John Lewis is an avid collector of video games. He started his collection as a child and continued to collect games for over 20 years. In 2011, his home was burglarized and he lost around 600 of the games that were in his collection. Despite this unfortunate setback, John continued to collect video games, eventually amassing a collection of over 2,000 games and over 30 systems. Then on September 8 of this year around 7:30pm, a house fire started in his kitchen, destroying everything in his home, including his game collection.

John's collection ranged from the Atari 2600 to current-generation consoles. In the last two years, he started adding complete-in-box NES and SNES titles, including critically-acclaimed classics like Super Mario RPGSuper Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, and Earthbound. To put John's unfortunate circumstances into perspective, a complete-in-box copy of Earthbound for the Super Nintendo currently runs for about $850 on eBay.

We asked John if he was going to start collecting games again. "I'm not sure," he said. "If I start again, it's not going to be nearly as big. I'll get the games that meant a lot to me and probably stop there."

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Losing a game collection of such significant size one time is tragic enough, but losing a game collection twice is something else. "It's very painful," John said. Considering the sheer number of games John had collected over the years, no one can blame him for being hesitant to restart his collection. Super Mario RPGSuper Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, and Earthbound alone were worth more than $1,000, and since John had over 2,000 games and over 30 systems, regaining his entire collection would be a significant financial investment, to say the least.

Perhaps some charitable gamers will band together to help John restart his collection or better yet, regain some of the other necessary items that were lost in the house fire on September 8. In the meantime, the cause of the fire is currently unknown, so hopefully John is able to get some answers at some point.