Video Games

Buying something for a gamer is one of those universally presumed simple tasks that becomes a lot harder when you find yourself in a shop staring blankly down a shelf because you don’t know what console they own, haven’t been told what they’ve already played and spent twenty minutes looking up whether that game in your hand came out 3 years ago and they’ve played since day one. Been there, done that, got the dodgy speeding ticket Terraria gave us*. Buying for gamers is hard. It looks easy if you’ve never had to do it. *don’t judge. This collection is us solving that issue. Every item in here has been picked with one eye looking at who’s getting it and one eye looking at who has to actually pick it for them because let’s be honest both are important jobs. We could list every big franchise with the latest release but that wouldn’t help the gamer who already owns all the stuff everyone thinks to buy first. Or the newbie who is still building up their collection. Or the nocturnal gnome playing Skyrim until the sun comes up. Or the gamer who wants something to blow away the kids minds this weekend. These are all different types of gamer and all have different needs. Everything we’ve included in here is things we love. Proper controllers. Games that will leave you thinking about them after you’ve finished playing. Accessories that have a use or job to do rather than toss-ins to bulk out a boring box. We play this stuff a lot and if you spend that much time playing games you end up with opinions. Loads of them. We poured those opinions into creating this list. Rather than trying to cover all gaming needs we wanted to cover them well. The worst part about getting a game for someone else is not knowing if you’ve guessed right. Sure you can pretend you don’t care when they shove it on the backlog pile but what you really want is to hand over that game or controller knowing you’ve scored a bullseye. Everything here we are handing over guilt free. Whether it’s that game they’ve been meaning to buy but kept pushing aside or the offhand mention of that tiny indie game nobody's else is going to know about. Trust us, we know. Gifts for gamers exist. You just need to know where to find them, and now you do.

Call of Duty

It’s easy to spot this type of gamer. They know the maps, they know the loadouts, they have opinions on what entries got everything right and what entries missed the mark, and if you let them they will explain all of this to you for hours on end. Finding the perfect gift for this person should be simple. It’s not. Licensed merchandise loves runway-ready garbage that looks great on a shelf in a warehouse and disintegrates when someone actually purchases it, and skating down the generic gaming gifts route of wrapable controllers and headsets too generic to even know what…

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Donkey Kong

You know the type. They see those red overalls and that barrel careening through the screen and they feel something instant and warm that justifies liking video games to people who don’t “get it” better than any explanation ever could. Maybe they grew up with DK on the big screen, maybe their girlfriend dragged them along to the movies and they fell just as hard. No matter how they got there, they’re not a Nintendo fan, they’re a Donkey Kong fan. Doesn’t matter that it’s just one franchise out of many that the company has produced. They love DK so…

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Elder Scrolls

Hi, you there! Yes you. There’s a good chance you know someone who’s named a cat Mehrunes or talked to a complete stranger online about the lore implications of Dwemer existence for three hours. Or maybe you are that person. Either way, it’s hard to find things to gift them that actually work. Most Elder Scrolls merchandise ranges from low quality to bland, and those who care about this series can smell gamerghoulft.printful.com/off at twenty feet. We put this list together because people who have spent hundreds of hours living in Tamriel care about it. A lot. About as much…

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Fortnite

Every parent that has shuffled their kids through the aisles of licensed character junk knows the feeling. You kind of get an idea, but you’re never quite sure what they want. Fortnite is a black hole that devours entire demographics. Kids, teens, heck even adults who jumped in a few years ago and never looked back. The issue is the licensed merchandise is massive… and most of it sucks. Chibi figures that don’t stay standing up. T-shirts printed with the wrong color. Items that look cool on a store shelf but seem designed to disappoint come morning. Well we didn’t…

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Game Boy

There’s a certain type of nostalgia that doesn’t affect most people. Not the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from looking at faded photographs. We’re talking about the stuff that gets under your skin; that sits in your hands and the feeling of a certain button being pushed and hearing a certain sound. The weight. The exact weight of something you used to carry everywhere as a child and then, for some reason, forgot about. The Game Boy does that to people. Adults in their thirties and forties pick one up and you can see something just click. That’s not the…

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Grand Theft Auto

GTA doesn’t fit neatly into the category of “Video Game Franchise.” It’s a phenomenon, a sentiment, a decades-long conversation about a collection of games that happened to revolve around one of the most important cultural landmarks of the last 25 years. If you love GTA you love it fiercely. You remember exactly where you were when you first booted up San Andreas. You spent three hours just driving around Los Santos when you had no storyline missions left because you couldn’t quit once you got into that world. Gift shopping for that kind of fan is easy if you know…

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Minecraft

If you have a Minecraft enthusiast in your life, you understand their passion for the game. Minecraft is their alarm clock and their homework (and that makes English teachers everywhere very sad). You don’t need us to tell you how much they love Minecraft. You want to know what to get them. That’s the problem with most Minecraft gift guides. They tell you what to get. They throw every Minecraft branded thing they can find into a list and call it good. We didn’t take that approach. Instead we curated properly. We only kept gifts that we’d actually consider wrapping…

