Videogame Box Art History

I've been reading "Racing the Beam" which discusses in intimate detail what it took to design games for the Atari 2600. It's moderately technical and probably would lose many readers due to it's jargon.

However there are a couple sections that I found to be particularly interesting that dealt more with marketing than programming. The book repeats the well known story that some of Atari's finest programmers left Atari and created Activision after they felt they were not receiving the recognition publicly and financially that they felt they deserved. The book provides an example of two games: Indy 500created by Atari and Grand Prix created by Activision. A photo shows the box art and screen shot for both games. The caption points out to the reader that Indy 500's box art features an "intricate, realistic painting of the game's subject" where as the game is more abstract than what the art alludes to.





The Activision box art (and not-coincidentally most of Activisions boxart for the Atari 2600) closely resembles what the actual Grand Prix game looks like.





I've always been a fan of box art and I believe that the art on many of the Atari 2600 boxes are some of the finest ever created. Although true, some people may have been convinced in buying a sub-par game because the art alluded to an experience that just wasn't going to happen, it brings back to full circle my belief that less is often more in a video game. And although Indy 500 doesn't feature the in-game thrills that the art implies, to a child of the '80 with an endless imagination the game did feature what the art implied plus more, but not simply represented on the screen.

Now that I've been made aware of this interesting concept of Activision representing their box art as a close resemblance to actual game play it got me to thinking about the black label Nintendo games that got me interested in collecting Nintendo games in the first place. There is little dispute that Nintendo was very careful in releasing the NES in the United States alleging to go so far as to sanction games with their Seal of Quality. Almost all of the initially released games for the NES feature a pixelated representation from the game on the label and box art. Typically it was almost an exact representation and in some cases there were a few exaggerations but all in all there was little question as to what the game looked like. This quiet possibly was genius marketing from Nintendo.

Popeye Box Art



Close up of screen shot



Actual NES screen shot