The Misleading World of Atari 2600 Box Art

Buffalo55 writes "These days, you don't have to worry about misleading box art, thanks to sophisticated video game graphics. In the 70s and 80s, though, companies tried to grab a consumer's attention with fancy artwork that bore no resemblance to the actual game. Atari, in particular, was one of the biggest offenders, particularly with its 2600 console."

Comments

I liked it.

[Lectoid]

I don't know. I really liked the box art. I think it helped make the game more than just the blocky pixels you saw on the screen.

Re:I liked it.

[tverbeek]

If they had shown actual screen shots, no one would have bought the things. ;)

But seriously, in those days I saw the box art as similar to the painted covers on the paperbacks I was buying: a visual to feed your imagination, showing what the characters and setting "really" looked like. I didn't expect the latest Asimov or Niven book to be fully illustrated comics, and I didn't expect Atari or C64 games to be fully-rendered movies.

This isn't misleading

[JoshuaZ]

This sort of thing was common even through the early 90s for computer games. People understood that the graphical level on the boxes wasn't anywhere near the level of the games. It is misleading to call this sort of thing misleading.

Back in the day when games required imagination.

[pushing-robot]

Do you think gamers 30 years ago expected photorealistic games? If the game was well written, the screens became more than just a smattering of blocky pixels, in the same way that a cardboard box could become an impenetrable castle.

I love modern technology, but it seems to be feeding a growing segment of the population with no desire for creativity or imagination. Read a book, people!

</getoffmylawn>

We used to call it "imagination"

[ShannaraFan]

Back then, you filled in the missing content with your imagination. These days, nobody has one anymore. Games (and movies) have to spell out every little detail, leaving nothing to the imagination. Remember seeing the Balrog on film? Was that what you imagined it to look like when you read the book? Wasn't what I had pictured, but I can't read the book now without seeing it the way it was depicted in the movie. Kinda sad, in a way.

Re:Not As Bad as Kool-Aid

[red_dragon]

You must['ve] gotten some bunk kool-aid.

Probably Flavor Aid. He should count himself lucky that he's still alive.

Cap guns

[michaelmalak]

And the cap gun you bought at the toy store didn't shoot real bullets. Before the age of computer photorealism, there was imagination.

Re:False advertising is legal

[nomadic]

To be fair, with 80's and 90's box art, we knew the graphics would look absolutely nothing like the cover, so it wasn't really dishonest.

Re:Not much better on the C64

[causality]

I never owned an Atari 2600, but I remember the same phenomenon on the C64. Box art was usually colourful and cartoony. Very few games (at least until you got to the tail end of the C64's popular life span, when you had games like the Creatures series) could come even close to living up to this. It was a good lesson at an early age that you should never take promotional material at face value.

Marketing is based on deception and considers it an important tool. This is nothing new.

It's like when a toothpaste brand says "9 out of 10 dentists recommend it!". In reality they may have interviewed hundreds dentists in groups of ten, over and over again, until they finally found a group of ten out of which 9 preferred their brand. What they strongly imply but do not actually go so far as to claim is that their group of ten is a representative sample of all dentists. Because they do not actually make this positive claim, they escape any accusations of false advertising. Yet it's quite misleading.

It's the same deal with the box art. They do not actually print "this is an in-game screen shot" yet they count on creating that impression. The intent behind this is clear enough.

This should be called "The Misleading World of Marketing" that happens to use the Atari 2600 as an example of a much wider phenomenon. Like politics and public relations, marketing is a field that is very attractive to liars who can say anything with a straight face while performing just enough CYA to perpetuate their ability to do it. Maybe "How to Turn a Pathological Personality Disorder into Profit" would be a better title. I don't think the general public has enough appreciation for the fact that making demonstrably false factual statements is a very crude and inefficient way to deceive someone. The state of the art in those fields is far more advanced than that, relying instead on framing, subtle implication, emotional appeals, misleading use of statistics, selective presentation of information, etc.

I bought a book yesterday

[nedlohs]

It had a color picture on the cover.

Yet inside there were just black letters on white pages bearing no resemblance to the scantily clad lady on the cover.

Re:Missing Contents

[jekewa]

Owning and/or having mates that owned almost all of the consoles of the era, I was keenly aware of the romance novel approach to cover art. I longed for the day when graphics in the game would match or exceed the package (and sometimes still do). I used to get by, however, by falling back on the imagination built as a younger child playing with Legos or other similar representations of near-real life. The blocky representations of characters and objects were abstract due to technical limitations, but by applying imagination to fill in the gaps, the sprites and geometric shapes would flush out in my head to be what was needed to make the experience enjoyable.

No LSD required.

You have it backwards.

[blair1q]

We thought the box covers were lame, and the games were totally cool.