ESOTERIC TASTES
This collector’s hoard is full of interesting and rare oddities
BIO
NAME: Anthony
LOCATION: Chicago, USA
ESTIMATED VALUE OF COLLECTION:
Around $500,000
FAVOURITE SYSTEMS: 3DO, Neo Geo
FAVOURITE GAMES: Killing Time, Wattam
SOCIAL CHANNELS: @VideoGameEsoterica(YouTube), @videogameesoterica.bsky.social (BlueSky), @VEsoterica(Twitter)
PANASONIC FZ-21 (3DO M2)
“That took me over a decade to find. The only thing they used it for was elder care memory games, to help people in nursing homes better retain their memories, and for driver training software.”
AMOUNT PAID: $1,000
BUBBLE MEMORIES
“It is a Korean only PC release that is just a really bad version of MAME on the CD. I talked to a Korean collector and they said that these things got extremely limited runs. Never seen one before. Never seen one again.”
AMOUNT PAID: $5
This month’s collector has an eye for the obscure, as he’s best known for his popular YouTube channel, Video Game Esoterica – a channel that highlights lesserknown games across a variety of formats.“Growing up, my father just loved playing videogames. I watched him at an arcade when I was a kid, put a quarter into aDragon’s Lairmachine and beat it from memory on a 1CC attempt,” Anthony recalls. “He just always loved games, especially the arcade. Growing up, he would just show up with, ‘Hey, the Sega Genesis is out, I brought it home,’ or, ‘The 3DO is out, let’s go pick that up.’”