I’ve been a PC gamer for longer than I’ve been able to read. Thirty years ago was a wild time in my young life — the release of Wolfenstein 3D and Windows 3.1 meant new and exciting things showing the possibility of the future of gaming and computing.

For the longest time, I was stuck with whatever my hand-me-downs my father had, both in terms of games and computers. And that was fine! I loved the games my dad played, like Super Harrier VGA, Prince of Persia, and so many more.

A few years later, in 1996, a friend got a new, cool game: Heroes of Might & Magic II. I’d been to his house many times, playing Sim City and Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, but HoMM2 was something else. Even the coolest Blockbuster rentals for my SNES (looking at you, Super Mario RPG) didn’t have a hold on me the way the one more turn-ness of HoMM‘s formula did.

A couple months of having to call my friend’s house almost daily to ask that I be sent home for dinner led to a surprisingly amiable solution from my folks: they bought me a copy of the game I could install on my dad’s PC. I still had the same restrictions for when and how much I could play (actually, even more stringent ones), but the game was mine, and the box with the cool unit card and audio playable CD (if you skipped the first track) stayed in my room.

And I never got rid of it.

Over the years, that wasn’t always the case. A number of games that I purchased were sold, traded, or in some sad cases, even stolen. I will always regret that I no longer have my numbered original CE box for Red Alert 2 with the holographic cover that had to be redesigned after the game’s release, even if I did manage to hold on to the pewter Tesla Trooper.

All of this long intro is to get to the topic at hand: The Collection, capital T, capital C.

In the years that I’ve been a PC gamer, I’ve amassed… a bit of a collection of stuff. Inserts from games, big box classics, collector’s editions, little merch bibbits like statues and coins. A lot of it, MOST of it has lived inside their respective boxes, because they’ve mostly been in storage with nowhere to go. This has created a bit of what I’ve coined “box bloat”, i.e. the amount of extra space (both in square footage and volume) taken up by something in a box, versus that same something without all the extra packaging.

This year I was fortunate enough to buy my first home, and a previous owner built a cool office space into an extra room; while at first I lamented giving up the desk I’d used for more than a decade and a half, I soon came to take solace in the awesome cherry bookshelf that was built in to said desk space. Finally, I could display all my cool nerd stuff!

However, there was a lot of work to be completed.

I’ll open up with the final results, since I know that’s more compelling and exciting than the process, but I welcome you to continue reading to see how I got there.This is +almost+ the final version. There’s some organizing to be done in a few places, and I’ve moved a few pieces around since taking this photo. The SPECIAL bobbleheads will be wall mounted on their display stand.This coin case will similarly be wall mounted, eventually.This has already been shifted multiple times — the in-world books and art books have been split across my bookshelves. I then changed it to be a “Cartographer’s Drawer”, as seen here:But I wasn’t happy with that presentation either, so I’m going to re-approach how I want to either store or display my collection of maps.

That said, the PROCESS of moving, organizing, sorting, etc… let’s begin!First step: get all of the stuff in one place.No, seriously. All of the stuff.

And that’s not even touching on the boxes I had to move trunkloads at a time:

Okay, I had everything moved over to the house, finally, although some of it in diaper boxes, old shipping boxes, old projector bulb boxes… you get the gist. I also had it split between the office and upstairs guest room, so it was time to consolidate everything into one work room. As we weren’t moving in for a few weeks, it was now or never. Get everything together, organize it, make some hard calls on what to keep versus be rid of, and GO!Alphabetical sorting & franchise grouping under way.The Elder Scrolls and Fallout chunks of the collection are obviously pretty significant.Hey, there’s that Heroes II box I mentioned! Spoiler alert: it survived this purge.For those who might not know, the case in the front there is the Hitman II (2018) Collector’s Edition; fun story: there was originally no plan for a PC CE for that game, until members of the community (including myself) participated in extensive (positive!) conversations with the devs and publishers about getting it made. Even then, there was no release of the PC CE in North America. I actually ordered my copy from France.Speaking of “you could play the audio tracks on the CD if you skipped the first track” game CDs, Total Annihilation was my introduction to the compositions of Jeremy Soule, who would later go on to score several The Elder Scrolls games and many more.I’m honestly shocked I don’t have a ton more Zelda stuff at this point in my life, since Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time are two of my top games of all time, but I’m pretty happy with the items I do have.The unboxing begins. I won’t bore you with all the photos from this process!So many boxes.Some Doom and a lot of Elder Scrolls stuff.A bunch of Fallout stuff, and the Kushan Mothership from Homeworld.Some Mega Man and Hitman stuff, and you can just see the edge of some Starcraft and Star Wars things on the right.Total War: Warhammer I & II CE boxes. I kept the contents, but the boxes went to a friend.Witcher III CE contents (the statue is out-of-frame, sadly) — I was a bit sad to get rid of the slip cover box here, but it was useful for waste disposal.I told one of my best friends that I feel like partway through this process, I began judging the CEs by how well their boxes accommodated other boxes and packaging as I broke it all down. I actually have a ton of pics of all the waste generated by this process, but I’ll spare you the majority of them.Another case I was sad to say goodbye to was the CE box for Dragon Age Inquisition. Unfortunately the outer plastic “leather” was already starting to degrade and the Bloat Factor was pretty high. I’d have reconsidered keeping it if the red inserts could have been removed, but sadly they were pretty firmly installed.The CE box for Total War: Three Kingdoms, however, is in amazing condition AND all of the contents of the High King and Serpent God editions of TW:WH 1&2 fit inside. I was tempted to keep those boxes but for the fact that TW:WH 3 wasn’t getting a CE, so, instead I’ll use this to store the steelbook etc. from III.This is a fraction of a fraction of how much Box Bloat I was shedding. Each of those boxes is overstuffed with other, smaller boxes, plastic packaging, etc.Starting to bring things down to the shelves. Haven’t (at this point) figured out what shelves need to be where, as far as vertical spacing goes.And, once more, the finished display. Well, mostly finished.

I will share details, a shelf by shelf, etc. in another post with updated photos, and a view inside the various cases & boxes that survived. None of them (save for Skyrim) actually contain what they did originally, and have instead been re-purposed as organizational tools for future displays, but the contents are still nifty. Plus I can do a section by section breakdown of the whole thing, whenever I manage to find the time.

Thanks for checking this out!

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