I have a lot of game consoles. Other than the games themselves, the biggest part of my collection is the endless amount of controllers I have gone through. 

It’s an actual problem, and I don’t know what’s keeping me from just getting rid of some of them. Half of them are broken, or have some issue or another. Hell, I don’t even know which ones do work most of the time. 

I even moved states and didn’t bother going through all of my Xbox One/Series X controllers before I packed. I just threw the whole pile into a box, and they now sit inside a cube of my tv stand, an accidental graveyard of memories.

To be fair, two of them are Gears 5 controllers that I can’t part with; my Gears of War 4 controller is still my daily player. I know one works, but the other one someone spilled apple juice on and I’m determined that a deeper clean can still bring it back from the dead. At the very least, it can go on my Gears of War shelf as a display.

Two of my Xbox One controllers have had mishaps with spills—not just the previously mentioned one. Some of them are just dusty and have sticky buttons. The non-Gears controller I think I actually did try to fix, to no avail. It sat on my shelf as a reminder to pick up a replacement before just becoming a museum piece with no audience.

I have an entire tote in the garage filled with cables and controllers. I’ve cleared a lot of things out over the years, but I know I have a mix of systems that do and don’t work, and more controllers than I’ll ever need. I’ve purchased aftermarket retro controllers to replace worn out gamepads, but I never remember to get rid of the broken ones.

At this point, I don’t know if I should actually start tossing things out, or just embrace the chaos and start a museum of broken accessories. “Here lies PS2 controller #14, it died playing the vs. mode in Star Wars: Episode III.”