Physical or digital media?

As a collector, I really love physical copies of games and programs. I like to look at them, I like the feeling of holding and using floppy disks and cassette tapes... and don't get me started on the wonderful sounds produced by floppy drives! If you are anything like me, then you know what I mean, and you can probably understand the frustration of reaching for an old game and find that one floppy is missing, or worse, corrupted.

I found myself in this unfortunate situation very recently, when I decided to bring back to life the very first Star Wars game I have ever played: Star Wars: TIE Fighter.

Luckily, I could get a quick nostalgia fix by visiting GOG.com and downloading a multi-platform digital copy. I was initially happy to be able to relive this great classic from LucasArts, and on my modern computer, but soon I realized that something was just not right. A little off, perhaps.

Star Wars: TIE Fighter

It was simply not the same...
Maybe it was the DOSBox logo at program startup, or maybe it was the manual in PDF form, or the absence of a big carton box... It was not the same.

So I started wondering: what is SO important, in a physical copy? Is it simply the nostalgic value? Is it the feeling of holding a product you purchased, more than a service you downloaded from the web?

I mean, digital content is objectively more convenient than physical media. It is made compatible with a wide variety of modern systems, it does not occupy loads and loads of shelf space, and it is not corruptible. From a purely practical point of view, digital wins over physical. Hands down.

Still, no download will ever replace the feeling of holding a big carton box decorated with a unique artwork, browsing a manual that was integral part of the product (and often part of the copy protection), or sliding a 3.5" floppy in the A: drive and run INSTALL.EXE.

Call me old-fashioned, but that's the real deal to me.

How about you? Are you also unreasonably nostalgic of big carton boxes full of floppies, or do you prefer the modern age of digital content applied to retrogaming?

Have fun,
Kradion.