Collection Thread (Image Heavy)

[MusicallyInspired]

Post pictures of your SQ collections! I recently acquired the CD version and boxed 5.25" disk version of SQ4. I also ordered the 3.5" disks on eBay and will be getting them soon. It's too bad one of them wasn't the 16-colour version then I could have all three versions in one box! Been wanting to get the boxes again for a long time now. SQ4 was my favourite Space Quest so I got that first. I already have the spaceship/screenshot box of SQ1. I thought I had SQ2 but it must have been lost to the ages. Will slowly get them all again eventually. I only have the front flap from the SQ Collector's Edition box. My parents threw the box out when I was younger :(. I also clearly remember owning the SQ2 box but I don't have that anymore either. I still have the manuals to SQ1 and SQ2 somewhere (including the Kerona coupon from SQ1) but like an idiot I took everything out of the boxes years ago and put them somewhere separate for some strange reason I can't recall right now. I'll find them eventually.

 

It's a somewhat humble collection right now, but it will grow now that I'm older and can spend my money on whatever I want (mostly, I am married with a family).

 

[Lunchbox]

I lost most of my rebought collections during my many years as a complete wanderer. To bad I just have my sq companion and the latest rereleases .... I miss my box sets now.

[e1ven]

I was never as big of a collector as some folk, mostly on a account of being poor.

But these were the ones I pulled together.

 

On the top, I have SQ1 EGA ( regular and cheesy version), SQ2 playable and shrinkwrapped, SQ3, the collection.

Then SQ4, and a duplicate CD-only version I ended up with, SQ5, and the hardest one to get.. SQ6.

SQ6 was by far the hardest SQ game for me, since I kept getting people sending me the CD only. I have a pile of dupes in the next row ;(

I have the Austrailian 3 quest game collections. The 3 comics, and the companions.

I also have two non SQ, SQ things- A DVD that happens to be named "Space Quest", and Roger Wilco beer.

[e1ven]

So.. Umm.. Anyone selling? ;)

[MusicallyInspired]

Not me! I'm still acquiring myself! I recall actually someone on this forum years ago offered me a copy of the SQ Companion, and also some SQ boxes from someone else (I think it was Frans actually!). But that never happened :).

 

I just got my SQ4 3.5" VGA disks in the mail yesterday. The only thing that would make it more complete is if I found the original SQ4 3.5"/5.25" 16 colour disks.

[Fronzel Neekburm]

I don't have a camera available at the moment, but if memory serves, the following SQ-related stuff wound up in my collection.

 

The latest Space Quest Collection (which is a complete rip-off I only bought for the sake of finally having the original language version of SQ6)

Mid-90s Euro Space Quest Collection (SQ1 EGA - SQ5)

SQ1 EGA Atari (factory sealed)

SQ1 VGA Euro big box

SQ4 German Sierra Originals

SQ5 Taiwanese (!) big box

SQ6 German big box

SQ6 German Sierra Originals

Roger Wilco Comic Vol. 1

 

Oh yeah, and I also have the "Best Of Sierra"-version of SQ6 ("Best Of Sierra" was this magazine that Sierra released in Germany from 1997 to 2001. I don't know if they released anything similar in other countries.)

[MusicallyInspired]

Nice!

[Leonard]

Taiwanese SQ5?

 

There has got to be a story behind that...

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Unfortunately, it's a fairly unexciting story: I found it on ebay and figured it would make a nice addition to the collection.

 

I'll try to post a picture as soon as possible.

[Spikey]

My wife recently bought me the Sierra 3-pack, Lighthouse, SQ6 and PQ4. She also bought me over the last few years, the SQ trilogy boxset, and Mac SQ1VGA amongst others.

[Frede]

I've always thought PQ4 was quite underrated. It's not perfect, but for some reason, I like the gritty style.

