Category: Otaku

Boxes Of Fun

  • September 2, 2010

I just finished reading this book:

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It is a book written by Steve Sansweet all about his collection of Star Wars merchandise and memorabilia. Sansweet is a legend in the world of collecting (note: not just Star Wars collecting) and over the years since 1977 he has managed to amass a warehouse-busting collection totalling over 110,000 items.

He started with toys but quickly moved into other items (such as clothes or licensed food), feverishly buying anything at all that had a Star Wars license. He set up a large network of dealers and friends all over the world so during the eighties his collecting expanded to contain international licensed items as well. The collection grew and grew, and Steve became an expert on all things Star Wars. Eventually (in 1996) he accepted a position working for Lucasfilm and is still with them today.

The book doesn’t even attempt to showcase the entire collection, instead highlighting a subset (< 1%) of notable items. The photography is superb, but even better are the anecdotes and asides Sansweet has included about many of the inclusions. I particularly liked the chapter on food packaging, since he relates tales of spending day after day in an Australian hotel room stuffing large quantities of potato chips into the tiny hotel garbage as he was emptying the bags for the packaging. Or doing something similar in France, this time disposing of more than 80 different types of chicken product so he could collect the packaging. And so on and so on…

The scope of the collection is truly mind-boggling. This is a man that doesn’t just have all the action figures, but he also has prototypes, point-of-sale displays and every single variant including the ones you’ve never heard of (like the Bib Fortuna figure packed with Spanish toothpaste). Virtually every type of item imaginable is represented in the book, and there are so many times he states that his may be the only complete collection of that type that I lost count.

For instance, in 1983, Harper’s Pet Chow in Australia packaged tiny Return Of The Jedi stickers only inside their 4kg (~9 lb) bags of dog food. There were 12 stickers in total, packed randomly. Given the size of the bag and the random distribution, what is the chances anyone actually completed the set? Yep, Steve has it (and he thinks it is the only complete set in the world).

Many such stories exist in the book. One can only imagine the difficulty of collecting such items pre-internet but he somehow managed to do it. And he continues to this day. I may have imagined that his Lucasfilm job may have made the collecting much easier since he could just get the licensees to send him items but that is not the case, and he seems to have spent a great deal of time during the years the prequel films came out flying around the world amassing Star Wars stuff 🙂

A highlight of the book for me was being reminded of items from my Star Wars past, such as these Australian iceblocks:

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I remember eating lots of those back in the day. He also had pictures of ancient Australian lollipops and the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes from 1980 with cut-out Star Wars masks on the back (I can vividly recall cutting out and wearing a C3PO mask around).

It’s a great book, and I say that not only as a Star Wars collector myself. I think most of you would find it quite interesting.

Now… one of these days I need to do a post about my strange SW collection…

(The image comes from toltoys.com, a nifty site dedicated to vintage Australia toys… it’s worth a look if you’re Australian!)

  • Posted in Miscellaneous
  • Robert

All-Nighters

  • August 24, 2010

I can’t talk due to the endless whooping, so instead I’ll type! And what better thing to type when I’m sick than a brief history of the few times in my long and storied life when I have stayed up all night in the name of video-gaming.

Note that this list is probably not exhaustive, but I think it is close. I’m trying here to describe the games that for various reasons I played so madly they made me skip sleep!

Gauntlet (Commodore 64)

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The C64 version of Gauntlet lacked a pause button (recall that this was well before the days of game saves). I was pretty good at the game and could play for very long periods without dying. Eventually I noticed I could play more or less indefinitely, and so did just that over one Saturday night. I started after mum and dad went to bed and played all through the night, probably wanting to get to the dragon level or something like that. I was using the warrior. My game became a marathon and continued all the way to Sunday baked lunch, at which point mum made me stop playing to eat. At this point I had about 9999 life (the maximum) and had observed that since life decreased at the rate of 1 point per second I could just walk away from the game for hours assuming I parked myself out of harms way. I believe I could have played forever, but I have no memory of how I actually ended that game.

Alleykat (Commodore 64)

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Your guess is as good as mine as to what I found so compelling about this Andrew Braybrook game. The marathon occurred in about ’87, and I played the game from start to end many times in one credit. I had moved the TV into my room and sat on my bed playing hour after hour all through the night. Some time around this period I may have done the same with Ranarama but I can’t recall with certainty like I can Alleykat.

Shadowrun (Super Nintendo)

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Looking back it is somewhat amusing I never actually bought this game. In fact it is perhaps the best SNES RPG I don’t own, and this is what led to the marathon. You see it was a one-night rental (such things were common then) and I was apparently far too cheap to simply rent the game a few extra nights and instead vowed to beat it in the one day alloted. And I did, although it meant no sleep – not much of anything actually save playing the game. This was about 1994 if memory serves me correctly. (By the way, the SNES Shadowrun is a completely different game from the – also superb – Genesis Shadowrun, which I do own!)

Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (TG-16)

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The game was on loan from a friend (Vic Ireland, of Working Designs) and I discovered that I could place the character in a certain position in the mine level and the enemies would infinitely respawn. I quickly surmised if I put something on the attack button I could ‘farm’ them for as long as I wanted. This I did, and then went to bed (so this is not really all all-nighter). The next morning my character was maximum level, making the rest of the game a walk in the park. Somewhat of an amusing memory for me, this is.

Might & Magic 3 (Super Nintendo)

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Back when I did the fanzine, as luck would have it one of my readers worked for FCI. This was a company that licensed and translated Japanese RPGs into English. He liked my work and sent me the odd game or two. One day I was surprised to receive an EEPROM (basically the innards of a cartridge) of a half-finished M&M3 for the SNES. There was no save game facility so I had to leave the SNES on to keep playing. I went one step further and left myself on as well, playing for many hours on end through the night. I had beaten the game several times on PC so I knew various tricks and was able to get quite far in a short time, finding many bugs in the process. To this day I have no idea if I ever got a test play credit since I never got the final game because FCI went belly-up simultaneous with its release.

That’s it; a short list but one that has many memories for me.

Oh there have been other times when I have gone on crazed game marathons. These include World Of Warcraft, various Monster Hunter games, Angband and even (IIRC) The Great Giana Sisters (MMN and I played this well into the night one time at his house). But only the four games listed above are the times I can remember skipping sleep entirely in the name of gaming 🙂