By Justin Polak
Co-founder, Ambassador to the Mushroom Kingdom

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. I would say the source of it comes from browsing an old vBulliten style video game message board back in 2003. I never really posted at the place in question, but I found the community to be funny, informative and interesting. However, whenever someone made a box art thread, I rolled my eyes before I even opened it.

The discussion always went down the same path. The box art for an upcoming game would be posted followed by pages and pages of the community complaining about it. I just never understood why people got so hung up on box art. There are some people that even claimed that they wouldn’t buy a game due to the low quality of box art. While I doubt they followed through with those type of claims, were these posters forgetting that there was an actual game within the box?

Look, I get pretty bummed when a game’s box art is terrible. But seriously, is it really that important? I care about the game inside the box, personally. Quality box art is more of a perk to me, not a necessity.

Alright, I heard some of you yelling at me just now. You are saying that bad box art can cause some consumers to ignore a game that is considered excellent simply because they judged it’s merit off an awkward looking cover. To use a famous example, the cover to the US version of the Playstation 2 game, ICO, was considered an abomination. I have seen everyone from game journalists to casual gamers claim that if the US kept the Japanese box art, or at least went with something similar, the game would have sold better.

I only half agree with that logic. While I am positive ICO’s US box art scared away some potential buyers, I’m pretty sure that the most of the same people would pass over the game if the Japanese box art was displayed in America. Instead of saying, “This game looks stupid because of this dumbass horn kid,” they would say, “This game looks stupid because it looks foreign and uninteresting! WHERE IS THE FUCKING GUNS MAN?!”

In other words, there are gamers out there that are just plain uninterested in a game, and they could care less if the box art looks good or not. If there is someone out there who rather slaughter aliens with a vast array of weapons, no game like ICO is going to win them over. Again, the US box art is atrocious, but you can’t sit there and seriously tell me that the sales would have been significantly better with different box art.

You want to know what had awesome box art? Phalanx. You want to know what was on the box? A country bumpkin looking dude playing a banjo! What type of game was it? A simple shooter game. You know, one of the many 90s games that had you controlling a space ship against an endless force of bad guys coming to kill you. Rumor has it that they choose such an unconventional cover to attract customers since there were many games like it at the time.

I find this funny for two reasons. One, to me this an an early example of trolling. Two, while Phalanx did turn some heads with it’s box art, it ultimately shows that what really matters is the quality of the game and that it does not matter what you do with the cover. While I haven’t played the game myself, I have heard that it’s a pretty decent game for it’s genre. Sure, it’s remembered more for it’s box art, but either you liked shooters or you didn’t. Most people would have made the same decision on if they should purchase the game or not, even if the cover looked “normal.”

While discussing the idea for this article with my friends, one of them pointed out that he thinks the box art for the original Metal Gear Solid is perfect. All it has is a while background with the red logo on the center, and I must say I agree. But with a classic game like MGS is one of the first fond memories you have about the box art? Is it even the tenth memory you have when thinking about it? The Twin Snakes remake for the GameCube was considered over the top, and I recall people complaining about the box art at the time. If you’re one of the people who had a bad experience with Twin Snakes, again, is the box art really one of the aspects that pisses you off, or was it Snake kick flipping off a missile Matrix-style?

When all is said and done, I see no reason to invest strong emotions on box art. It’s nice when you have a sleek looking cover, but unless you plan to stare at it all day, I think your main concern should be the game itself. I’ll admit that I probably sound just as crazy and nitpicky at the type of gamers I am complaining about, but we all gotta get our rant on sometimes.

Front page image from kotaku.com.