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15 Truly Hideous Examples of Game Box Art
We've discussed it before, but it's something that bears repeating: sometimes the art on game boxes just isn't very good. 1up has rounded up 15 examples of poor art direction for a smattering of games since the start of the hobby. They've taken some pains to avoid oft-repeated examples of this malady, and managed to remind me again of my favorite space shooter advertised by a man with a banjo. "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial : Interplanetary mission. (PS1) - This is not a game cover. This is what you see when you lose at Mystery Date. 'I got the Jock.' 'I got the Trust-Fund Brat.' 'I got the Elephant Man and a bouquet of alien flowers that laid eggs in my face.' The whole thing is creepy enough without actually commenting on E.T's robot stalker friend hiding in the distance. There's something to be learned here for future game-cover artists: Don't bother actually filling in your backgrounds. That way the cover can double as a superfun coloring book for the kids."
I'm surprised they left the Xbox remake of bomberman off the list. How many people did that box art let down? I suppose from an artistic standpoint it wasn't so bad, but it was totally misleading.
Before you jaded Internet soldiers say it, yes, this has been done. Every website and its incestuous sister-daughter-wife has one of these worst-covers lists, including us now.
Just because they acknowledge it, that doesn't mean they should go ahead and do it anyway.
The repackaging of Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow, shown on the last page of TFA. I couldn't believe it when I saw it in a store.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but linking to the SAME LINKS as the summary is NOT a way to get easy Karma.
YOU FAIL IT!
The... content, lad?
Curse them!
Some publishers seem to not understand the relationship between packaging and sales. If you look at a game that was given shelf space but then proceeded to fail spectacularly, it usually has stupid box art and badly done screen-shots. I have worked in games and this has become a peeve of mine, you do everything you can slaving to make the best possible game, and then the publisher creates the one thing it is responsible for: the box the game goes in, and turns out some embarrassing little surprise. Gamers do "judge the book by it's cover."
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
as much as I personally loved the box art (and that I'd have bought the game even if it had come in a blank cardboard box) I've heard many times that it was one of the reasons why the game didn't sell as well as it could (I bet that if they had put Fall From Grace on the box sales would've easily been 2x...)
-- the cake is a lie
I guess this is where I complain about Quake3. I mean, id had the gall to rush it out the door for pre-orders to be delivered by Christmas (not a big dealie to me, but I'm sure to at least a few others), and they sent the darn CD and key in a plain white cardboard CD mailer. The gall! Plain white!
Of course, a few weeks later they realized the erros of their ways and sent me the l33t tin edition of Q3A for Linux....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
What is the matter with the /. editors? These lists are content free. They're just a way to organise non-information, which you'll forget after about 5 minutes, in such a way that you have to click on a long sequence of pages, exposing you to as much advertising as possible. They are almost the lowest form of journalism. Given that there are many of millions of people out there in the tech world, many of whom are smart and interesting and working hard on cool stuff, surely there's something better to post than this drivel?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Alright...I saw the Jacki Chan Stunt master game then I scrolled down......HAHAHAHA Irritating Stick. I have never heard of that game but I laughed for a good 10 minutes after seeing that one....such a retarded premise for a game. Is that Santa Clause holding the stick?
This was a just plain bad article. Uninspired, filled with lame jokes, and with no real objectivity to it.
There were quite a few really crappy box art examples in there, yes, but there were others that got in there pretty much because the author didn't like the style the artist used. Hell, this article actually said on two of the entries, "my editor made me put this in here." Lame, lame, lame.
5 pounds of shit does not need to be put into a 20 pound bag. (I know they like ad revenue, but geez...)
I loved Strider for the Genesis, but as I kid I wondered why Uncle Joey from Full House (Dave Coulier) was on the box cover. The NES version of the game had a way better cover. The Castlevania DoS box isn't that bad, it is just very cheesy in an anime sort of way.
I can't remember the last time I've seen a cover within a cover.
In this thread, obsessive nerds care about petty shit.
