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You never know how much crap you own until you have to move homes. I've chucked out 3 bin bags of stuff and taken about half a metric ton of books, CDs and DVDs to the charity shop (not to mention these two appalling bookends my parents bought me years ago) and it still doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to the mountain of things I own. It's like some kind of magic trick.

Buried deep in the stuff I never properly unpacked the last time I moved, I found my original boxed copy of DarkBASIC that I bought in 2001. I still have both CDs, the spiral bound manual and the monster hunter tutorial booklet.

I now use AppGameKit and have no intention of ever going back to DBC, I don't even have it loaded onto my current computer, but I can't bring myself to throw it out. If I had never had stumbled across DBC all those years ago in a local gaming shop I would never have moved on from qbasic, probably would not be making video games or demos now, certainly not have done any cgi modelling and animation and all the other fun and challenging things associated with making games. So I've decided to keep it.

That's funny! I still have my original box and CD. Though I think I bought mine in 2003 or 2004. I didn't use it until about 2006. When I first booted it up in 2003 or 4, I didn't like the screen and the editor and it just made no sense to me so I never used it. Then sometime around 2006, I was into chess for some reason and wanted to figure out how to program the AI for it. I remembered I had some game programming language around (DBC) so opened it up and started messing around. I still hated it at the time, but then I started reading TDKs tutorials on his MatEdit website.

A lightbulb went off that it was just another flavor of basic, very close to C64 and Amiga BASIC and I realized I didn't have to use the built in editor and I fell in love!

I don't have the box, but I do still have the CD and book. Man that book is falling apart I thumbed through it so many times starting out. Interestingly enough, the first thing I worked on with DBC was putting together a 3d chess board

I had a similar experience with DBC as to Latch in that I didn't really get into it straight away. It was mainly that the 3D stuff didn't work on my computer and I wasn't connected to the internet at the time so couldn't sort it out.

The editor was also atrocious but DarkEDIT made everything so much nicer. Even then it took me a while to get into things and I have to say it wasn't until about 2010 that I really started to get into it.

One of my first games was a simple top down shooter that I recreated in AppGameKit earlier this year

I also made a simple driving game, using my first model made using Doga that came on the second CD.

Having now moved, taking heavy boxes down two flights of stairs and then up two flights of stairs, my copy of DBC adding to the burden and my now crippled back, I might just load it up just so I can justify why I've brought it with me.