 

My SQ collection consists of the 2006 Collection, so there's really not much to show. I never managed to track down any of the original games here in the rotten state of Denmark, so I'm looking forward to receiving my physical SpaceVenture package.

 

It has been ages since I last held a big computer game box in my hands. And of course, it'll be the first time for me, SQ-wise.

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Finally got around to snap a pic of that Taiwanese SQV box. Here it is:

 

 

I'll also leave this here:

 

 

Roberta Williams Anthology

 

Brand new, factory sealed

 

€0.89 on German amazon

 

:P

[JDHJANUS]

I will try to get pics up of my Space Quest collection this weekend. I would love to find the original black box Space Quest I complete (to include the grid background), as well as the Space Quest 15th Anniversary Collector's Edition.

 

Talk to you later!

 

JDHJANUS

Josh

[Capn_Ascii]

I don't have any pics, as such (for reasons that I'll get into shortly), but this does seem like a good time to share the chronicle of How Ascii Got His Space Quest Back Games. It's an epic tale, full of excitement, adventure, and software distribution practices of dubious legal nature:

 

-Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my dad playing Space Quest 2 and Space Quest 3 on the family computer - a Tandy 1000. It was one of the first times I'd seen a game more complex than 'eat dots, avoid ghosts', both graphically and in terms of being able to walk around and interact with the game world. Sadly, this was back in Ye Good Olde Days of rampant software piracy letting your friends borrow your computer games, and I'm fairly certain those copies were themselves 'borrowed'. I am both proud and slightly ashamed to admit that those copies have survived all this time, across multiple replaced forms of storage medium, and are the very copies I still play to this day. The Space Quest 3 I have is apparantly a semi-rare version of some sort, as I remember Frans asking for a copy back when he was attempting to archive the games here on SQ.net.

 

-There was also a copy of Space Quest 4 somewhere in those old 5.25" floppies, although obviously a Tandy wasn't capable of running that particular game (256 colors, and all that). I didn't understand why at the time, and I remember spending a good few years trying to figure out why it wouldn't run. It wasn't until the family computer got upgraded to a proper PC years later that I finally got the chance to play that one.

 

-Next came Space Quest 1 VGA - a birthday present from my father, who knew how much I loved the games he'd already let me play. He specifically got the 16-color version so it would run on the Tandy, which was both good and bad; good in that I got to play it, bad in that I didn't realize there *was* a 256-color version until years later (Again, this was long before I had any degree of coputer knowledge). I didn't get to hear the awesome soundtrack until the aforementioned PC upgrade, and I didn't get my hands on the 256-color version until Frans' archival efforts.

 

-Space Quest 5 came after that...I picked that one up at a library discard sale. I remember being a bit bewildered by the box, which had a library label claiming that the obviously-used product was missing its 'code reader'; by this point, I knew PCs better, yet I had no idea what it was talking about. I got it anyway, installed it, and played it through just fine. It wasn't until a while later that I realized that the label was actually referring to the manual being missing, which had the copy protection coordinates one needs to play the game.

 

So...how did I play and beat it without said manual, you ask? Because along with SQ1 VGA, I'd gotten a Space Quest written strategy guide for my birthday as well. The Official Guide to Roger Wilco's Space Adventures, Second Edition (I think). It was written in a marginally-serious narrative form, and more importantly, the chapter on SQ5 (which had just recently been added, hence Second Edition) had all the coordinates in the dialog, presumably so that those reading along as they played would have the numbers handy and not have to go look them up. On a side note, I still have that book, although by now it's terribly yellowed, dog-eared, and the cover has long since fallen off.

