I like the comfort of Steam, significantly on this period of gigabit downloads, cloud saves, and having the ability to resume a desktop gaming session from the sofa on my Steam Deck. But generally I stumble throughout a picture from the Old Days so potent it knocks me again in my chair and makes me assume, yeah, perhaps I would nonetheless be okay with putting in video games from a number of CDs if it meant having a thick, luxurious handbook to pore over within the meantime.
Anyway, simply have a look at this rattling closet.
Posted on r/pcgaming this week, Redditor Mestizoc was cleansing out a spare room in his dad’s home—”so full of junk I can barely get in there,” he advised me by way of DM—when he opened the closet and located the king’s riches. Maybe higher than the king’s riches. It’s the form of closet the king would open and go “damn, I own all that?”
While there are undoubtedly far larger massive field PC sport collections on the market on the planet, this one comes near the Platonic excellent, for me. Because it is clearly not a assortment within the modern-day YouTube sense, tons of of video games hoarded and was a busy backdrop for extra movies about shopping for extra shit. This is simply the closet of somebody who was an energetic PC gamer in the course of the prime massive field days, when video games got here on discs and had been splashed with flashy artwork.
There’s clearly no try right here to personal the “all-time classics,” as a result of it is a delightfully eclectic assortment. Don’t get me improper: Classics abound. System Shock 2, Quake 2, Jedi Knight, Diablo. But maintain trying and you will additionally spot the likes of Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time and Redneck Rampage: Suckin Grits on Route 66.
The closetful of video games belong to each Mestizoc and his dad, a retired Navy Senior Chief who’s now in his 80s and was an avid PC gamer—and gamer basically—even earlier than Mestizoc was born.
“First game I played was Pong,” Mestizoc shared. “We also had Tandy, Atari, Coleco, NES. Even had Vectrex. The first PC game I remember watching him play was Zork. It was only text and I tried it but I was way too young to realistically play it. The first PC game I remember actually playing myself and being hooked on was the first King’s Quest. Being able to control this character in a colorful world was so fascinating to me. He had to pry me off the computer I was so instantly hooked.”
More traditional PC gaming love
From that time on his dad would purchase every new Sierra journey for him, which is the way in which his tastes continued to lean—mirrored within the likes of King’s Quest 7, SWAT, Phantasmagoria, and Dreamfall, all visible in the closet. His dad, meanwhile, preferred shooters, which also abound in the closet.
“The game that I loved the most I don’t have the box for is Quake 1,” Mestizoc said. “I remember coming home one day and he was playing it. He quickly told me to come over and check it out. It looked cool but then he said ‘these are other people playing!’ and my mind was blown! … I still think and talk about my old clan Negative Burn often and hope all the guys are doing well. That game and those guys were a big part of my life at that time and I would have never experienced it if he hadn’t shown me and let me use his computer. He bought a new one and gave me his old one after that because I would not get off that game, lol.”
A few years ago, PC Gamer contributor Alexis Ong wrote about how instrumental the family computer was in shaping a generation’s relationship to games and technology. I think it’s more than nostalgia, to look back on that as a special time in the development of games and technology; being forced to share access to the house’s one affordable computer forged personal bonds that made those formative gaming experiences matter more.
A day doesn’t pass without someone posting some version of “remember this?” on Reddit, farming karma off naked nostalgia. But Mestizoc’s post nonetheless struck a chord, pulling in 20,000 upvotes across r/pcgaming and r/gaming and more than two million views. Maybe I’m romanticizing a little, but I think it’s because the big physical box was once emblematic of that shared PC gaming experience, and finding out that your dad essentially preserved the entirety of that era for the two of you to rediscover someday perfectly encapsulates how the most important thing about games, when we first experienced them, was the person sitting beside us.
“Seeing some of the people rediscover a game they forgot about, finally remembering the name of a game they thought was just a dream, reliving old glory days, or just showing respect for good taste in games. It really has touched me, I never expected this to blow up like this,” Mestizoc said. I had no idea what I had here and thought maybe a few hundred people would find it interesting.
“By far the coolest thing that has happened to me on Reddit and honestly I think when I look back at this in the future I’ll remember it as one of the better moments of my life. … Typing this out has really made me realize how much he influenced and encouraged my love for gaming. Even today when we talk it’s mostly about games. Without gaming our relationship would have been completely different.”
In one of the more surreal comment threads, a developer chimed in to say they’d worked on three of the games: Freespace, Starfleet Academy, and Redneck Rampage. In another, one of the Command & Conquer series’ lead artists chimed in “Not a single Westwood game. Why does your dad hate me?”
Command & Conquer: Red Alert wasn’t in the closet, but it was among the rest of the games loose in that spare room. After the Reddit threads blew up, Mestizoc sent me another photo, this time with all the games and many more piled over, under, and alongside a small desk. Full Throttle sits alone in a jewel case, absent its big box. More classics immediately jump out: Half-Life, SimTower, Thief. I spy more games an avid FPS dad may have bought and regretted (or loved?) in the late ’90s, like Sin and Mortyr. And sure enough, there’s Red Alert on the rightmost stack.
He may not have any new big boxes to show for it, but Mestizoc’s dad is still playing games in his 80s. “He just finished Subnautica and he’s currently playing Starfield,” Mestizoc posted on Monday. “He’s really enjoying it. Says there is so much to do in there.”