Not too sure about that. Sometimes, games just install their files in their own directories and that's it, they don't do anything in the registry beyond adding their name to the uninstall list.
In fact I've ran into some thread in another forum where people would install a game, rar it up and extract the files in another location or even on another computer. It was surprising to see many of them worked fine, both old and new (UT99, FEAR, Battlefield 2, Warcraft 3, etc.) You'd need a no cd crack for most of them to work properly I guess.
How ya doing, buddy?