Judging a Game By Its Cover

1up has up a piece looking at the good and bad of gaming boxart. They cover some history of the art form, why things tend to change when they move from East to West, and some notables among the boxes of the past twenty-five-odd years. From the article: "After the American console market crashed in the early '80s, it was up to Japanese companies like Sega and Nintendo to pick up the slack. However, the cover artwork for many Japanese publishers' early games seemed to be lost in translation. The first generation of Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges were little more than enlarged screenshots showing off the main characters in all their pixelated glory. Sega Master System games were even worse: a plain grid on a barren white background, complete with a single, low-quality image." Relatedly, GameDaily is running an article on the history of game marketing, which I thought dovetailed nicely with this somewhat less serious examination of the subject.

Comments

It's all about...

[sdaemon]

...the boobies.

EverQuest. WoW. And countless others.

Sigh

[HockeyPuck]

I was really hoping this was a look at how the SCREENSHOTS often depicted on the front/back/inside flap of the box look nothing like one can get on a 3mo old gaming rig.

Re:Sigh

[cliffski]

or better still, how the screenshots in magazines and on websites look nothing like the game looks like on ANY rig. I'll never forget the first time I asked an artist what he was doing to hear him say "Touching up screenshots for a magazine." I had no idea that ever 'triple a' game developer runs its screenshots through the art department to touch up the particle effects and the shadows to make them look better. If you have a brand new alienware PC and the screenshots still look better, thats why, they arent really bare screenshots at all.
Bastards.

Sega Master System!

[Buddy_DoQ]

It may be the clouds of nostalgia, but I recall the Master System has having the best box art ever. When you walked into the store, you knew which games were for the Master System at a single glance. I dug the minimalist style, and the consistency of the box art. Each game had it's own flavor and yet the boxes could be displayed and not look tacky on your converted VHS rack.

Ico

[Trashhalo]

A great example of a game cover being lost in translation is Ico. First lets all go look at the japanese cover of the game.
Not bad eh? Okay are you ready for the american cover? I cringe every time I see it.

Katamari Damacy box art

[tepples]

And Ico is pretty much the ONE game that has the same name in the US and Japan where they could have used the EXACT same art.

O RLY? Compare Katamari Damacy (J) box art and Katamari Damacy (U) box art. The only differences are NTSC U/C vs. NTSC J, ruby text in romaji vs. kana, and different national ratings organizations.

Re:Use Screenshots!

[gaijin99]

Much more important: use screenshots that aren't from cutscenes.

Anytime I see a game using nothing but cutscene art I know the actual in game graphics will blow. Cutscenes aren't the game, and showing cutscenes is just pathetic.

At Tokyo Game Show this year the preview of the new Metal Gear game was one of the more crowded areas, but no one got to see what the game would look like. We saw an impressive CG movie with all sort of nifty looking stuff, but I have no idea what actual gameplay will look like. Metal Gear has a pretty good history, so I'm sure the actual gameplay might be good. I *hope* that when it comes out the box will show what the game really looks like.