I love the convenience of Steam. In this era of gigabit downloads, cloud saves, and the ability to resume a desktop gaming session from the couch via my Steam Deck, digital distribution is a marvel. But sometimes, I stumble across an image from the Old Days so potent it knocks me back in my chair. It 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.
(Image credit: Mestizoc on Reddit)
Posted on r/pcgaming this week, Redditor Mestizoc was cleaning out a spare room in his dad's house—describing it as "so full of junk I can barely get in there"—when he opened a closet and found the king’s riches. Maybe even 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. It’s clearly not a collection curated in the modern YouTube sense, where hundreds of games are hoarded to serve as a busy backdrop for videos about buying more stuff. This is 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, vibrant art.
A Delightfully Eclectic Archive
There is clearly no attempt here to own every "all-time classic." Instead, it is a delightfully eclectic collection that reflects a genuine passion rather than a market strategy.
Don’t get me wrong: Classics abound. The shelves hold heavyweights like:
- System Shock 2
- Quake 2
- Jedi Knight
- Diablo
But keep looking and you’ll spot the likes of Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time and Redneck Rampage: Suckin Grits on Route 66. The games belong to both Mestizoc and his dad, a retired Navy Senior Chief who is now in his 80s and was an avid PC gamer—and gamer in general—long before Mestizoc was born.
"The game that I loved the most I don't have the box for is Quake 1," Mestizoc shared. "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."
The Shared Experience of Formative Gaming
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 titles like King's Quest 7, SWAT, Phantasmagoria, and Dreamfall, all visible in the closet. His dad, meanwhile, preferred shooters, which also abound in the closet.
"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," the Reddit thread notes. "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 accumulating 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. 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 him on Reddit, and honestly one of the better moments of his life, was realizing the impact of that shared hobby. "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 memories preserved in cardboard.
