When it comes to the corporeal state of games, most of us are pretty jaded; and rightfully so. Speaking as someone who only recently realized the emptiness of carrying around a bunch of plastic junk from apartment to apartment, I've grown to welcome the age of digital downloads and its inherent lack of box-lifting. I don't think I'm missing out on anything by not having a space-wasting DVD case for every XBLA game I have on my hard drive; and yet, certain things bring me back to the time of unbridled video game materialism that was the not-too-distant past. Since the conveniences of Gamefly, Steam, and the XBox Marketplace have entered my life, I've cut down the time I spend in brick and mortar retailers by about 99 percent. But on the few instances I leave the loving embrace of my apartment, I usually stumble upon an artifact of Gaming Past that's too good to pass up. And I can't exactly ignore the tiny, capitalist gremlin shrieking in my brain. He controls my thoughts, you see.
Whether or not I should be institutionalized is not what's important here; with this post, I hope to highlight one such recent incident of gaming archaeology--and I'm talking about the cool, fictional, Dr. Jones branch of this respected field. We've all probably stumbled across amazing finds at garage sales and flea markets, but my most recent adventure took place in the retail chain named Micro Center, the first word of which describes dignity level of the employees who work there. One of my buddies had to go track down some PC parts, so I wandered over to their video game section to discover something I didn't expect to see: an entire bin-full of original, shrink-wrapped Deus Ex boxes at the insane price of $1.99. Having never played this game was always a regret of mine, and the fact that a retail chain somehow undercut Steam was cause for celebration. So, after convincing the kind, middle-aged clerk that it wasn't necessary for me to give him all of my biographical information for a two-dollar purchase, I had a little--albeit, wholly insignificant--piece of gaming history.
Of course I opened it--this was no huge investment. After breathing in air that was straight from 2000 (it smelled like my teenage years), I shook the massive PC box to see what else it could contain: out fell two identical instruction booklets (I'm guessing this is why Ion Storm went under), a fictional newspaper insert to give a little more history about the game's world (stuff like this always justified those unwieldy PC boxes), and a survey card complete with the delightfully quaint question, "Do you own a modem?" I toyed with giving my postman something to send to a now-defunct Texas developer, but I decided my time would be better spent not abusing civil service workers. To my surprise, the untouched and unpatched disc from 8 years ago worked fine in my Vista PC; my ability to cope with slightly out-of-date game mechanics, however, seemed to be completely broken. I'm not sure what agent of Satan decided stealth in a FPS could be anything but a baffling ordeal, but I have a whole five weeks of uninterrupted freedom to find out.
Anyone else out there stumble upon any little treasures like this? The only other story I can think of is that of a friend of mine, who, at a local flea market, bought a copy of Chrono Trigger which was housed in a Shadowrun cart. But I assume that was simply the work of black magic.
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