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I really miss those cloth maps, they brought the game to life before I even got it installed.

What's up with the game "Akalabeth"? That name's a total rip from Tolkien (he used two L's instead of one).

Blizzard has always had some nice packaging..The cloth maps have always been cool :)

My mother used my cloth map for Everquest as a bleach rag. :[ Totally screwed up my sense of direction..
*cries at the memory*

"Games are bad, because they kill the environment, AND people."
- Future Jack Thompson

Thank Lord British they included Akalabeth. I can remember this bag hanging at North Coast Computers with a crappy Xerox on yellow paper and thought... Oh this looks fun! Then Castle Wolfenstein was the first game with a printed booklet for the Apple2 :) Oh the memories...

Dugg for HUGE BOXES.

I read "Rock 'n' roll" as Rick-Roll. This is very sad.

Article needs more pictures.

What happened to the boxes of cereal with PC games in them? I may not remember much from my childhood, but I remember Chex Quest owning.

I miss my Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 boxes *cries*...

Dugg for Steam in last image

So much for them claiming that games were expensive because of the packaging.....

What happened to EA? I've heard that currently its a nightmare to work there, much unlike the picture the article paints of them. Oh and their games blow now.

EF2000 - A combat Flight Sim came with so much stuff it was ridiculous. I've still got the manual which is like 400 pages long. I hate it how most PC games don't even include a manual now, the manual is a PDF document on a separate disc. Who else misses reading the manual of your new game on the way home from the mall?

I remember photocopying my friends manuals after copying his games so I could type in the stupid words to get past copy protection.

World In Conflict's Collector Edition box is amazing. The only thing it has in common with other game boxes is that it looks like a box.
I wish, however, that "normal" (as in non-collectors/limited) editions boxes were as good.

Did anyone else think the Orange Box's box was cobbled together last-minute in Photoshop? Oh well, it must've been because VALVe was too busy making GOOD GAMES to worry about little things like that.

I miss cool packaging, like Black Isle's BG and IWD boxes, manuals, and maps, but it's better for the environment to have smaller boxes, and online manuals (remember those HUGE CD boxes, when that format first hit? What a waste of paper). Sometimes I read the manual, sometimes I just throw the disc in and learn by playing, and I bet most people are the same way. Most games now have tutorials, or the first few missions are like tutorials.

By far, one of the better articles that Digg has linked to. I love all this stuff. I'm playing GTA IV right now, but it seems like just yesterday I was reading a passage from the game manual which accompanied Interplay's Lord of the Rings (PC). Damn, how time does fly when you're having fun.

I always thought it was stupid to have huge boxes with so much empty space inside.

I remember taking my Red Alert/Command & Conquer manuals to Elementary School and planning my base build order and drawing out structures during class... Best 100 pages I ever read.

Eidos released both Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7 for PC in a weird squared-off triangle shape! I still have some of the boxes from the 'large-size' days, the good old days :D.

I have my GOTY copy of Half Life and the expansion pack still in their pristine original conditions.
I really miss the old eye appealing cardboard boxes.The hollowed out plasticy crap they use today only damages the cd/dvd's inside.

the trippiest game packaging ever when i was a kid was Zork.

mirror?

I hated those early anti piracy code matching screens. Enter the 14th word on page 60: _ _ _ _ , Enter the page number of Chapter 4 : _ _. Everytime you run the game, it would randomly change. Early flight sims were notorious for this. I remember leaving the game on pause for days; just not to enter those codes again.

Dugg for InterAction- That magazine was WIN!

Dugg for the Marathon Infinity box.

My favorite cases are from Bungies Marathon series, triangle boxes with cool graphics and the jewel case embedded in the front... how sweet was that! Sure they were an ass to store with the rest of your games... but they sure did look cool sitting ontop of the shelf always in full view.
A pic for the peeps who never had the privilege.
http://macmedia.ign.com/mac/image/object/003/00351 ...

Are they really complaining about the smaller, more uniform packaging of modern games? Seriously, game packaging had gotten completely out of hand in the late 1990s. You had boxes that had to be 18 inches on a side, with nothing inside but a registration card and a CD in a Jewel case. Anybody remember the behemoth that was Warcraft III Battle Chest? It looked like game boxes were never going to decrease in size until one year they just sort of got down to the small VHS++ form factor they ship in now.

Interesting article. I must say that I miss the old days. My parents had a few infocom games. I was too young to appreciate the games then but I wish I still had my C128D so I could play them now. The boxes left an impression. What happened to infocom anyway?

I know the people who did the Marathon boxes. They were designed to be difficult to stack neatly. This was because they were tired of making cool box fronts, only to have the retailer turn the box sideways so you only saw the edge (spine) on the shelf. So they made a box that couldn't be shelved sideways.

I miss WON. Spent so many hours playing Homeworld and Star Trek: Armada and i miss seeing the little WON symbol, letting me know I was getting a kickass ass-kicking.

3-Ring binder manuals, Maps, figures, glow-in-the-dark stones. Computer games were new so the makers tried to make them like board games, and give the user visual aids sense a lot of games were text based. And we loved it.
You are in a cave. There is a Wumpus...

I think my favourite manual was for Civilization 2. Not only was it informative on how to play the game but there were tons of historical facts describing the periods of history and the units in use at the time. Several hundred pages too.

I never played that many games, but I got Red Baron 3D from Sierra and it came with an instruction manual that was basically a bound book, complete with World War I air combat history and all. That would be awesome if games today had stuff like that. I suppose they do sometimes, but they're the "collector's edition" and you have to pay extra :(

I was a little surprised that they use Ultima IX and UO as an example of cloth maps and the like. Origin had all that extra material for years in the Ultima games. How many people learned the runes and could read road signs and the maps without reference?

Dugg for the Marathon box, but they really should have included the Spectre boxes too:
http://macmedia.ign.com/mac/image/object/009/00906 ...