On the subject of big boxes, let me tell you a sad story...

In my teens I was involved in a car accident and received a large £££ payout in compensation (which I promptly spent on 16/32Bit hardware, music, clothes, booze and recreational substances).  By the time I was due to move to Bristol to go to Uni I had a STE, an Amiga 1200 and a CD32 and hundreds of boxed games.  Deciding to spend the last wad of cash on a PC for uni work (and to play Quake of course), I left the aforementioned computers at home to gather dust.

Fast forward a few years (about 2000 I think) my parents wanted to clear my old room for my younger brother to use.  I came home from my place in bristol, loaded all my old stuff in boxes and moved it into the garage.  Two years later (following another house clearout) I get a call from my Mum asking what I want to do with all my old computers.  Completely detatched from the retroscene at this point, I told her to just dump it...

Now, years later, I'm still trying to get it all back!  I had loads of rare stuff in mint condition and complete with manuals - I used to buy poorly-selling games for £1-2 a pop from a warehouse clearance end-of-line store, and as we all know now, if a game didn't sell many copies they're generally worth a few quid now.  I also had all the big publisher games (all the Bitmap stuff and Team 17 games in 1st edition big boxes), original Core releases, Image Works, Krisilis, Melborn House, Graftgold, Hewson, etc. but also a few rare shareware and small-lable games too - especially for the CD32 (boxed Xenon II CDTV anyone?).

Oh well... I'm sure I'm not the only one who did this.  Anyway, that's the end of my confession - back to the original topic :)