Cataloging My Software Collection 

"Where'd you get those bookshelves?".... "The past". Excellent.

While Microsoft wanted people to use Me at home and 2000 for business, there were plenty of us that used 2000 at home anyway. A friend of mine worked at Microsoft on the windows team back then, and let me buy a copy in the employee store and he tried to convince me to get ME, but I explained that I was a Computer Science major (at the time) so I needed 2000. Most “computer people” knew that you couldn’t boot into DOS mode anymore on ME, so we just kept using 98SE. I dual booted 2000 and 98SE while in college so I could play older games easier.

The Asperger's in me absolutely loves your desire and dedication to catalog all of your software.

The Red Alert 2 Collectors Edition is the only way to get both the RA2 OST including the tracks that aren't in the game, as well as one of the pewter figurines of either a Tesla Trooper or a Chrono Legionnaire. RA2 is my favorite video game of all time, so that version of the game is something I'd love to get my hands on, but they are not common. Even just pieces of it have been worth my time on ebay. As for Windows 2000, it was the OS of choice for all of the computers in my middle school, as well as my home computer for about a year between ME and XP, so I've got nostalgia for it. And I know I wasn't the only one running 2K at home. Who knew someone else had Robot Arena??? Seems most people only know or played the sequel.

your enthusiasm and passion for this is infectious! Thanks for doing what you do and thanks for being one of the most genuine and coolest people on youtube!

I'm not sure why you think people have "false nostalgia" about Windows 2000. Maybe it's due to your age, but as someone who was already an adult even before Windows 3.1 came out, I can assure you that a LOT of more technical people did in fact use Windows 2000 as a home operating system, and at the time it was considered more reliable for games than Windows 98 or ME. Many people even stuck with it for a while after XP was released.

39:17 Man I haven't seen or thought about that Mutant Penguins "egg kick" graphic one single time in 25 years and as soon as you showed it memories of the magazine ad came rushing back. Unbelievable how our brains can recall this stuff 😄 Thanks so much for sharing.

:D I'm stoked and surprised that my old copy of Linux could be of use in this way! Haha, cheers dude!

the nostalgia thing towards Windows 2000 comes from europe as here home computers came with windows 2000 at the time for some reason and i have never seen a desktop pc here that has the Windows ME sticker or COA on them only Windows 2000 / NT 4.0 OR windows 98/SE stickers and COA s for some reason

I love the cut to the globe. The pride of my collection is a small box copy of Myst V: End of Ages that was a limited release in the PAL regions. It looks and folds open like a book. No plastic.

Now that's gotta be a lot fun, thanks for your time and enjoy the holiday.

As someone with fully correct nostalgia Win2K was really good after a few service packs.

I still have some of my big/small box collection, but it's been shipped around a lot and kept in a crate; my folks never thought much of it so while I was away it's taken a beating over the years. Glad to see this stuff being preserved and cataloged.

I'm impressed immensely at your collection as well as your archival efforts here.

Amazing! Superb video dude - and what a great collection!

Everyone I knew ran Windows 2000; windows ME was only for people who bought pre-builts and even then you could usually upgrade your dell to Win2k. Win2k ran everything perfectly; all the DOS games we were still ran included. The idea that Win2k was not a home operating system is denying the reality of that OS. It was used by many, many home users; and it was awesome.

As we all remember the childhood games we played, I would love to see a video on what your childhood was like.

WRT Windows 2000, In the 90s I didn't want to use Windows 9x and bought Windows NT 4.0, and used it alongside MSDOS and Linux, even installed the NT DirectX Upgrade. When 2000 arrived it was a huge quality of life improvement (and showed NT was the way in the end) so I for one have good remembrances of it (better than Fisher Price UI XP)

This is very interesting to me. I am not a collector and this really shows how different the mindset is. It would be my personal hell to catalog all this and most of all I wouldn't even know what to do with the information- but you clearly enjoy having the data and it seems to make your collection more accessible to yourself so congratulations to you for having the collection, the space for it and the meta data to enjoy it!

My boy sailing past Master of Orioni & ii, X-com, Baldur's Gate, Myst, X-wing. . .every time I thought he was gonna stop on a game I like, he grabbed the one next to it. 😅

Well I am going to annoy you a bit more. I loved 2k at the time, it was the best Windows OS by far, other than W7 later down the road. Stable as a rock at the time. If all you did was game probably 98SE was probably a better choice, but if you needed an all around machine, 2k is where it was at. I suppose some people complained because it wasn't compatible with some software in the past, but XP was far worse out of the game than 2k when it was released.

