Collecting Introspective: Finding Eden

The hallowed chalice is firmly within my grasp. The Holy Grail in silicon and plastic, filled to the brim with the most succulent of nectars. A font of youth, the waters therein infused with the spice of nostalgia that would surely throw me forcibly back in time. But as my lips meet the contents, the taste is strangely bittersweet.

I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that if one game was the catalyst that drove me into collecting it would unequivocally be E.V.O. : The Search For Eden for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Most folks who are out collecting have a ‘Holy Grail’ – that one game that drives them out into the frontier of game collecting. That signature piece that defines the hobby for them, the ultimate treasure in the chest of musty relics. For some it could simply be a great game, like Super Mario Brothers 3. For others, it could be something nearing unobtainable, such as a legit gold Nintendo World Championship. For me, it was E.V.O…

EVO
Hoist E.V.O. on weary shoulders.

So now I have E.V.O., what’s the problem? Well, when it comes down to it, it’s because I didn’t find the game but rather that I simply bought it. Now, I have absolutely no problem with eBay. I’ve used it to get hard to find games in the past and it is my only source of Famicom carts and Famicom disks. There’s just no market for that stuff here, so the independent joints don’t get it in. But E.V.O. was my raison d’ete when it came to collecting.

I held no illusions that E.V.O. would be hard to find in the wild. See, I asked for E.V.O. whenever the folks would ask what game I’d like for a few years in a row. E.V.O.’s distribution didn’t really hit my part of the globe or if it did it was a very brief stint. But for a long time we had difficulty with releases. I remember renting Secret of Mana a long time before it was in stores to buy. I guess I figured E.V.O. would be much the same, it would turn up sooner or later.

It didn’t. I remember my mother coming home one day and telling me she tried to buy E.V.O. from the one rental joint that had it. It hadn’t been rented in months, except by me, but they turned her away. This was not at my bequest, she just decided to try to buy the game for me like this because she knew I wanted and that I rented more than a few times.

Eventually that place did sell off all of their SNES games, but it was subtle and unannounced. There was one guy in high school who told me they were selling off their stock… but only after he cleaned up himself! I asked him about E.V.O., he didn’t buy it. However, when I went there to pounce on it… but it was already gone! I seethed! I had only been collecting for a few months at that time. I was not angry, I was incensed. At that moment I told myself that I damn well WOULD find E.V.O. and it would be mine and I would finally have it available to play at my convenience on an actual SNES. And the lucky bastard who got that copy of E.V.O.? All the power to him or her.

Is my appreciation of E.V.O. linked to nostalgia? Yeah. Most certainly. I still have a VHS I recorded of E.V.O. gameplay and evolution records because I started to think I would never have it. You know I even remember the aluminum door blowing off its hinges one super windy night because I was trying to finish the bird castle area of E.V.O… I rushed out of the house in a hurry before the return deadline and forgot to close it properly. Weird how you associate stuff like that.

So dudes and dudettes, I was dead set on buying E.V.O. at a flea market, a garage sale, an independent shop – wherever. I had visions of digging through a musty old box of assorted junk to find the glowing treasure at the bottom. I had visions of walking though the tangled masses and looking at a flea market table and there in the middle of a pile of insipid 90’s mascot cash-ins would be E.V.O.

Bizarro SNES Store
You know, if most store displays listed their SNES titles like this instead of the inverse… in my dreams XD.

Then we would run through a field of daisies in slow motion and embrace. Together at last.

Alright, I’m exaggerating of course. But the point is that E.V.O. was going to be special. It was the game that was denied to me, that I never stopped looking for. So it really is sobering to hold the game in my hands and know that I merely clicked my way to my buried treasure. I didn’t dig it up.

I guess what it came down to for me was that like many things, it was all about the journey and not the destination. Not so much about finding Eden, but the search for it. I’ll still go to fleas and thrifts and shops with relative frequency to see if there are any diamonds in the rough. It’s like if I had a sweet hat and a whip, I would be all about the treasure hunting. This is how I defined my collecting. It’s why I’ve never been very prolific about using online services for domestic releases. My enjoyment was from the hunt itself.

But man, E.V.O… It’s an animal all of its own. That game was so formative for me creatively and in regards to taste. It laid the groundwork both for my collecting and firmly entrenched my heart and preferences in a pit of obscure and unique titles. It was a good game about prehistory at a time when I was all about dinosaurs. It had a subversive tongue-in-cheek narrative that was firmly entrenched in its own mythology but was not afraid to take a poke at itself. It’s kind of sweaty to place a great deal of importance on a plastic rectangle, but a lot of folks has that one game or item that is ultimately definitive. That they really do place a great deal of importance on.

I’d been toying with the idea of picking up E.V.O. for a while now. Checking prices online, contemplating whether or not I really wanted to take that route. Well, I came to realize something I’ve known for years – that really, I will probably never find E.V.O. in the wild around here. I had only ever seen it to rent in one place, and any copies that were sold probably left the province via eBay. Ultimately, I had decided, it was pointless to chase that windmill because the chances of winning that battle were slim to none. After all, E.V.O. just isn’t there. But now it’s here.

The bittersweetness passed pretty quickly, and I shook with excitement because – hey, E.V.O.!

EVO circumstances
Collecting rhetoric adapts too.

See, the more I think about it, I’m glad to close the book on that chapter because my collecting really hasn’t been about specific games in a long time. I’ve kept it at a moderate size by generally only buying games I’ve felt were good or interesting. Or were extremely cheap or – admittedly – notoriously bad.

