I love the convenience of Steam, particularly in this era of gigabit downloads, cloud saves, and being able to resume a desktop gaming session from the couch on my Steam Deck. But sometimes I stumble across an image from the Old Days so potent it knocks me back in my chair and makes me think, yeah, maybe I would still be okay with installing games from multiple CDs if it meant having a thick, luxurious manual to pore over in the meantime.
Anyway, just look at this damn closet.
Posted on r/pcgaming this week, Redditor Mestizoc was cleaning out a spare room in his dad’s house—”so full of junk I can barely get in there,” he told me via DM—when he opened the closet and found the king’s riches. Maybe better than the king’s riches. It’s the sort of closet the king would open and go “damn, I own all that?”
While there are undoubtedly far bigger big box PC game collections out there in the world, this one comes close to the Platonic ideal, for me. Because it’s clearly not a collection in the modern day YouTube sense, hundreds of games hoarded and turned into a busy backdrop for more videos about buying more shit. This is just the closet of someone who was an active PC gamer during the prime big box days, when games came on discs and were splashed with flashy art.
There’s clearly no attempt here to own the “all-time classics,” because it’s a delightfully eclectic collection. Don’t get me wrong: Classics abound. System Shock 2, Quake 2, Jedi Knight, Diablo. But keep looking and you’ll also spot the likes of Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time and Redneck Rampage: Suckin Grits on Route 66.
The closetful of games belong to both Mestizoc and his dad, a retired Navy Senior Chief who’s now in his 80s and was an avid PC gamer—and gamer in general—even before 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 classic PC gaming love
From that point on his dad would buy each new Sierra adventure for him, which is the way his tastes continued to lean—reflected in 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.”
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