I was taken back to the good ol’ days when you pulled out “Command and Conquer Red Alert 2,” when we had Dial Up and I’d call my buddy across town to play a session so we would hang up and attempt to connect through the only phone line we had at the time and something would always happen, then it would disconnect and the phone would ring. Getting broadband cable through Road Runner when I was in high school was as good as I thought it would ever get. Oh how the times have changed!

That HP plotter is in absolutely stunning condition, love it, so jealous!!

Nice video. I catalogued my console video game collection, but did just a manual data entry into a spreadsheet. Your method was way better and cool to watch.

Flashbacks to 1994! I worked at Egghead Software! Too many memories on that shelf! Thanks

Dude!! Recoil in big box form! I would LOVE one of those. Such a great game.

Win2k may have been intended for enterprise, but fr power users it afforded a better experience than ME; I had machines with both,

I didn't play a lot of PC games when I was a kid (had a PC running Windows 98, I'm too young to know/remember specs). Your collection included some that brought back memories: Lego Racers, Lego: Island 2, Toy Story (I had that same collection with all the games although we didn't keep the box). Very cool collection

Came here from the Hydro Thunder vids, but 13:19 specifically made me sub. There's been multiple times now where I've found myself 6+ hours deep in a google sheet because the dataset didn't exist and I had to be the one to compile it, so I felt EVERY BIT of that.

Great video, great collection...right up my alley 🙂

Awesome collection. All theses games were released when I was a kid. Some of the games remind me of great times. I am kind of jealous but in a positive way. You are a lucky man. Keep up the good work 😊👍

Police Quest SWAT was a very immersive game to play. Sniper training was not easy to do. You'll enjoy the game if you ever attempt to play it.

Glad to see someone is as crazy as me, I've been wanting to scan my entire collection too but also the manuals/inserts/all sides of the boxes, and then some minimal custom website to catalog/search it all easily. Bought a nice Epson scanner today and getting a bigger scanner from work for this. Wish me luck!

So funny I came upon this video today since earlier today I was zooming in on a different video of yours to see what you had on the shelves! 😆

Great collection. 👍🏻

39:51 „The DIG“ - a great late Lucas Arts adventure! Never played it back then but it’s still available on Steam for a couple of bugs.

I really enjoyed watching this video for reminding me how fortunate I am to not suffer from mind numbing OCD in relation to displaying and cataloging an extensive software collection. Really had a great time thanks for sharing!

Fantastic collection! A few games I played as a kid and did not see in your collection are Oregon Trail games, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, Skateboard park Tycoon (2001), Counter Strike.

Sweet collection, some games I recognize. Will see if I can find some my "old" games.

Love the mini VGA monitor. I picked up a 10" monitor NIB this year and it's super adorable.

I absolutely LOVED big box PC games. I remember looking through them for hours at Babbages.

so glad i found this channel

Regarding the non-upgrade copies of Windows 95: they do exist, but only as a floppy version. Most bought the upgrade version as it only cost half as much as the "full version"

I ran Win2k as a daily OS for years, went from 98SE to Win2k... Put off XP for a long time until I was finally forced to run XP. Win2k was a fantastic OS, there's no reason people couldn't use it at home (other than maybe the price?)

22:03 -- HA! I love that you have that bobblehead XD

Merry Xmas from North Germany 😀

Fox the Titus, and Prehistorik 2, I'm still chasing those on eBay, since years. There was a perfect condition (used) French copy of Flashback/PC, for 200 EUR, but hesitated and later got sold. Nice to see Croc there. Once I bought Destruction Derby2, perfect condition for a hefty price, it got damaged while being checked at the forwarder. I'm really glad there are people who consider those boxes a kind of art.

Hey just wanna say awesome video watched it fully in one go really awesome that you do this one suggestion i have is like have a rating for the covers in the wiki page to be sorted by, like must see covers or fascinating ones i wanna keep looking at all of them thank you.

I think you do it to share. We love seeing the old games. That falcon 4.0 and apache longbow were great memories, guess it was just the moment that makes them great. Had to use Qemm to help create a boot disk to play iirc

I've also gotten into boxed software collecting this year. Mainly programming tools and the OS's they run on. I've also got a bunch of different versions of office suites to try and give a flavour to the types of software that would have been used with / created by those systems. I've stayed away from Games because that is just a much bigger pool. It always surprises me that there isn't a ton of pages dedicated to "Box art for X". Especially by big companies like Microsoft that have archives and could just digitize all of that stuff and open a virtual museum. Like early DOS versions. There's the stock photo everyone uses with three different copies of DOS except I can only find additional evidences for one of them and even then I've never seen a copy like that for sale.