The people that care about this shit are NOT the people making linux ready for the desktop.
Sheesh, some of the early 8-bit artwork from small British companies wasn't that hot. I could probably get some of those old "Your Computer" magazines I got from my Dad, and scan a few examples from them, but I'm too lazy. :-)
This Timeslip budget reissue cover is actually a later example, but it's still quite bad; it looks like they got a child from secondary school on work experience to do it.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
http://www.lemon64.com/games/view_cover.php?gameID =3309
How can one forget Cock'in in a list like this? It's like David Cronenburg and David Lynch had a baby.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
^ ^ ^ ^ Why is somebody modding an AC who is obviously a sodding Christian?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Wait, someone writes a homophobic post and you assume it's a "sodding christian?" Someone ought to mod down your post as well.
There are plenty of articles depicting poor box-art.
This article however if you read it was fairly interesting in comparing America, European and Japanese box-art for various games, and showing how those changes came about. You can observe evolving changes and cultural differences.
The article covers both the good and bad, and certainly isn't simply a list of poor covers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Worse yet: why does _everyone_ and their grandma feel like they _have_ to sound like a hip smack-talking wisecracking wigger when they write a "the worst X" list? They say that if you try too hard to make an impression, usually that's the impression you make. Same here. Most of these lists sound, at best, like a bad case of mid-life crisis or like the "pretty fly for a white guy" kinda teenager, since they mention Offspring: some poser trying to sound artificially cool, hip, funny and all gangsta.
How about just telling me what's bad about a game? Or in the case of covers you'd think it would be obvious by itself. I don't need some contrived smack-talking wisecracking metaphors to convince me that something really is that bad.
Also, I wonder how many of these lists are some lame effort to establish street cred. Take a site which otherwise gives only scores between 95% and 100% to please the publisher, slap a "15 worst games which are 20 years old" (or otherwise noone makes money off them any more, so the publisher still won't be mad at us) on it, and voila, now they can claim that they say the bad stuff too. Or, hey, let's play it even safer and pick only on something as mild and irrelevant as box art cover. Surely the publisher won't be too pissed off at _that_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It doesn't get any lamer than Fabio, does it?
My early gaming years were littered with box art promises. They always used to put the Commodore64/Atari version screenshots on the box but never their crummy port to the BBC Micro.
Still at least Acornsoft knew what they were doing.
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/Elite.jpg
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I usually don't even look at the box art. I just look at the title to see if I recognize it and then turn the box over to see what the game is. And then what do I see? Five great screen shots of cut-scenes that give no information whatsoever on what the gameplay may be like. Man, I hate that.
This was the cover for the Activision game "Tongue of the Fatman", released back in the 80s.
I can imagine being one of the developers of this - you spend long months coding and testing, only to have some idiot in the marketing department slap this lousy excuse for a cover on it. Cripes.
If this article, or, an article that heavily resembles it(bad video game box art) was posted not once, but TWICE before, why go for 3?
Have we honestly ran out of content we can link to on the web? I highly doubt it. Come on, greenlight something a bit more original.
Exibit B: El Viento American cover
Interesting, since the game has huge-eyed stereo-typical anime women in cut scenes throughout, and combines H.P. Lovecraft and the Magical Girl genre (in a non-ecchi way, mind). It's not like anyone who was offended by anime was going to like the game based purely on the cover.
My theory? The cover was changed so that parents, buying it for their kids, wouldn't pass it by if it was too Japanese looking. (Parents who had the "they bombed Pearl Harbor!" mentality of my own father. I swear "they'll be no Star Blazers in this house!" yeah, but Scooby Doo was ok, right Dad? Grrr...)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I'm glad someone was able to type "bad game box art" into google, paste the results, and then get paid for it. Not to mention the fact that there was a nearly identical article from the same site posted on here not too long ago. (Bad 80s/90s box art or something like that)
Why wouldn't I assume its a christian?
Make SELinux enforcing again!