But more and more I started buying games I was simply unfamiliar with. Those titles that were either on “the other guy’s system” or that I had never heard of before. Collecting started to become more about discovering hidden gems rather than rediscovering known treasure. E.V.O. is a known quantity to me. It would be fantastic to find it, but the landscape and reasons have changed for me. I couldn’t see the point in depriving myself of a game just to make a point.

E.V.O. and Ogre Battle were the last two games on this frontier for me. With E.V.O. in hand, Ogre Battle is an eventuality. E.V.O. marks a turning point, I think, and I doubt I will have such an array of feelings the next time I get a rare game that I want very much. I’ve called a few games ‘grails’ in the past, but for me E.V.O. is THE Grail. I think I’ve chosen… wisely.

And you know, if I ever find E.V.O. in the wild I’ll still geek out. Hardcore.

Oh yeah, and how about the game itself? Well, I guess that’ll be the next entry.

10 Replies to “Collecting Introspective: Finding Eden”

  1. On the subject of the search and renting games, and the mystique that can come in acquiring a game physically–I am reminded of how I recieved a copy of Actraiser.

    I rented the game multiple times and I had brought the rented copy to a friend’s place, in fact, I had brought it to two different friend’s places… I guess I really liked it at the time. I biked home, with cartridge in case in hand. My friend’s houses were only a block away. And I happened to wipe out on my bike, only a few houses away from mine, flinging the game out of it’s case into the street. Before I could recover myself from the fall, a car drove by and over the Actraiser cartridge.

    I might have been worried about what kind of trouble I was going to get into for this, but as it turned out, the game still functioned fine but the rental place wouldn’t take a damaged cartridge back. They had my parents pay a low sum of $15 or $20 for the game. And I don’t remember being punished. I was surprised at how cheap they were letting us have the game.

    Maybe a few years later, I curiously removed Actraiser’s PCB from it’s grey casing. I think it’s still somewhere, in a closet among trinkets collecting dust. It would be a trip if I got that running again, even though it’s not in it’s cartridge casing.

    Anyway cheers. E.V.O is sick.

  2. I went and looked for it and found it on the floor in the closet. I feel compelled to bug my buddy again to borrow his SNES. I have a copy of Illusion of Gaia I have yet to play as well. Oof!

    1. Just don’t drop the SNES into the road then :P. That’s a great story and it’s memories like that that cement certain things to our favour. That’d be cool if you could get that sucker working again.

  3. “Collecting started to become more about discovering hidden gems rather than rediscovering known treasure.”

    I like that quote and agree with it. It’s a better way of collecting, methinks.

    I actually tried E.V.O. a few years ago. Never beat it, but it was good. I can’t remember if you mentioned it that made me try it or not. Anyway, I think I’ll try another play through, this time beating it, hopefully.

    Aquas, that sucks. I biked home once after renting a game and it was in my hand. It was Hexen 64, and fortunately I never dropped it, but it was on my mind to be careful with it on the way home and that was something I was a bit nervous about.

    1. Well man I would really surprised if EVO didn’t come up in a convo with me at least one or ten times XD. I rented Hexen a couple of times on get-togethers actually. We used to like just putting in the codes and jumping around worlds laughing at the stiff jumping animation and generally just not really playing the game.

  4. Congrats on the acq at long last, homie 🙂 I dunno if I have any such profound ‘grail’ left to get. I think my most wanted is Bionic Commando on original Gameboy (not Elite Forces for GBC which I have already) but it’s nothing like that intense. I think I have similar anxieties relating to game completion rather than collection. For instance, LoZ1 is my favorite game of all time. I have never played the 2nd Quest through to completion and I’m honestly afraid to, because where will my gaming life go from there? Downhill is the only way. Nothing will top it for me, the heady combination of nostalgia/formative influence, raw challenge and timelessly perfect gameplay.
    But back to EVO I agree it is an absolute ‘personal classic’, I enjoyed it always when I had a chance to play it and I would certainly be glad to own a copy!! I think it’s underrated as a co-operative game. It’s really fun to play with others. An odd thing to say but in the SNES era, at least among folk I knew, it was not uncommon to take 1P games in turn to max out progress in a rental title, especially on an all-nighter – and let’s face it, most games were rental due to prices and/or rarity.
    With a game like EVO, with big stretches of grinding (never tedious because of the evolutionary gains you make being such a motivator), it was a natural fit to take it in turns while the other player(s) could get on with other life matters (homework, supper, etc). Then you could grind on minor prey until it was time to consult your co-pilot(s) regarding evolution choices. And you’d certainly never do a boss encounter without all hands on deck! And the player for those occasions would almost always be the Prime, i.e. the person who had rented the thing in the first place. Only fair 🙂
    …Bit of a long comment but you triggered off some good memories 🙂 Cheers! And Happy Easter!! OP

    1. I’m going to touch on the particulars of EVO’s gameplay and especially the grinding when I write an actual look at the game. But that’s a neat perspective. EVO’s grind only becomes a chore at one point of the game. Then once you get the required part, the rest is gravy.

      I can understand the anxiety there. I guess the biggest for me is Solstice which I’ve promised myself I’d beat going on 5+ years now. And this is a game I rave about quite often. I’ve resolved to clear it this year though. Nothing on the order of LoZ second quest though because I’ve only had Solstice for those 5 or so years. It hasn’t reached that point, not going to let it :). But it is definitely a closet skeleton now.

  5. I just wanted to say getting this game was my own search for eden literally. I’m still trying to get a manual in good quality for the original, but my 3-piece set is nearly complete ! Loved your story, was very much like my own!

    Oh the purple yeti…how pissed she made me back in the day.

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