The games go on...

A really strange yet wonderful thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I work at a small software company in customer service, and as there are only ten people in my office you get to know people pretty well. I tried to keep things under wraps for as long as possible, but around the one year mark at this new job people began to realize that I was videogame nut. I was sorta worried that people would think I was some sort of man-child if they knew, but I guess it really didn't phase them. I don't really talk about it at all, but some of my culture references tipped my hand. Our marketing man apparently had played some of the same PC games that I had and we had a few good conversations about Doom and Master of Magic. What happened about a year later really blew my mind.

I was talking shop with him one day and right out of the blue he told me that one of his best friends had recently died, a man he'd known since high school. I offered condolences and gave him space to talk but he didn't tell me much more than that about him. What he did tell me was that his widow had met up with him a few days back and gave him a cardboard box full of computer games. Like... fifty computer games. I really didn't know where this was going at this point, so I just nodded at him. The widow knew that he was into PC games like her late husband and she was aggressively donating/selling/moving his things in an attempt to move on, so in that fashion they passed to him. He then said that he wanted me to have them.

Now all of this happened in the space of a little more than a minute so I was sort of stunned. It isn't everyday that someone offers you something a dead person owned once, let alone computer games. When you think of the things people leave behind you imagine clothes or watches, perhaps a baseball glove or tool set. I don't think that any one imagines a copy of Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield on CD-ROM. Now I'm not saying that these games were his prized possessions or anything, but seeing as how irrational I get when it comes to games perhaps I assigned extra meaning to the gesture. I was floored.

I told him that they were his and that was what the widow wanted. He explained that he didn't have time for them now that he has two children. He kept coming back at me and I kept trying to put him off. I felt really uncomfortable about it. In a part of my mind all I could think was, "I really don't deserve this stuff, it's not his fault what happened to him and everything. Why should I profit?" The next week he walked in with the box and talked me down out of my tree. It got a little easier when I saw some of the titles in there, I must admit.

Better than that though, the discs were in near perfect condition and everything had it's codes and documentation. He had taken better care of his PC games than I ever had apparently. He left me alone with the box and I went over them during my lunch. I left a lot on the table but with what was in there I couldn't take them all without feeling really skeezy. Here's what I came home with...

-Hearts of Iron
-Half Life 2
-Black and White
-Age of Empires II
-Sid Meier's Pirates!
-Rainbow Six 3 + Athena Sword Expansion
-Civilization IV
-Return to Castle Wolfenstein
-Axis and Allies
-Warcraft III
-Rise of Nations Gold Edition

Listing them all here just makes me feel like I was cherry picking after the fact. I guess I was, but I was told to! The other part of it all is it reads like a list of the PC games I would have bought over the last six years if I wasn't throwing money at my consoles. It's just amazing. I'm playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein right now and it just feels so strange that this man I never met went down all the same hallways and twisty labyrinths I am in right now, except he didn't really. Neither am I, but he did, and now he's gone and... I'm not sure what to think about it all, but I know what I want to say about it. Thanks a million, man!