Let me introduce you to Golfshrine.
Somewhat inspired by the likes of the Jurassic Park fridge, Twitter's Bee Movie collector, and that video store full of Jerry Maguire on VHS, I started collecting old golf simulators some years ago. It began innocently, with a few PlayStation golf games sitting on the "free with purchase" shelf at the local retro shop. But I kept finding cheesy old golf games at thrift stores, or in lots with other games. Soon, I started to eBay them. But the core tenet remained: nothing over ten bucks. Along the way, I began to really actually get into golf sims (to a degree previously not reached by me).
Eventually, I had so many golf sims that I decided, why not separate them on to their own shelf? So I did. And it got too big for one shelf. So I split it to a second one. And it quickly grew to be almost too big for the second shelf as well.
Some of the highlights here:
- SimGolf, from 1996, with two of the three original golf balls. I ordered a custom golf ball with my "WW Labs" logo on it (actually a set of 12 - no idea what to do with the other 10!) to fill the empty slot. (Not to be confused with Sid Meier's SimGolf, which is on the wishlist.)
- At least three versions of True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club.
- Every Sega Genesis PGA Tour Golf game (edit: as of August 2023, for real this time).
- On that note: I do have the Tiger Woods '99 game that has the hidden South Park episode on the disc. Yes, the pre-recall one. It kind of became a whole Thing.
- Almost every home console port of the Links series. (I'm missing the one for the Radio Shack VIS, but good luck with that.)
- Golf, for both NES and Famicom. And in clock form.
- ESPN Golf Presents Lower Your Score with Tom Kite, for the 3DO, in Japanese. Contains no game content and is in a language I cannot understand, so it's doubly useless to me, and twice as hilarious to own. The menu soundtracks are the chillest things ever.
- Virtual Hydlide being up there is in no way a mistake. I'll let @BadGameHOF explain why in their excellent and highly exhaustive article.
Always looking for more weird, old (and above all else, cheap) golf crap to put on these shelves. (And maybe more shelves.)
If you're interest in seeing more, Golfshrine has a delightfully old-style website at https://netizen.club/~wildweasel/ and I encourage you to leave a comment or possibly also a tip in the jar.
