Updates & Acquisitions

May 20, 2025

The Golfshrine front has remained silent for over a month. My energy has been focused on the much more important tasks of keeping my expenses paid down, which has entailed working a few projects around the house and otherwise attempting to make myself useful. But as a creature of habit, I kept my eyes on my eBay searches, looking for my next weird and unusual pick-up. This came via indirect inspiration from friend of Golfshrine, HerzogZwei:

Wow, all of him? I am intrigued.

This sparked the search. I had to figure out which generation of Tiger Woods this collection really contained (the '99 edition) and what the 15 courses were. And instead of that, I found something even more absurd: less Tiger, in a bigger box.

The big man is here! ...again!	These are full-size big boxes so this is an enormous set

I believe this box set would have been sold through Costco or Sam's Club stores, but I can't definitively prove that. This Tiger Woods '99 Collection contains a total of 9 courses (3 in the base game, and 3 each from the course boxes). I was already quite satisfied with the absurdity of this box (as an enthusiast of big dumb boxes) - I do already have the two course add-ons from it (thanks to last month's kind contribution), but the ones in these boxes have never been unwrapped, and I'd think it a shame to release them from their plastic prisons now. On top of these, two "best-selling" books from Earl Woods - Training a Tiger and Playing Through, neither of which I really plan on reading if I'm honest.

But then, disaster struck: as I removed the cardboard insert from the main game box, I found... there was nothing in it. The main game, the entire reason I even bought this thing (since I didn't yet have a PC version of Tiger '99), wasn't even there. I brought it up to the eBay seller, hoping this was a simple mistake. And indeed, it was. They had simply forgotten to put the game discs back, and offered to send them to me free of charge as soon as they'd located them. The process of finding them must have been an epic in itself, as it took almost a month and two separate shipments, but I now not only finally own this game in full, but an additional bonus disc thrown in by the seller as an apology gift.

(Insert enormous metal "thud" noise here.)

So, the full set is now in my hands. I know not what powers it shall grant, what wish I should ask of the dragon atop the mountain. ...I don't know, it's been 25 years since this was released, I'm not sure the dragon still does that stuff. (ahem)

The extra bonus disc is a copy of Golf Tips: Breaking 100 from publisher Diamar Interactive, a multimedia CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh that, through the medium of slideshows, video clips, and a dose of QuickTime VR panorama, claims to help you lower your golf scores in a manner similar to perennial Golfshrine favorite, Lower Your Score With Tom Kite. It does also include a section called "Play the Hole," which puts you at a single hole of the PGA West Jack Nicklaus Resort Course in a sort of interactive practical exam. Not quite a simulation, and only the one hole, but it is an interesting feature to an otherwise unremarkable instructional CD-ROM.

"Play The Hole" is a sort of interactive quiz, not a simulation, but it seems like it gets a point across.

If you'd like to mess with Breaking 100 yourself, I imaged this copy and uploaded it to Internet Archive. Tiger Woods '99 is already fairly well preserved, so I didn't bother doing that one.

Really, after waiting the whole month to get this situation ironed out (I made sure to leave my seller some very good feedback), the part I looked forward to the most was how on earth I was going to fit all of this into the shelf.

We can't fit much more, Captain!