Man, you know you’ve hit that weird middle-aged point when you’re explaining to your students why I can still remember the exact location of every single Power Star in Cool, Cool Mountain but can’t figure out where I left my coffee mug fifteen minutes ago. There I was last week, trying to teach these kids about the Industrial Revolution, and somehow we ended up talking about the real revolution – those late 90s collectathon games that basically hijacked my entire college experience and turned me into a digital hoarder.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because my nephew got one of those Switch collections with Super Mario 64 on it, and watching him play brought back this flood of memories from Christmas 1996. I was twenty-one, technically old enough to vote and drink and pretend I was a responsible adult, but I spent three straight days in my parents’ basement hunting Power Stars like some kind of deranged digital archaeologist. My mom kept bringing me sandwiches and asking if I was okay, which… looking back, fair question.
See, I got into this whole thing through Sega initially – the Saturn had NiGHTS which had some collection elements, but it wasn’t until I borrowed my buddy’s N64 that I really understood what Nintendo was doing with Mario 64. Those 120 stars weren’t just random pickups scattered around; they were like little challenges, each one teaching you something new about how these 3D worlds worked. Back then, moving around in three dimensions was still this magical thing, you know? We’d grown up with left-right, jump-don’t jump, and suddenly here’s this castle with actual depth and verticality and secret walls you could walk through.
I remember calling in sick to my job at the local game store – yeah, I worked at a game store and still called in sick to play games, the irony wasn’t lost on me – just so I could figure out how to get that one star in Tick Tock Clock. My manager knew exactly what was up when I came back. “How many you get?” he asked, not even pretending to buy my “food poisoning” excuse. “115,” I admitted. He just nodded like this was completely normal behavior for a twenty-one-year-old. “The penguin race one?” “Obviously the penguin race one.”
But here’s the thing about Mario 64’s approach – it actually made sense. You needed 70 stars to finish the game, but those extra 50 were genuinely optional. They were there for people like me who wanted to see everything, explore every corner, master every challenge. Each star had its own little celebration animation, this satisfying musical sting that triggered some kind of basic reward center in my brain. I probably heard that jingle 500 times and it never got old.
Then Banjo-Kazooie showed up in ’98 and completely destroyed what little remained of my academic focus. Rare took Nintendo’s formula and just… went nuts with it. Jiggies, musical notes, Jinjos, honeycomb pieces – every screen was packed with stuff to collect, and it all served different purposes. The Jiggies unlocked new worlds, the notes opened doors, the Jinjos gave you extra lives, the honeycombs permanently increased your health. It was like they’d designed a game specifically to appeal to my particular brand of obsessive behavior.
I have this vivid memory of being on the phone with my friend Dave at like midnight on a Tuesday, both of us trying to figure out how to get this one Jiggy in Bubblegloop Swamp. We’re describing camera angles and platform positions like we’re directing some kind of tactical operation. “Okay, if you stand on the log near the crocodile’s left tooth and look northwest…” My roommate kept giving me these looks like I’d lost my mind, which honestly wasn’t entirely wrong.
The level design in these games was just incredible, especially considering nobody really knew what they were doing with 3D platformers yet. Banjo-Kazooie’s worlds were these perfect little puzzle boxes where every collectible was placed with purpose. You’d get a new move and immediately think, “Oh wait, I bet I can use this to reach that thing I saw three levels ago.” The backtracking could be annoying, sure, but mostly it felt like solving mysteries you’d been carrying around in your head.
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And then… oh man, then came Donkey Kong 64, and Rare just completely lost their minds. Five different Kongs, each with their own colored bananas, their own golden bananas, their own everything. The game had more collectibles than some small countries have citizens. I’m not even exaggerating – someone calculated there were over 3,800 individual items to collect in that game. Three thousand eight hundred! I made spreadsheets. Actual spreadsheets with color coding and completion tracking because the in-game counters weren’t detailed enough for my needs.
My girlfriend at the time – who’s now my wife, somehow – would find me at 2 AM surrounded by energy drink cans and notebook paper, muttering about banana medals and battle crowns. “This isn’t healthy,” she’d say, and I’d be like, “I’m just missing twelve regular bananas with Lanky Kong in Gloomy Galleon, it’ll take five minutes.” Four hours later I’m still there, having discovered that those twelve bananas required me to complete a mini-game I’d somehow missed that required precision timing I clearly didn’t possess.
