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On Early Game Packaging Treasures
Thanks to Armchair Arcade for its article discussing the wonders of classic game boxes, as the author reminisces about the "lost art of innovative game packaging from the early to mid-1980's, when there seemed to be an abundance of real thought and care behind the customer's experience beyond the software itself." He points out: "Hardcore gamers appreciate hardcore packaging, with unusual boxes and a handful of feelies... Today, hardcore packaging - if available at all - has a hardcore price. There are still tens of thousands of hardcore gamers like in the past, it's just more profitable to go after the hundreds of thousands of mainstream consumers instead." The article ends with a series of gallery pages, including some of the classic boxes from "the company with arguably the greatest overall packaging", Infocom.
The classic Electronic Arts "album cover" packaging and their attempts to make game developers into rockstar-like characters.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Back then the biggest problem was graphics. it was really hard for some people to imagine that they were fighting some big ugly monster with ten heads when all they would see on the screen as representative of the monster was an ascii symbol. I think fancy packaging made up for this deficiency. Today it's no longer a problem. Besides I'd rather have a good game with extra money spent toward better QA or other things that are actually in the game as opposed to collectible junk.
...and say that I don't think that fancy packaging is a really good idea.
While fancy packaging might help roll boxes off the shelves, software (at least in my experience) doesn't usually come from retail anymore -- one orders it online.
And ultimately, all the trinkets you get are just that -- trinkets. They wind up in the wastebasket, taking up space. Marathon's triangular boxes did it, Quake's tin box did it, etc. I was actually rather pleased with my purchases from Linux Game Publishing, Tribsoft, and Loki, which all simply came with a card and a CD or two in a DVD case. No waste, no having to dispose of tons of packaging materials, no blowing money on something that I'll see once that then forget about.
I have no idea how much it cost to put Quake III in a custom-embossed tin box, but let's assume that it was about 50 cents. I have no idea how many units Quake III sold, but I would assume that it is at least half a million units. Given only those assumptions, there's five artists that could have been hired for a year's work each to add more textures and better graphics to Quake III. That's an awfully tough tradeoff. I'd rather have the game itself be nicer, to be honest.
There are still a few convincing reasons to ship things in a package. Most of the time, I'd prefer to have my documentation in plain text, if I can get it. It's easier to search. However, sometimes things wind up in PDF on a CD. It's good that they can't get lost, but it's also rather annoying to read through a PDF, and a pain to print out hundreds of pages. Some manuals (I remember the SuperPaint manual) are quite readable while munching on lunch, and should stay in the form of wood pulp.
In general, though, I'm happy to see fancy boxes and addins go away. They just don't provide much benefit. Heck, I'd be happy to have a CD with nothing more than the name of the product printed on it -- no fancy, colored artwork, even.
May we never see th