 

-At some point after this - I'm assuming around 1996 or so - I remember being in a Wal-Mart, browsing the software section (back when software was still something to have a proper section based around - shelf space and all!). I was looking over the selection, and HOLY CRAP there's a SPACE QUEST 6!? Brand new, in the box, just released. This was back in the pre-Internet days, so of course I'd had no sort of news to follow from my then-favorite company...just stumbling across a new release in my favorite series like that was quite a shock. I bought it, took it home, and proceeded to get stuck on the endodroid puzzle for over half a year (I couldn't find the hotspot on the pipe behind the bar). The Internet was *juuust* coming into its own around this time, and it finally occured to me to search for the answer on-line. I found this weird site called the Virtual Broomcloset and, using the info there, was finally able to progress in and beat SQ6. A belated thanks for that, Jess. ;)

 

That was actually my first encounter with the SQ fan community, although at the time I was too young to understand the concept; it wasn't until around 2001 or so that it occured to me that, hey, I've become something of a Space Quest-obsessed pseudo-expert, I could get *in* on that hot fan bickering action. I met a bunch of cool people, hung around for a while saying very little using an awful lot of words, then drifted away when the community started to run out of steam after years with no new releases. And then Hell froze over, the Two Guys joined forces to conquer the world once more, and here I am again. Sunrise, sunset.

 

-Ahem. Anywho. Again, a lack of knowledge about different versions almost caused me to not realize that, hey, there was actually a talkie CD version of SQ4 somewhere out there that I never got to try. I eventually found it on sale one day in an Electronics Boutique (remember when they still existed? And they actually sold computer software and stuff?). It was a cheap copy, one of those straight-to-bargain-bin release versions that software companies would make after the product's original sales life was well over. Basically just a plaid red CD in a case, with no real documentation. Took me ages to get it working, especially because by now PCs were powerful enough that the dreaded Timer Issues^TM were starting to rear their ugly heads. I have to admit, after the (mostly) professional voice acting in SQ6, the poorer sound quality and voice acting skills of the SQ4 staff (yes, I know, there's a reason for that) were rather underwhelming. I also didn't care much for how dopey Roger sounded compared to his SQ6 self. On the other hand, Scott made for an excellent Vohaul...but, I digress.

 

-And then, finally, *finally*, years later, after I was part of the SQ community proper, I found the one game I'd been missing the whole time - SQ1 EGA. Found it at another discard sale from the same library I'd originally gotten SQ5 from...hard to believe they used to rent software like that. Frustratingly, however, the disks themselves were corrupted. :( I wound up getting a working copy from Frans' archival project (which I'd been not using for moral reaons), justifying it by saying that, hey, I actually *did* pay for the game this time. I won't go into my opinions on the two versions of SQ1 here, as I've already done so in this other thread over here.

 

-I should note that, by this point, I had a lot of original Space Quest discs and CDs that had been around god knows how many years, all just sort of taking up shoebox space in my room. I didn't realize just how dangerous this was until one day I went back to replay Space Quest 6, and the game kept crashing during the first Stellar-Roger cutscene on the Deepship 86. I thought it was a computer glitch, until it occured to me to try copying the CD to my hard drive to improve performance - only to get a read error. The disc was damaged. :blink: This sparked a monumental, panic-fueled event wherin I began burning back-up copies of *all* of my old game CDs (and burning disc games to CD) out of fear that they too would someday die a slow, gradual, scratch-filled death. I only still have a working copy of SQ6 thanks to, once again, Frans and his online SQ backup efforts (Gee, I hope I'm not going to get him into trouble by talking about that like this).

 

 

...and that's my story. :) At the moment, all of my SQ games are sitting on a trio of burned CDs, tucked safely into a box in a bedroom I use solely to store my myriad of random crap. I haven't actually played most of them in years, but that's only because I played through them so many times when I was younger that they're mostly burned into my brain. Even now, I can often casually quote text from them that most other folks have long since forgotten.

 

Help me. :unsure:

 

Oh, yeah. Why don't I have pics? Because most of the software boxes I held onto, both SQ and otherwise, got destroyed when my house was flooded by Hurricane Floyd. At this point, the only ones still intact are SQ5, SQ1 EGA, and LSL1 EGA.

[pcj]

Still need to get the black SQ1 box signed: