5 Most Impressive Game Collectors

Humans have long since been fascinated with collections, whether it’s museums of priceless artifacts from around the world or sugar packets, people are fascinated by large collections of items, and that’s as true for video game collections as anything else. Not only do gamers like to have collections of all their favorite games or consoles, but they’re also very expensive meaning there is an exclusivity to owning it all similar to high-end luxury goods. So let’s take a look at some of the most impressive collections and the individual game collector behind each one.

Linda Guillory’s game collection has been recognized by the Guinness Book Of World Records, twice! The first for the ‘Largest Collection Of LCD Gaming Systems’, 1599 of them in total, as well as ‘Largest Collection Of Playable Gaming Systems’, for an eye-watering grand total of 2430 consoles.

Linda, who lives in Texas, intends to continue working on her collection, with the possibility of eventually putting the collection into a museum to help teach kids the history of video games.

Antonio Monteiro, also based in Texas, is the game collector who is the Guinness World Record holder for the biggest game collection ever at a staggering 20,139 games! It took the Guinness World Record team 8 whole days to count and confirm the collection!

The collection involves, among other things, the entire North American collection of games for the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PS Vita, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii U, Game Cube, Wii, NES, N64, Gameboy Gameboy Color, and Dreamcast as well as a host of older and less well-known consoles. Not only that, he has huge collections of games for other consoles, as well as Japanese games.

Michael Thomasson, who hails from New York, used to be the holder of the Guinness World Record for the biggest game collection, that Antonio Monteiro now has. At the time it came to more than 11,000 games! He used to operate independent game stores and so used his position to acquire rare games, keeping the games in the best condition for himself.

Needing money to help out his family, he sold his collection at auction. After 56 bids the final total was a whopping $750,250. Not a bad price for the huge collection. This is also not the first time he has sold a record-breaking game collection, having done it two more times beforehand, but always building his collection back up to be the biggest.

Joel Hopkins’ Australian game collection is a little shy of the current record, at around 17,500 games compared to the record of over 20,000, but he did hold the record for a while. What makes this game collector impressive is his focus on retro games, something that is much harder to get hold of and, oftentimes, a lot more expensive, depending on the rarety.

As well as the game collection, which is so large that he built his own warehouse to store them all in, he also has a huge collection of gaming memorabilia as well as board games and other gaming-related items, a truly impressive collection.

Syd Bolton, known as Canada’s top game collector, may not have had a Guinness World Record to his name, but his collection holds its own with around 15,000 games in the collection. Whilst not contacted by Guinness World Records, he and his collection did appear on the show, Extreme Collectors.

What makes Syd a particularly special game collector, however, is that he was also a video game historian and founder and curator of The Personal Computer Museum, where he holds another record, for the oldest computer to send a tweet, using Syd’s own code. Sadly Syd passed away in 2018, but the impact that he has had on the history of gaming and PC will continue onwards.