RadioShack is gone, but it is not forgotten. Amidst all the weekend obituaries for a company that had already been dead for years, though, people seem to have forgotten one thing: the company’s legacy of making its own supremely dorky box art.
I mean, get a load of the fonts! The placement! Some of them look like cereal boxes, others like magazine covers.
Vintage Computing & Gaming has a big gallery showing off decades of the store’s best/worst attempts at making their own box art, but I figured I’d post a few gaming-related (and GIANT MOBILE PHONE-RELATED) highlights below.
I love that this is endorsed by the biggest celebrity chess has ever known, and then…the endorsement is shown as fine print where most folks in a store won’t even see it.
Comments
11 responses to “So Long, RadioShack, And Thanks For All The Sweet/Shitty Box Art”
What the hell is Radioshack?
In Australia, they were known as “Tandy” (which was actually the parent company of Radio Shack). Tandy were to Dick Smith what Dick Smith now is to Jaycar. Eventually, all the Tandy stores became Dick Smith.
Hopefully that clears it up for you.
It does! Thanks!
I am so goddamn old I remember most of those things…
I do as well, I can certainly remember Championship Golf and the Archer Walkie Talkies. Tandy was an awesome place to go as a kid.
Bridge Companion looks like a really alluring night in. I am not joking.
Blackjack above it says “chips not included”.
Bridge Companion does not say “M&Ms not included”.
I have the baseball one that my dad gave me back in the 80s (not sure, but I don’t think it was new even then).. and last time I used it (maybe 3-4 years ago) it was still working.
Still not a fun game, but hey, it seems it was built to last. 😉
The joke about finding Hugo was already dated…..now it just doesn’t make sense at all….
I had a mechanical robot arm toy thingy when I was little, it wasn’t the Armatron though. It looked like a white legless robot with a red visor and one arm. You’d shove $20 worth of batteries in its butt and it’d roar like a blender crushing ice whenever you turned it on and operated its arm.
I had the computerised chess set, it was brutal once you got to the higher levels, would just annihilate me, and I used to think I was ok at chess, was great Xmas present from my parents though