Video game corporations we once naively held as heroes of the common gamer are working hard to make game discs a thing of the past, but the resistance is real. GOG just announced it’s reprinting the “good old” big game boxes many grew up with, and I love it.
Steam’s most kind-hearted competitor has just announced the return of the “big box”, and in a very interesting way. In collaboration with Big Box Collection, a one-person passion project that has been 3D scanning many old game boxes for a decade, GOG is now letting players make their own.
This way, everyone gets to play a role in pushing against big box extinction, and the process is very simple. When acquiring select games, you can also download a ZIP file that’ll contain all you need to print, cut, and fold your own big box for the game you just got. That’s not just a really cool arts and crafts project, but a cool way to feel like you’re truly paying for something, not just getting a license to play a game.
Right now, you can only get the files to conjure your own big box version of the original Hitman: Codename 47, Armikrog, Descent, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, but the list will likely grow in the near future.
I’m sure many people out there won’t see the fuss about big boxes, but they truly were amazing back in the day. Nowadays, we get flooded with all sorts of video game merch. It’s very easy to get Pokémon-branded everything in your life, from clothes to coffee mugs. Back in the 90’s, however, merch was rare and expensive. If you wanted to look at art featuring the main character of a game you loved, big boxes had you because, well, they were so big and high-quality they doubled as movable posters. Because nothing beats the aura of a big box collection photo.
Sure, they weren’t practical. They took up a lot of space on your shelf and, more importantly, on store shelves trying to maximize the space to show you stuff to buy. To add insult to injury, most contained little more than a regular CD jewel case and an instruction manual, but they looked like massive works of art that automatically made their console game counterparts look and feel inferior.
If you have any rare big box, or a collection you’d like to show, I’d absolutely love to see it in the comments.
Tiago is a freelancer who used to write about video games, cults, and video game cults. He now writes for Destructoid in an attempt to find himself on the winning side when the robot uprising comes.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/gogs-preservation-initiative-is-bringing-back-one-of-the-coolest-and-least-practical-staples-of-old-pc-gaming/
