While I do consider myself to be a collector of all manner
of Dreamcast related tat, I’m far from what most people would consider 'hardcore.' I do not have a full complement of any region’s library for instance, and while
I do have around 95% of the PAL releases in my collection, I refuse to pay over
the odds for the remaining few (mainly shit) titles required to call it a 'full set.' Furthermore, many of the peripherals and consoles I own are unboxed and or in 'used' condition – I generally buy Dreamcast stuff to play with it, examine it, record
its existence in an easy to digest manner and upload it here for people to enjoy…or
take it to events for other people to play with/destroy and cover in hand slime.
What I'm trying (and failing) to convey is that I'm not one who only collects sealed or mint condition stuff, and I'm not overly precious about stuff being kept in a nuclear bunker where radioactive dust clouds, sunlight or curious hands cannot get to it. Nor am I one who feels he has to collect absolutely everything with a Dreamcast swirl on it...and that's the point I'm meandering toward with this wholly unnecessary, rambling introduction.
One aspect of collecting for the Dreamcast that has
barely shown up on my radar until recently is the collection of white labels. I have been
aware of the things for as long as I’ve been aware of the Dreamcast itself but
collecting these PAL-centric preview discs has never really interested me for
some reason. For those who aren’t familiar with white labels, they were special
sample versions of Dreamcast games that were predominantly sent out by Sega
Europe to the press for preview purposes and – as far as I'm aware – also used
in Dreamcast demo pods in stores such as GAME and Electronics Boutique in the
UK. As I said, I’ve never really been very interested in collecting these
preview discs, but Mike Phelan included a very comprehensive list of them - complete
with serial numbers - in our recently outlawed collectors guide (you can still
download it for free here); and several friends randomly donated a selection white
labels to me over the last few weeks.
