For some reason I just remembered back to when PC games came in giant, cereal-box-sized packaging. Remember that? Damn, it feels like a long time ago. When I was a kid and I bought Rainbow 6 and Quake 2, they came in these colossal boxes. Jesus, those boxes were huge! No point to this post really, other than to ask if anyone else is as amused as I am at how huge those boxes were for the tiny bit of stuff contained inside.
Yep, I remember it…
I was just thinking recently how I also remember when CDs came in HUGE Boxes as well that were 2x the size of the CD. Man… crazy stuff. The times are a changin’ 
Some felt like small board games, the boxes were so big. And the manuals! They were packed with info, I could read one on the john a piece at a time for months!
I stopped buying physical copies of games around the time they started making the switch, so even now the new, smaller boxes bemuse me. They are a better design, though; less wasted space.
Quake 2’s release was such a great day. Those Goldeneye kids didn’t know what they missed out on. It was so much better than Quakeworld and a nice change from 24/7 Red Alert.
Hell, not only were the manuals gigantic, some games even included a 1-200 page novella to set up the backstory!
I loved the cloth maps from the Ultima series. I’d drape them over the back of my computer chair.
Walmart was behind the push for smaller boxes. It allows them to cram more games into less space.
Laura Bow was her name. Thanks to her I found The Dagger of Amon Ra !
Fondly. As I remember the fact that, for some reason, no two of these fucking boxes had the same dimensions. Thick ones, tall ones, wide ones, hexagonal ones… Made for great eye candy in the store, but they were hell to organize on a shelf or in a drawer.
Yup. They don’t even waste the space of a manual… I have honestly no idea how people who play in depth flight simulators and don’t have access to industrial printers manage these days. You guys remember the Falcon 4.0 or Jane’s manuals ? You could choke a donkey with them !
Back in the day, the big boxes were needed for the games. One game I had was Elvira, it took ~80 megs on the harddrive and needed like 12 3.5" floppies. Iirc, X-Wing also took a ridiculous number of disks.
The other week I loaded Madden '08, takes like 2 gigs, and needed only 1 disk.
Amiga games usually came in those huge boxes too. It made sense for some games that had say 10 discs but often it was the one disc and a slim manual rattling around in a huge box. I suppose the bigger box gave a bigger display so it could catch the eye better.
The boxes used to take up so much space on my shelves, I don’t miss them one bit. One thing I do miss though are the thick manuals. I still have my Fallout 2 manual sitting alongside my HOMM 3, Arcanum, Supremacy etc manuals. Now all we get is a small slip of paper with the keyboard commands on, if we’re lucky. Bah.
Oh man, what a blast from the past. I LOVED X-Wing! I’d play it for hours.
Yeah, I was just cleaning and found a copy of Death Gate in a giant box. Wonder if anybody would pay me for it?
Some collectors editions still do. The collectors edition of Hellgate: London was a cereal box consisting of a map, about 1" of foam, and a DVD case.
I don’t. But I do remember when Microsoft Office came on like a million floppy disks and took a month to install.
I liked those old games with the huge boxes and the cool stuff inside. Nowadays all you get is a DVD and a piece of paper that says “Read the .pdf manual in the DVD”. I kinda feel ripped off with these games.
I remember opening the Red Baron box and finding the huge manual listing the aircraft specs and the cool printed maps.
Also, who remembers those copy protection code-wheels? Accolade’s Gunboat and Monkey Island had them, there were probably other games too. For those who haven’t seen them, they consisted of several concentric discs that had to be aligned to reveal some word or number that had to be entered to start the game. Here’s from Monkey Island, the one from Gunboat was much more complicated with 4 discs IIRC.
In Prince of Persia somewhere in the middle of the game it would prompt you to enter the first letter of the fifth word in the second paragraph of page 15 or something like this. There were potions labeled with the letters of the alphabet. If you drank the wrong potion you died and the game stopped, else you could go on.
Yeah I definitely remember that specific thing. It frustrated the hell out of me because I had a pirated copy of the game that my parents downloaded on MacBBS.
I liked those old boxes. I don’t even think of them as “old”.
I remember King’s Quest VI and Gold Rush and all the Sierra classics.
I also remember when it was a running joke that the box art was 20X better than the actual graphics.