Tonight, I began cleaning out my closet o’ stuff. No real reason — I think I’m just inspired by the clean lines of my iMac, and feel the need to declutter my space.

As I began going through piles of old CD-ROMS for everything from DOS to OS/2 to Windows to Linuxes, I ran across my After Dark CDs.

Remember After Dark? That was a cool screensaver for Windows (some of them would even run in the Win 3.1 mode for OS/2 Warp) that started with humble beginnings — flying toasters — and expanded into some pretty cool realms over the 1990s. There were Star Trek versions, twisted versions (my favorite) and tons of add-on modules. Alas, the product died on the vine. (Although there is a Mac OS X version by some group in Japan, including a limited number of modules.)

Behind every success and eventual fade is a story, and I happened across the rest of the story for the After Dark product. It seems that it’s not a pretty story, and you can find it here. ‘Tis a shame that it ended this way — I loved After Dark, and would love to run that on my Mac (not in Classic mode, that is).