A strit Begolli, commonly known as Polaki, is just an average video game collector like the rest of us. His niche is rare consoles and he boasts a collection of over 181 systems including some of the rarest and mostexpensive consoles, such as a Japanese Atari2800, a Taiwanese Funtech Super A’can andthe Tomy Pyutta Jr. Like many collectors, the44-year old is a family man with a wife and two kids, but this is where Astrit’s similarities
While Astrit’s impressive collec on is certain-ly worth an ar cle in itself, it’s the collec on of his youth and the way he played them that makes him stand out from most other gamer-collectors.
Astrit resides in Kosovo, a small European country in the Balkans, approximately 750 kilometers north of Athens. He claims to have the largest video game collection on in the Balkans.
Astrit’s rst contact with videogames occurred in 1982 when he was six years old. He remembers that the city where he lived had four arcades. Because he was so young and didn’t have any money to buy tokens, he merely stood outside the front door and watched other people play all the games. His parents began giv-ing him lunch money two years later, but he used that money instead at the arcades. He remembers playing the classic games including Pacman, Galaga and Phoe-nix. By 1990 he received his rst serious machine, the Commodore 64. Astrit loved the fact that playing vid-eo games gave him the phenomenal feeling of escap-ing from the real world and losing all sense of me.
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