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Nintendo

Gift shopping for someone with a PlayStation under their TV looks deceptively simple. Until you actually find yourself there, deliberating over whether they already own a given game, if their headset needs upgrading or if the controller in your hands works with which version of the console. Hyperventilate slowly. We've built hours down this rabbit hole. So this time we built the guide around doing the homework. We play PlayStation. Hell, some of us live and breathe it. That meant we were starting from a different place than most gifting guides will. We weren't window shopping and selecting items that…

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Pac-Man

There are few things in pop culture that have stayed around the way Pac-Man has. It was born in 19? ?, it looks like a yellow slice of pie with teeth but became one of the most iconic images around the globe. It’s something we consider alot when we work on a collection such as this. The easy route would be to take a maze print, slap it on a mug and call it a day. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about digging in to find those things that do the licence justice. Things that someone who truly loves…

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Playstation

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Pokémon

Pokémon ages with you. Not in some creaky childhood memory holding way. Literally. In the sense that there are adults in their twenties and thirties who still buy cards, still debate what starters are best, still care about a franchise that began in 1996 and hasn’t let go since. If you want to buy a gift for that person, or a child experiencing it for the first time, it can feel like your options number infinity. We wanted to change that. Not by cataloguing every Pokémon item under the sun but sifting through to find the things that are actually…

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Sega

Who is this collection for? Oh, we know who it’s for. They had a Mega Drive hidden beneath the TV. They can hum the boot-up noise from a Saturn better than most people can hum Journey. They still remember Sonic being cool before everyone told them he wasn’t and hey, they’re not wrong either. Buying for a Sega fan is incredibly easy or maddeningly difficult, depending on your approach. Consider us professionals who have approached it very scientifically and love Sega way too much. Sega has always held a special place in the hearts of those who grew up playing…

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Skyrim

Games come and games go. Skyrim hasn’t gone because for over a decade it’s quietly lingered in the background of people’s lives. It hangs around for so long that its managed to seep into their souls. We know them: the people who’ve done every questline. The ones who’ve modded Skyrim beyond all recognition then rebooted into a virgin game. Who’ve named their pet Rock’noll or whispered “I used to be an adventurer like you” without prompting at family dinners. These are our people and we say that without a hint of sarcasm. The problem is good gifts for Skyrim fans…

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SNES

Welcome. If you’re looking for gifts for a certain type of person, you’ve come to the right place. The person who had a grey controller in hand from a young age. The person who learned to read approximately at the same time as they learned the Konami code. The person who still speaks about select Saturday mornings with a hushed respect that makes you question what you were doing at that age. That person may be you. They may be your husband. They may be your mum. Either way they are here. Nintendo’s Super Nintendo Entertainment System occupies a space…

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Sonic the Hedgehog

There's a person out there. The kind of person who spent their childhood on a Mega Drive and never really recovered, in the best way possible. The kind of person that is no doubt hearing the Green Hill Zone theme tune in their head as they read this sentence. The kind of person who has opinions on which era of the games were best and will happily explain these opinions to you for hours if you allow them. This is a gift for that person. We care about this. Sonic merchandise is everywhere, and not all of it is good.…

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Space Invaders

Some people will notice a Space Invaders reference from twenty feet away. When they do, they’ll feel a profound and totally irrational connection to whomever created it. Maybe they spent their childhood feeding quarters into machines after school. Maybe they stumbled across the game decades later and fell just as enthusiastically in love. Maybe they don’t get stronger nostalgia than that feeling, but they know that row of aliens sinking lower toward your doom means something more than a coin-op from 1978. This moment. When popular culture and technology bumped shoulders and had some undeniable baby furniture. We built this…

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Super Mario Bros

Something about this plumber defies retirement. Sure most of gaming's eighties heavyweights are settled into their golden years now. Fondly looked back on but never replayed. Mario did something different. He never stopped. Surviving new hardware launches, grabbing new fans along the way but never losing the ones he had. That is why purchasing a Mario gift isn't like picking up some retro merchandise. You aren't gifting someone a memory. You are tapping into a franchise that is still going stronger than ever. Because this is the hard part. The merchandising machine that is Mario is vast and lot of…

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Tetris

Some games come and go. Tetris doesn’t. Since 1984 Tetris has been around and it’s not going anywhere else. No, we’re not getting nostalgic here. Facts are stars are shining in the sky. Tetris is engraved into the brains of a generation; of several generations. Everyone knows Tetris. When we say everyone… we mean everyone. So this isn’t a gift collection for bored dads and retro gaming enthusiasts. This is for the person who still plays it on their phone at 3am. The one who had their Game Boy Tetris cartridge rubbed hollow from overuse. The person who will still…

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The Last of Us

Some games come and go. The Last of Us is not one of those games. If you played it, you remember where you were when you played it the way you remember a novel that impacted you. The story. The world. The gravity of every choice Joel makes in that finale. It stays with you. This means that bar is already set incredibly high when you’re looking for something to gift a fan of it. Something that matches the quality of source material. And that bar isn’t low. With that in mind, we built this collection. Not with jerseyOfficial logo…

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World of Warcraft

Twenty years is a long time to love something. World of Warcraft has existed since 2004 and the people who play it are serious about it. They know their faction and their class. They almost certainly have feelings about expansions you didn’t know people could have about video games. Buying a present for someone like that can be remarkably easy… or impossibly difficult depending on how Warcraft literate you are. We are Warcraft literate. We live in this world too, which is why we wanted to keep this collection small. There’s already a vast sea of Warcraft merchandise out there.…

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