Guild Wars Collector's Edition

Guild Wars launched without a subscription fee, and the Collector's Edition made sure you felt like royalty anyway. The Guild Wars Collector's Edition on PC is one of those mid-2000s packages where the developers clearly wanted to spoil their community right out of the gate.

The 128-page hardcover art book is the standout. ArenaNet's visual design for Guild Wars was striking from day one, and having that artwork collected in a substantial hardcover volume gives this edition real shelf presence. The soundtrack CD preserves Jeremy Soule's score in physical form, which alone makes this worth tracking down for music-minded collectors. You also get an exclusive in-game Divine Aura, a Logitech headset, a custom version of TeamSpeak, and three months of free voice hosting.

The headset and voice software are pure time-capsule material, artifacts from an era when built-in voice chat wasn't standard and guilds cobbled together their own communication setups. For Guild Wars collectors, the art book and soundtrack are the lasting treasures here, but the whole package tells a story about what online gaming looked like before everything got streamlined.