Old-school game packaging was pretty incredible. Sure, some 8-bit releases have terrible box art and were clearly designed in the space of a single evening, but there's a charm to their rough and ready nature - they hark back to a more primitive, innocent age.
Engadget's Sean Buckley knows this all too well, and has kindly posted a gallery of NES packaging from his own personal collection which should transport veteran players back to their local video game emporium, where they once stood in front of racks of cardboard boxes that bore artwork which seemed to promise so much.
From Nintendo's early pixel-heavy box designs to iconic covers such as Castlevania and Final Fantasy, it's impossible to browse through this gallery without feeling a little bit sad that we'll never see cover art as evocative as this ever again. Enjoy.
[source engadget.com]
Comments 13
Konami seemed to have most of the best just going off memory.
Was Ultra part of Konami or bought out by them? I remember the good TMNT games as Konami, maybe it's just getging old.
@SetupDisk Nintendo had a very tight grip on publishers and in order to prevent another video game market crash like the one in 83, third party developers were only allowed to publish a certain number of games per year. Konami circumvented this by establishing proxy companies like Ultra Games in order to release more than the limit of yearly released.
@Shiryu
Ah that makes sense. Well I will throw Ultra in with Konami for best NES covers overall.
The mousecapdes box brings back memories - the first NES game I ever got and the beginning of a lifelong love for Capcom games. I remember always renting turtles arcade and being slightly disappointed it didn't come with the Pizza Hut coupon.
As much as I liked NES boxes I wish now they would have been more like the Genesis game cases, at least that way I could have convinced my parents to let me keep them.
I always loved the silver Konami boxes, so iconic and brimming with greatness inside.
The Legend of Zelda and Adventures of Link boxes were great. Their gold covers looked so swanky. I love the RPG boxes too. Like final fantasy and all the Dragon Warriors that looked like the cover of a Fantasy Novel and the you boot it up and it's chunky pixel art in the game itself. I remember the first Final Fantasy came with a SNES sized instruction manual that I read over and over(the NES books were half its size). Great talking point here. P.s. I love that the pictures are all staged with a power pad as the backdrop.
Always loved the black box art. It was an interesting move on Nintendo's part to show the pixelated graphics instead of the over-the-top (and also great) painted art on Atari carts.
Guy gets bonus points for using the Powerpad as his backdrop
Contra and Mario 3 are two that stick out as my favorites from the NES era
@-Godot
Engadget writer with the boxes here — You're joking, right? "Clearly" you've never seen a script of all the game's text: http://www.woodus.com/den/gallery/graphics/general/gamescript/Game_Script_DW1nes2.pdf
40 pages of words is pretty text heavy for a NES game, even with the formatting, intro page and images that script includes. If that's not enough words, let's remember that the game narrates every single battle with yet more text. None of this is a bad thing, but it's certainly enough to make it one of the more text heavy games in the NES library.
Is it text-heavy by today's standards? Nah, no way — but we're judging it by its own time period. It may not be the most text heavy experience in the NES library, but you can't get away with pretending it doesn't have a lot of text for the era.
That and instruction manuals. Those were the days first party nintendo manuals were art.
Ahh man, so many memories indeed. I remember going to the local video store back in the day and renting video games for the weekend based solely on the box art being good or bad. How pleasantly surprised I was with the original Mega Man.
I love how TNMT II still has the Pizza Hut coupon included, that's dedication right there.
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