Remember big box PC games? GOG’s bringing them back, sort of

I have fond memories of cruising the aisles of CompUSA and browsing the massive cardboard boxes containing floppy disks and CDs. That’s what PC gaming used to look like. Those days are long gone, of course, banished to a time before smartphones and the drone of a data center that’s louder than my dog’s whining for clean water. But GOG is trying to bring that feeling back… sort of. I hope you have a good printer.

Apologies for the gloom and doom. GOG’s efforts at preservation are to be applauded, as it almost single-handedly preserves classic PC games and makes them playable on modern hardware with no DRM. But that’s still all digital, something PC gamers have been used to for the better part of two decades. When all three major console systems are moving away from physical releases, now seems like as good a time as any to bring back those giant boxes for PC games—and GOG is doing just that.

The Big Box Collection is a digital archive of these classic PC game boxes, complete with an online interface to see them from every angle in 3D. It’s a passion project created and maintained by one person, who’s now partnering with GOG to deliver printable files based on those scans. For five new games in GOG’s Preservation Program, the boxes will be visible in the GOG Galaxy interface, too. And that’s not all! You can print these files out at home and assemble your own box.

The five games in the initial collection are:

• Armikrog
• Descent
• Hitman: Codename 47
• Myst
• Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

(Incidentally, the original Star Trek series debuted 60 years ago yesterday.)

GOG calls it “a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes.” Which, I’ll admit, is a bit less exciting than I thought it was when I read the headline on the post. I assumed GOG would be printing the boxes itself and shipping them, complete with physical media for the game files, even if just a cheap USB drive.

And even if you have a color printer at home, you almost certainly don’t have one that can replicate the quality and finish of mass-produced cardboard packaging. That’s an entire industry all on its own. And having to glue matte paper onto a box you’ll need to provide or assemble yourself? Well, that seems like a pale imitation of the experience of unboxing Starcraft back in ’98.

The alternative would be, of course, tracking down a copy of the original game box. But as GOG notes, these are hard to find for many titles, and cardboard doesn’t last forever. And it’s not as if vintage game collecting is getting any less expensive, just like gaming itself. Perhaps a bit of “proper papercraft” is as close as we can get.