The German release of POD also comes with this great hardcover artbook. I also have the bigbox release of POD: Back to Hell, which is absolutely amazing.

Toonstruck is amazing! You really need to try it sometime.

nice, I was unaware of your PC game collection :)

Really nice wiki, love that you also added a picture for every entry! Btw I noticed a typo with the Ultima Collection, you wrote "Ultiima Collection". Just wanted to let you know ^^

This makes me reminiscence the good ol' days of computer lab software exhibition shelf. I am thinking of figuring out which one you own is the oldest by means of making a spreadsheet first and then rearrange.

22:10 I have or had one of those red phone-shaped games. I think it was either a quiz game or a 20 Questions game.

Nocturne is awesome.. Always wanted to see 'the stranger' make a return

I’ve been waiting for this one, wanted to watch the stream, but working in retail, I’ve spent the last 96 daytime hours in a supermarket 😫😂

Win2k was superior to ME in most ways, and if you really needed the legacy 9x experience, 98SE was way more reliable and stable. That's back when the "every other version" sucks rule wasn't supplanted by the continuous release cycle of the Win10 era.

loved watching this vid, saw lots of ones i still need...having that wolfenstein '98 box is a bigger flex than having the original releases, way less common lol. also 47:31 complete collection for zoo tycoon, the marina expansion, and zoo tycoon 2 also came in big boxes in the US, them all being sams club/costco releases

29:30 WipeOut has lore : ) (Not quite that much, at least not in the original version). OMG, Recoil! Hadn't thought about that for YEARS. Fun little tank shoot-em-up.

The Red Alert 2 Collectors Edition seems to be absurdly uncommon as best I can tell. I dont think many were made and the game is a beloved classic.

I have nostalgia for Windows 2000 because it's what was on my mom's work computer. I didn't have home internet yet, so being able to go to her workplace in the summer and go online was a real treat....before their IT policy got stricter lol. Also, I wonder how well the PC version of Croc performs. I really hope it gets a remaster too, one day.

Great video, like every video you make. Thank you. I believe you overlooked speaking about one aspect of the process, that is, the cropping of the box art picture. 🤷‍♂️

30:05 lol, Crazy Drake. That's an Earthworm Jim clone. Had it on a 1997 pirate games & shareware collection CD

I know it's not on your agenda in any way, shape, or form now, but I heartily recommend you to reconsider your position on reviewing games! I watched maybe 5 minutes of the first video I saw of yours a few days ago and immediately subscribed because I love your style. Such an undertaking may be better for a separate channel. I would gleefully watch such content. But no pressure. Just polite input. You do you.

800+ wow! I thought my collection of around 220 or so big box titles was pretty impressive!

And here I was thinking he wasn't much of a Big Box guy! Incredible collection. I think your coolest box is definitely Croc, followed closely by Glover! Thanks for the great video.

Actually never saw Windows Me in the wild back in the day. But all my friends and parents had 2000 installed =D

cool video. i pretty much do the same but offline with libreoffice calc instead. i record all my pc games, demo discs, and pc gamer magazine issues. plan on archiving eventually but it's quite the effort

Thanks for sharing! Very cool collection!

We need to get you a copy of chex quest! That one had an awesome big box lol

That was awesome to see Half Life 3 you have boxed there! 😉

Ooohhh boy that is quite the under taking. I am currently using an app that you can scan the product serial number on the package. It works most of the time. It has been real convenient you can add custom tags. I was running into a problem I would go to the thrift store back when you could find pc games seems that we all have hoarded them all now. Anyway I would find that I would get home with my bag of purchases and find that I already had copies. So I mainly use it to reference my collection when I am shopping. My collection has crested at over 600 games at this point. I don't care about big boxes I have limited space so my collection is largely just jewel cases. A large amount of small dvd box cases and a small amount of big boxes. I am waiting for my latest ebay pickup alone in the dark 1-3 a big box complete copy. Anyway I love my old PCs I love play these old games from my childhood. The best part is I had subs to pc gamer and cgw back in the day and just finding a game in the wild that I remember reading about or seeing an ad. Now being able to bring it home and install it on a pc that I couldnt have even dreamed of as a kid. It just hits so hard. I am torn at this point I dont have a pure dos machine and have a mobo with a pentium 3 just need ram power supply and sound card. And I want to get the marathon trilogy but I am going to need a mac. Anyway Happy collecting btw my favorite video was the 4 screen doom.

