, completely, a sucker for it.