By the time I began purchasing the seventh generation of video game consoles in the mid-2000s — the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii — I already had a wiring nightmare on my hands. Even before I owned those three consoles I had at least twenty other gaming systems wired up to my television and ready to play.

You’re probably familiar with those old manual RCA switch boxes that allowed you to hook four different things up to a single television. To wire up that many televisions, I had eight 4-way switch boxes connected to a big 8-way switch box. All of these switch boxes were numbered and I had a cheat sheet mapping out all the connections next to the television. To play the Nintendo, switch box 1 needed to be on 2 and the big 8-way switchbox needed to be on 3 (2-3). The Super Nintendo was on 3-3; the Commodore, 4-1. The 8th 4-way switch box was reserved to those all-in-one joysticks. I had quite a few at the time and was constantly unplugging and replugging different ones in.

The only way to power this monstrosity was by daisy chaining power strips. I had a plug in the outlet that split the two existing sockets into six, all six of those had power strips plugged into them, and a few of the power strips had additional power strips connected. There’s no part of this configuration that would have passed any kind of safety inspection. Every time I left the room I was worried something was going to spontaneously combust in the middle of the night and burn the house down.

Unhooking all that stuff was a lot simpler than hooking it up, I assure you. After we sold our last house and bought our current one, all of those consoles, controllers, power supplies, power strips, wires, and switch boxes went into big plastic tubs.

That’s where most of them remain today.

The PS3, Wii, and 360 are all still hooked up. In another area I have a Retron 3 (that plays NES, SNES, and Genesis cartridges) and my Atari 2600 hooked up. To be honest, most of them are collecting dust (if it weren’t for Mason, all of them would be). Upstairs I also have my Commodore 64 and Apple II hooked up, but to be honest most of my retrogaming these days is done through emulation. Between the Raspberry Pi, the MiST, the emulators on my PC and the 60-in-1 arcade cabinet downstairs, most of the games I enjoy playing are just a click or two away. I never said emulation was better, but it darn sure is convenient.

I don’t know what to do with those tubs of consoles, so for now, they sit. I paid too much money to get rid of them, but lack the space or interest to hook them all back up. So, in the tubs they’ll stay for now until I can figure out what to do with them.