Best collectable PC games?

[Exhuminator]

But keep the good suggestions coming guys, I appreciate them.

Man I have a crate in my dork cave closet full of all kinds of PC goodies obtained since the 80s. I'll tell you about the first three things that came to mind:


The original Baldur's Gate II manual was amazing. It was a bound manual that consisted of a ridiculous amount of pages. The craziest thing is that about 75% of the manual is just super detailed spell descriptions for each spell in the game. That's right, you can spend an evening doing nothing but reading about tons of spells in intimate detail, without ever even having played the game to try them out.


The original The Secret Of Monkey Island came with this codewheel. It was a form of anti-piracy that was used at the time. Except Monkey Island's was actually amusing instead of just being annoying like others were.



My most prized PC extra is a map from the Elder Scroll's Redguard game. This is no ordinary map. It's been burned, pre-burned. Here's the story:

"When we made Redguard, back in 1998, I decided we needed a map for the game. We had a nice island that could be done, and I knew this was something that would make players happy and feel more a part of the world. So we made this old looking heavy paper map that felt very authentic. But when it came back from the printers, it looked, well, new. Too new. So I set mine on fire. And kicked it around the parking lot. Now it looked authentic. Miraculously, I convinced our President to let me set them all on fire. Yup, we put all the folded maps on a few giant palettes, took a blow torch, and burned the facing edge of all the maps. Anyway, if you bought an early copy of Redguard, you have an official "burned by Bethesda" map. We did get a few complaints from boxes smelling like fire and the ashes from the map getting on the CDs." - http://www.elderscrolls.com/community/map-making/

So yeah, I have an Elder Scroll's map personally burned by Todd Howard, the executive producer of Bethesda.

[Michi]

The original Baldur's Gate II manual was amazing. It was a bound manual that consisted of a ridiculous amount of pages. The craziest thing is that about 75% of the manual is just super detailed spell descriptions for each spell in the game. That's right, you can spend an evening doing nothing but reading about tons of spells in intimate detail, without ever even having played the game to try them out.

I found a copy of the Collector's Edition of that game not too long ago. I can confirm that it is an impressively mighty tome (that doesn't necessarily fit all that well in the accompanying box.)

[Tanooki]

I saw a Baldur's Gate II box that would probably have had that book inside it for a pretty cheap price at a book and music store in town here that bothers with PC stuff that mostly just rots on the shelf. I've got that EE version of th egame so the nice book is PDF'd for general use which obviously won't deteriorate but being so huge isn't fun to sort through either.


OK here's a challenge, and it's a bit off topic but I hit a wall on this. 1990 Christmas I got the first computer with a CD drive from Philips(magnavox) called the Headstart Computer, a 386sx16 which had all the best junk going for it at the time. It had many discs with it from learning, encyclopedia, badass copy of the Manhole(from the Myst guys) and then it had this wicked Games disc that had so many latter half of the 80s PC games from text based junk with kingdoms to goodies like Road Runner, Into the Eagles Nest, Skyfox 2, Infiltrator 1 and 2, Uridium and other excellent gems. I can not find the thing let alone how they named it. Love nothing more than to find that, buy it if it's reasonably cheap, and feed it to the DOS box.

[Gunstar Green]

Lazy Game Reviews on Youtube has a pretty bitchin' big box PC game collection. He does a lot of DOS and early Windows reviews as well as looks at a lot of "oddware," unique defunct computer hardware.