I must say that I’m positively surprised by a recent experience that I’ve had with one of the wonderful things that the Internet offers that weren’t there 15 years ago. Clearly I’m a retro enthusiast and I like playing retro games, collecting retro hardware, and displaying things that I still have from that area or that I’ve bought new that stemmed from that era.
One of the things that I dislike about today’s gaming experience is that you cannot buy these beautifully crafted and designed big boxes that games used to come in, in the late 80s/90s and the early 2000s. These boxes would be designed to give you an idea of the gameplay with screenshots with a story and with a description of what the game was. It would try to persuade you to buy the game with its visuals and its catchy phrases. Sometimes, the boxes would even be somewhat misleading – or would have nothing to do with the actual story of the game, focusing on catchy visuals.
And more often than not not only would you get the game on discs or on CD and a manual – but you would also get smaller gimmicks like pins or posters or cheat sheets in the game box. Clearly this drove instant gratification, doubling down on your purchase decision, before you even played the game! Sometimes, there would also be junk like ads or registration cards that no one really looked at and no one really ever filled out back in the day.
Unfortunately these game boxes are a rarity these days and if you buy a game online today most of the time it only exists as a download and if there’s a physical copy um especially for the consoles of this world then you would only get a slim case with the storage medium where the game is stored on. Very rarely there would be additional things like a manual or other gimmicks in the box. At least I haven’t come across a single new game in the recent years that was released that had any of these gimmicks in a nice shiny box that you would want to display.
Long story short: the pleasant experience that I had was with a re-release of Loom and the release of the Return to Monkey Island that I bought off of limitedrungames.com. They are designing these beautiful replicas or sometimes redesigned big boxes of games that either existed before that people want to collect or buy net-new and then display or they create fantastic boxes for games that never had a big box but certainly deserve one. And they have a range of collectors’ editions for games that usually only come in slim cases that deliver these interesting gimmicks and collectibles that you might want if you’re a huge fan.
I bought myself the remake for the Lucasfilm adventure Loom. Despite the fact that I own a big box version of Loom for the Amiga from the original time, the rerun from limitedrungames offered a number of inbox gimmicks that I wanted to have. There is a two sided large poster with on one side the original art box to hang on your wall or on the other side and interesting alternate poster that I’ve never seen before (it’s the same picture as the one on the collector card below). It also comes with the manual and the book of patterns as well as the audio drama that all were in the original big box, just remade and just re-released on modern media. The audio drama originally was put on a cassette and I have a hard time finding a cassette player these days, if I don’t want to get in trouble with the children in my neighborhood. Other gimmicks include the infamous red filter glasses to work with the copy protection.
For the real collectors there is even a small card that outlines which of the boxes from the re-released series that you own for you to keep and display and provide should that be something that you’re very interested in.
So why would anybody be interested in buying this? For one, some of us want to own the games they played and loved, to cherish them. While you can get the games at steam and Gog, there’s a difference however in being able to browse the manual or engage in a real copy protection act while playing. In addition, some of us prefer the original big box for displaying. While you could always get the big box of the original games online, they may be expensive, or in bad condition, or both at the same time. Or you may have to pay the retro tax, because everything’s more expensive then it’s retro. Third, you may still have half the box but you want the contents and the gimmicks of that box once again – to complete your own box, or replace the very used parts with re-prints. Most simply, you may want the game that you had 30 years ago in a format that you can actually play on a modern machine but don’t like the online purchase experience or rely on online connectivity to use it.
So I’m happy initiatives like limitedrungames exist and that they partner with game studios to deliver all boxes in a rerun or boxes of new games in new runs so that the collectors among us and those that feel nostalgic and those that want to display their games still have something to put on our shelves and get that warm fuzzy feeling in our bellies.
I guess that’s the underlying reason for purchasing games in big boxes all along – the warm fuzzy feeling.
FRICKELSOFT 