A man from Buffalo, New York now has the official world record for biggest video game collection of all time according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Michael Thomasson, 43, now officially has the record according to the Guinness World Records 2014 Gamer's Edition and the Associated Press with 10,607 different video games in his collection. Thomasson, who is married with a five year old daughter, teaches 2D animation, game design and the history of video games at Canisius College in Buffalo. He began collecting games as a teenager, when his grandparents bought him the now obscure Colecovision and his first game, Cosmic Avenger. Because video games for the console were hard to find, Thomasson first got the game one Christmas and then the video game console one year later, and the anticipation over getting to play the game caused him to become determined to buy every single he could find. The collector still has fond memories that that console after several decades and thousands of games later:

"It's my first love so it's sentimental...They looked good, they played good. For the time they sounded good...for the bleeps and blips of the 80s."

The man who owns thousands of games cannot afford to be choosy, so he has many games for forgotten video game consoles such as the Japan-Only Casio Loopy and the Apple Pippin, both of which were released in 1995. Thomasson also claims to have games based on cartridges such as NES and Super Nintendo games, laser discs, games based on VHS tapes, and even some put on to cassettes.

Shockingly enough, this collection is the third such collection that Thomasson has started. The first he sold in 1989 to pay for the Sega genesis. The second collection he started he sold in 1998 to help pay for his wedding. To build up his collection he stays on a $3,000 per year budget and avoids paying full price for games. He claims to buy on average around two games a day. The estimated worth of the collection is around $700-800,000. Interestingly enough, the world record holder says he does not have much time to actually play video games, and claims that he is lucky to play video games for three hours in a week.
Thomasson now claims that his collection has surpassed 11,000 items. The previous record for biggest video game collection was set in 2010 when Richard Lecce of Florida was reported to have 8,616 games in his collection.