Something I used to love as a kid was going to EB Games or Harvey Norman and browsing the shelves for all the boxes of brand new video games. And with good reason: it was an era when box art matted. It matters a lot less now, but it's still fun to look back in time.
It's for the Super Famicom-themed 3DS that Japan is getting. As if the handheld itself wasn't beautiful enough, now this? This should be on a gallery wall, not a retail shelf.
Most video game box art sucks. The new DOOM's cover, however, is especially bad. Thankfully, Bethesda seems to have taken note of this, and is offering fans a "vote" on a reversible second cover.
Yesterday, alongside the announcement of Doom's release date (May 13), Bethesda showed off the cover for it's next big shooter. It's... generic.
I am an aficionado of fine box art, it is known. And this is an ever-growing collection of damn fine box art.
It's not so much a problem these days with videos, screenshots and reviews everywhere for almost any remotely popular game, but before the internet, sometimes you just had to trust the publisher. And that meant box art. Dirty, damn lying box art.
From the very first days of its home console business, Nintendo has given its box art a trademark standard, a border or frame that clearly marks the title as being for a Nintendo system. Did you know, though, that this trademark is a lot older than the NES or Famicom?
This sounds wonderful — an art book collecting the box art from Super Famicom games. And the mockup pages also look great.
The best examples of box art tend to be those with a timeless design. Those you can look at ten, twenty, even thirty years later and say, yup, that still looks amazing. Super Mario Bros. is one such game.
What the hell am I looking at here? It's the strange imagery that's produced by taking a familiar piece of cover art, splitting it in half and duplicating one side on the other.
You can't judge a game by its cover. You can, however, judge a game cover by its cover. With the growing importance of digital sales and preorders, what's actually on the front of a game box is in many ways becoming less important than it once was, since it's not the main thing driving sales, even for casual buyers.
One of the reasons I run Fine Art is so that artists, who play such a major role in shaping our attachment with our favourite series, get some of the recognition they deserve. That goes double for the images on the front of the box.
As someone who remembers old box art this brilliant gallery, put together by Games Radar, is an absolute belter. It reimagines the box art of current gen video games and makes it look super old. I am dying.
Rockstar not only recreated the 2D universe of the previous games in 3D, but the developers also came up with a new standard for the North American box art. For each title after Grand Theft Auto III, the cover art would focus on characters and various staples from the game.
Rockstar has dropped the official box art for Grand Theft Auto V. It's just like that unfinished mural, only finished.
This weekend, Kotaku posted images of a new mural going up in downtown Manhattan. The unfinished mural seems to show the yet unrevealed Grand Theft Auto V box art. Impatient people decided they couldn't wait for the mural's completion, so they finished it themselves.
Last week, while I was checking out Splinter Cell: Blacklist, I had a long, interesting talk with the game's creative director Maxime Béland.
This weekend there was a big hoopla over BioShock Infinite's newly revealed box art. Fans complained that it was too standard and boring, and didn't even feature Elizabeth, the focal point of the game. Where's the beautiful sky city? Previous BioShock titles always had the iconic Big Daddy on the covers, what about Songbird? What on this box art even indicates just how unique a game we're bound to see next year?
The leak of Wii U box art for a few Ubisoft titles got people wondering if the images seen online were real. Then Ubisoft confirmed the leaked box art was in fact legit. Now Nintendo is chiming in.
