The Guinness Book of World Records has certified a Texas man as the lucky fellow who has the largest video game collection in the world. Antonio Romero Monteiro has even the biggest of bundle fanatics beat with his collection of disks and cartridges dating back decades. In total, Mr. Monteiro owns 20,193 video games. That's a little under one-fifth of the total number of games that are currently on Steam, except this madman actually owns physical copies for most of these titles.
Texas news station WTVY reports that Mr. Monteiro found out the good news this past Monday from The Guinness Book of World Records. The longstanding collection of strange world records sent two people out to count Mr. Monteiro's video game collection by hand. There were so many titles that it took the two Guinness representatives an entire week to get an accurate count. The record page states that he officially earned his place in history on February 2, 2019.
Mr. Monteiro estimates that he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his collection with some individual titles costing several hundred dollars. This is no surprise to anyone who has popped over to eBay in search of some nostalgia only to find that a copy of Suikoden II or Starcraft 64 will cost them at least a hundred bucks. As an example, video game historians searched for years to find an NES version of the original Simcity, a prototype that was only shown at trade shows and was never released to the public. Such unique titles can end up at very high prices—and that's if the owner is even willing to sell.
The video game collection holds titles from second-generation video game consoles all the way up to today's eighth generation. While he does play some of the games—after all, how could you not?— a good portion of them remain unopened to preserve their value. He credits his "very patient, loving wife" with tolerating his hobby that approaches a level few people ever reach.
"I have some games that were only released in the Japanese market," Mr. Monteiro stated. "There are many, many unopened games."
What do you think of Mr. Monteiro's video game collection? Could you ever see yourself accumulating over 20,000 games? How many games do you own? Let us know in the comments below!
