I just spent far too much on a bunch of old games, but can't help but wonder; am I the only old gamer who is shocked at the number of games I've never heard of?

I'm the reverse - I'm embarrassed because I have pretty much heard of all of the older games.

Most old adventure games (1980's and 1990's, DOS and Windows 3.1/95) are not available as downloads -- at least not as "legal" downloads. First person games are especially underrepresented. Only a relative handful of the "better known" first person games are available at GOG and Steam. Some of this may be due to difficulties getting them to run on 64-bit Windows. Many of these first person games from the early to late 1990's used 16-bit versions of QuickTime, or the games themselves contained 16-bit code.

Other first person games (like Faust, Ring, Reah, Shivers, and Schizm) didn't use QuickTime and are probably 32-bit games, but still aren't offered.

I'm really glad I didn't start playing adventure games any later than I did. It's possible to go back and play the 3rd person "classics" from Sierra and LucasArts, but the first person games from the 1990's are largely forgotten by GOG and Steam -- and the price for complete, boxed disc versions (as opposed to a wayward game disc someone found floating around his attic) is often a lot higher than what I paid 15 or 16 years ago.

Have fun The Haze. I love the older games.

I'm doing pretty well with all the old games I will ever actually want to re-play

There are still a few I haven't been able to get "ready tweaked" for modern machines { yet } but I do immediately snap up any that GOG put on offer

EDIT :
In the meantime, I can still play the rest of my oldies and ancients on my Win98SE machine

Oh, be still my heart if they would offer Shivers I!

Shivers was great -- much better than 7th Guest.
It seems strange that so many old 3rd person games from Sierra are available for download, but not Sierra's 1st person adventure games like Shivers and Lighthouse.

Then there are 1st person games from other developers like Obsidian, Morpheus, 9, Dark Side of the Moon, Mission Critical, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, Byzantine, Amber, Riddle of the Sphinx, Ripper, and a host of others.

I am pained to admit that while I still have the entire Myst series in boxes, as well as both Syberias and many others, I have decided it's less trouble to buy them, download them, and play them, rather with fighting the old disk problems that seem to occur. Perhaps I'm just lazy.

The Haze, I was dead set against downloading but feel exactly like you do now. I still use the discs if that is all that is available but have re-purchased a lot of my games as downloads to avoid the disc related problems.

Yes I feel your pain, but if your are not doing so already, what we do, me and my good friend, and we own over 400 Adv. games mostly in the original boxes, is that we keep the boxes and simply slip the downloaded created DVD with a printout of the Original CD or DVD Label affixed to the CD/DVD (which can be found on various sites), and this way we still have our Boxed Collection intact and still looks great on the shelves.

I do nearly the same, Starcom

I burn to disk a game I've purchased from GOG - clearly labelling it as a GOG version - and then put that disk in with the original game disk in the original retail box.

I get much enjoyment from looking at my boxed games

That's funny! Because I think I should sell some of my boxed games because most of them won't work any more. But I LOVE looking at them on my shelves! We PC gamers are all a little weird, I think...

I play old games on a cheap external HDD loaded with Win 95 and 98. It’s not connected online and used also for private text storage. You can find Windows disc's-95 and 98 on ebay and old disc games from charity shops over this side of the pond. I find it by far the cheapest and best way to play old favourites for only a minimal outlay.

Cari.