Ah, Crystal Quest. I haven't thought about that game in awhile. My friends and I played it to death at a summer camp back in 92 (or maybe 91?) We were at McNeese State U, which "featured" a great Macintosh lab.

Something I'll never forget from that summer: I had brought my Commodore 64 from home and was setting it up in my dorm room. I suddenly (and much to my chagrin) realized that I didn't have the required (weirdo) monitor cable. I thought all was lost, and mentioned it to the lab tech at the Mac lab. He said, "Follow me," and I went with him to this gigantic storage room. There must have been a hundred Commodore 64s in there, with all the related hardware and no telling how much software. I even saw some older machines in there than that! He gave me the cable and just said to forget it.

I had to ask: What was going on? Apparently, the university had a policy that said that anything it purchased with some big grant couldn't be sold. So, they had all this equipment in excellent condition that they couldn't sell and had to pay to store. With PCs or Macs, they tend to shuffle them around to faculty (recycled hand-me-downs), but I guess when a machine gets too old, it ends up in cold storage.

Of course, I wonder how often pieces come up missing from those unwanted collections...! They're collector's dreams come true.