When Master of Orion 3 came out, I bought it with a friend of mine. We had heard some of the buzz about the game, and we had heard that it wasn't very good, so neither of us were willing to buy it at full price. We split the price, and went back to my place to try it out.
I remember the manual. It gave a nice backstory for the conflict, and got me enthused to play. i thought to myself, "surely there is some fun to be found here!"
I was wrong.
We spent a few hours with it that day. At first, we thought that we just needed to figure out the game's intricacies, and a beautiful experience would open up before us. We could see for ourselves what it means to become a galactic overlord, one conquest at a time! We'd crush empire after empire under our boots!
We were wrong.
When we couldn't take anymore, my friend went home, and brought the game with him. I went to visit him a few days later. He had discovered the whole "click End Turn until you win" strategy, and was ready to quit. I took the game back to my place and gave it several more hours of play over the next few days.
In the end, we faced a dilemma. Neither of us ever wanted to play the game again. We didn't want to throw it away, because someone might dig it out of the trash and try to play it. We couldn't destroy it because we had paid good money for it.
We made a sacred pact that day.
We both uninstalled the game. He kept the install disk, and I kept the play disk, so that neither of us would ever have the means to reinstall the game on either of our systems. To this day, I have no idea where he keeps his disk. Mine is sealed away where it can't hurt anyone. From time to time, I'll take it out to remind myself of my ordeal. I do this with the curtains drawn, so that nobody sees it, and a stiff drink in my hand, to dull the pain. This dark legacy will haunt me for the rest of my days.
Some day, I'll pass the responsibility to my son, and he can become the custodian of MOO3.
