I'm a bit of a pack rat, just ask my wife. I am, however, pretty selective in the things I keep. For example, I keep all the boxes to my hardware and software, but I do not keep most of the dozen or so magazines I subscribe to much longer than two months. This particular habit has proved quite valuable a number of times, particularly when I am selling hardware I no longer need.

The reason I bring this up is two-fold. One, I have a scanner that came with a slide adapter that a friend just happens to be interested in purchasing from me. This particular scanner is about seven years old. Had I not kept everything that came with it, including the box it originally came in, I might not have been able to sell it. Selling it gets it out of my basement and makes my wife happy, which is a very good thing.

The second reason I bring this up is that, while looking for the slide adapter for the scanner I sold, I happened across some true gaming gems from the days of DOS. For those of you too young to remember DOS, think of Linux, but without graphics. Those of you old enough to remember creating autoexec.bat files for individual games and having to know the memory address ranges required by your sound card will probably remember the games I stumbled across this evening.

The first gem I came across was Might & Magic III: Islands of Terra. I remember spending nearly a hundred hours playing one of the milestone games in a storied franchise. I also found a copy of the very first Alone in the Dark game from back in 1993. Back then, this game was ahead of its time. Heck, there are gameplay elements in this game that still hold up today. Clive Barker's Undying is the only other game I've played that had the same "jumping out of your skin" impact that I experienced playing Alone in the Dark.

Alone in the Dark also had a very clever copy protection mechanism. The game included a little booklet filled with images of objects in the game. In order to start the game, you had to correctly tell the game the page number of the object it asked you for. No StarForce, no checks for virtual drive software, just a simple question that could (at least then) only be answered if you had a complete copy of the game.

I know that I won't load and play my copy of Alone in the Dark. I have too many fond memories to subject one of my favorite gaming experiences to the harsh reality of today's hardware. While Alone in the Dark was a ground-breaking game in its day, technology has a cruel way of turning nostalgia into something far more sinister. I'm leaving my nostalgia safely tucked inside the cardboard box it came in.