The Vault of Regret is a very large place, which houses dusty old game CDs and boxes, untouched digital libraries, and the metaphysical concepts of remorse and embarrassment. Here we write about all the games we should have played but haven’t, or that we have played but didn’t enjoy, among other things.

Do you still have all your old boxed games from the 90s? If not, do you remember what happened to them? Why you kept some, and not others? And would you make the same decisions again now?

Perhaps you just got rid of the boxes, and kept the discs, for reasons of space. Or maybe it all just stayed at your parents’ house for a while, until several years passed and they had a clear out which forced you to make a decision. You weren’t to know, back in those days, that you’d be able to play those old DOS games again. Or that you’d even want to.

In our house, three people contributed to the shelves surrounding the family PC, and we each had different strategies when it came to our purchasing decisions. At the one end of the scale was Jo, who kept a fairly short list of adventure games that she wanted and would make sure she either saved up for them or put them on the next Christmas or birthday list. And at the other was yours truly, a gullible idiot who would buy whatever happened to be in the sales. (My Dad was somewhere in the middle, a keen follower of review scores but also always up for a bargain too.)

While Jo and I were living with our parents, at least some of the time, we could take and leave what we wanted back and forth to university. But when the time eventually came for me to move out, to share a room in a London flat with my girlfriend, I had a feeling that the arrangement would come to a swift end if I arrived armed with stacks of big box PC games.

And so it was time to perform a serious audit. Items of moderate value, generally the more modern titles, could be put on eBay as individual items. But in a pre-DOSBox world, the more genuine oldies were of less interest to the game-buying public. The only thing to do was to throw them all into a big cardboard box and sell them off together at a low, low price: 40 or so games at a starting price of 99p plus postage. (I think I got about 35 or so quid for them in the end).

It doesn’t bother me that I got rid of these games – the particular source of regret, in this case, is the fact that I can’t really remember many of their names, and even the ones that spring to mind, I can’t be 100% certain about. What was in that box? I guess it feels weird to have sold games that I didn’t play, or that didn’t make much of an impression on me: a collection of impulse purchases and some filler from compilations, no doubt, with some titles ones that I genuinely did mean to get around to one day, and others that were frankly never likely to make their way to the top of the pile.

I remember this much. But the box wasn’t empty, it had stuff in it.

As a dedicated archivist of my own digital past [Jee-sus! Just say ‘hoarder’ – FFG reader], it does genuinely bother me that I don’t know what these games were (I’ve already spent longer than is healthy scouring my e-mails and old backups for evidence of the eBay listing from 2003). Plus, it sort of blows my mind that I could have spent so long writing about old games here (admittedly, at an extremely slow pace) without even remembering, never mind getting around to revisiting, all the ones that I used to own.

In all likelihood, the full list will forever remain a mystery. But slowly, a few names are coming back to me: I’ve even somehow confirmed, thanks to MobyGames, that a seemingly random collection of CDs that were in my collection at one point in the 90s was a genuine, real-life compilation and not simply a figment of my imagination. So perhaps I can still dredge up a few more memories, pick out some of those abandoned oldies and give them a proper look over, all these years later.