The completionist drive these games triggered was genuinely scary sometimes. I’d dream about missing collectibles – not good dreams, either. Anxiety dreams where I’d discover some secret area in Click Clock Wood that I’d completely overlooked, and I’d wake up in a panic thinking my 100% save file was fraudulent. I actually booted up Banjo-Kazooie at 6 AM once just to double-check that I hadn’t missed an entire section of Freezezy Peak. The compulsion was real, man.
But you know what? The best of these games earned that obsession through brilliant design. Every Power Star in Mario 64 taught you something new about movement or puzzle-solving. Every Jiggy in Banjo-Kazooie rewarded careful exploration and creative thinking. When collectathons worked, they weren’t just meaningless busywork – they were guided tours through these amazing 3D worlds that developers had spent years crafting.
The problems started when developers figured out they could use collectibles to artificially extend game length without creating meaningful content. DK64’s banana collection wasn’t fun exploration; it was systematic grid searches of massive levels with arbitrary switching between characters. The joy of discovery got replaced by the tedium of completion for completion’s sake.
I hit my personal breaking point during DK64’s infamous arcade sequences – you know, the original Donkey Kong game recreated within the larger game, required for 100% completion. I spent six hours trying to beat the fourth level because the controls were just different enough from the original to throw me off. At some point around attempt number 80, I had this moment of clarity: “I’m a college senior with a history degree spending Saturday night screaming at a digital gorilla instead of writing my thesis.” I finished it anyway, obviously – the addiction was too strong – but something fundamental shifted that night.
My wife still brings up the “Great Collectathon Years” whenever I get too obsessive about something. “Remember when you spent spring break hunting Jiggies instead of going to Cancun with everyone else?” she’ll say, and I have to admit she’s got a point. Though honestly? I probably had more fun exploring Treasure Trove Cove than I would’ve had dealing with drunk college kids and overpriced margaritas.
These games shaped how I approach everything else, though. I became the RPG player who has to open every chest, examine every bookshelf, exhaust every dialogue tree. I can’t leave an area until I’ve seen everything, found everything, done everything. Sometimes my students ask why I know so much random historical trivia, and the honest answer is that collectathon games trained me to be thorough. When you’ve spent 40 hours systematically exploring every inch of a digital world, regular research seems easy by comparison.
The modern attempts to revive the genre have been… mixed. Yooka-Laylee felt like Rare trying to recapture lightning in a bottle and mostly succeeding at reminding us why we moved on from some of these design choices. But then Super Mario Odyssey showed up and proved you could still do collectathons right – hundreds of Power Moons scattered around gorgeous worlds, most of them quick and satisfying to grab, with the really challenging ones saved for dedicated completionists like my former self.
A Hat in Time nailed it too, understanding that the best collectibles are integrated into level design rather than just scattered randomly around. Each Time Piece felt earned, not just found, which is the key difference between good and bad collection mechanics.
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I’ve mellowed out over the years, obviously. Can’t spend entire weekends hunting collectibles when you’ve got lesson plans to write and teenagers to educate. But the old impulses are still there – I caught myself hunting Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild well past any reasonable point, just because seeing that completion percentage tick upward still triggers the same satisfaction it did twenty-five years ago.
Watching my nephew play Mario 64 recently was fascinating. He beat Bowser with the minimum required stars and then asked what else there was to do. When I explained about the remaining collectibles, he just shrugged and moved on to another game. Part of me was horrified – how can you leave a game unfinished? – but mostly I was impressed by his healthy relationship with completion. Kid’s got better priorities than I did at his age.
Maybe that’s the real legacy of the collectathon era. Not the hours spent hunting digital trinkets, but learning about persistence, attention to detail, and the satisfaction of thorough exploration. Those games taught me to engage deeply with virtual worlds, to appreciate the craft that goes into level design, to find joy in mastery for its own sake. Plus they gave me mental maps of colorful, imaginative places that I can still navigate perfectly in my memory, even if I can’t remember where I parked at the grocery store.
So yeah, I spent probably 500 hours of my youth collecting meaningless digital objects that exist only as data on old cartridges. But those hours connected me with friends, taught me about game design, and left me with a deep appreciation for creative virtual spaces. And honestly? In a world where most entertainment is passive consumption, there was something beautifully active about those obsessive completionist marathons. We weren’t just playing games; we were inhabiting them completely, learning every secret, mastering every challenge.
Would I do it again? Probably not with the same intensity – adult responsibilities and all that. But I’m grateful for those years when I had the time and energy to lose myself completely in these digital worlds. They were good worlds, carefully crafted by developers who understood that exploration and discovery could be their own reward. Even if it took me way too long to figure out that 101% completion in DK64 wasn’t actually worth the sanity it cost me.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