Command and Conquer is amazing, and the collectors edition has software included that's unlocked and decompilable with debug code.

Having them cataloged makes it incredibly easy to pull them out when doing research. Ask me how I know ;-) Glad you came up with a system that works for you. It will also help when you decide to sell off or donate items that you don't want any more.

Raptor is such a good game!

I know the feeling my bro and I are planning on doing another theme month in March . Morphin to March will be our theme month in 2024 . Aside from western month we do every April .

I had no idea there was a boxed edition on The Stanley Parable. That would be awesome. Would also love to have a copy that isn’t tied to Steam, so I can still install it on Win 7 in 10 years.

Thanks for sharing! I've always been curious about what is lurking behind you in the rest of your videos. I would really enjoy a closer look at the Roland Virtual Music Tutor and Disney SoundSource stuff. I've always been fascinated by it!

didnt know there was a stanley parable pc box wow it looks so cool 😭

I have nostalgia for windows 2000 - windows me sucked SO BAD, we bought windows 2000 instead (my school was on windows 2000, and so were my parents offices ... we knew it was better than ME)

I was actually looking into using Tellico for a collection of something, but they didn't have an option for what I wanted and I gave up making a custom category. Ended up just using Google Sheets XD

would like to know how to set up the barcode reader :O and is there a template of the google doc ?

Wow even the cameras works with Microsoft Windows such as 10 and 11 entangle will work on Microsoft windows 10 and 11 and you can get a sealed copy of windows 10 and windows 11

I have a Don Bluthe Space Ace and Dragons Lair I and II stand up game that I bought from WayFair. It had a problem so they sent me another one to replace the bad one. Its something you have to put together.

I moved from PA to AZ in September and trashed a shitload of big box PC game boxes. Kinda annoyed I did that since I love collecting retro gaming things and would have been cool to have put in my display...but I was limited on space and had to pick and choose what to get rid of.

Watching you go thru the boxes on the shelves... Ohh NO! Make it stop, my OCD is running amok! Haha, please put the boxes facing the same way in the future.😉😊

During the high speed run I instantly recognized those brown vinyl 3 ring binders for the TRS-80. My first PC was a 4P that my BIL gave me. I remember an old catalog with the 4P in it, it had a picture of a man in business suit carrying it, like a piece of luggage. I believe the ad said something like "Only 26 pounds!" Also instantly spotted the Paint Shop Pro 7 on the shelf which I still use nearly daily. Has most of the functions as my Photoshop Elements has and less tool clutter. I tried PSP X but it sucked and went back to 7. Do you have a wishlist of software and hardware?

Turbolinux 6! I have that too.

Wow, did that bring back memories. I especially liked seeing Skynet pointed out; one of my favorite FPS games. I'll definitely be perusing the Wiki page for more blasts from my past. Sure wish I could play those again. Thanks for sharing.

Man, I used NT 4 and Windows 2000 at home, Me was crap!

Holy shit... Dude has Red Alert 2!? Magnificent!!

Although this method is awesome and gives you total control, for someone with a smaller collection (or just wanting way less hassle) I'd recommend CLZ Games. It's an app for your phone which uses the camera for scanning barcodes and automatically pulls up and adds the games to the database. I've around 1000 games and have been using it for like 6 or 7 years now. Must say though, my collection is 99% console stuff; not sure how the app would react to obscure PC software. That said, on some occasions when scanning a console game barcode it won't pull anything up, but you can just add it manually from a list of suggestions or simply create your own entry linked to that specific barcode. Pretty neat. Back when I bought it it was like 10€/$, now the've switched to the dreaded subscription model, which is a shame. Still, for someone wanting an easy hassle free method can't think of anything better.

Wow, 800 games! That's very impressive.

sound source has an amp inside it, so it's gonna have some caps. edit: I think a buffer chip too, that times the covox style input?

interesting to see a box copy of mandrake linux. thats what got me into linux in 2002.

I'd like to see a video on the Roland Visual MT B)

Looking at the wiki, it seems like there's either intentional misspellings or mistakes on the naming, like Scrable instead of Scrabble.

Very nice video! I too am archiving my own Big Box PC Collection! A majority of which (98%) are North American PC/IBM PC Games but decided to use Instagram as my own personal archiving platform but also keep them and the pictures archived on my NAS storage drive! I'm currently in the mid 400's but have about 2500 Big Box PC Games to archive! I only do small bits here and there throughout the week since it really is a large amount of work, so kudos to you!