by Beat Suter
Packaging for video games has become obsolete. Today, 90% of all games are streamed as data or downloaded via the internet. Only a small proportion of video games are still packaged and placed on shelves in electronics stores. It used to be very different.
A video game had to attract attention through its packaging, as it was lined up in stores on shelves in large rooms full of boxes. And potential players had to enjoy and somewhat laboriously rummage through stacks or well-sorted long rows of tables. The early packaging did not show the gameplay of a game but conveyed a stimulating idea of the game world. Professional graphic designers created covers with expressive, realistic heroes and scenes that went far beyond the pixel world of the game.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the standardization of such boxes was not such a resounding success. There were different types of packaging. Retailers tried to introduce standardization and, for example, did not include oversized packaging such as the large Kaiser box (1989) from Swiss publisher LINEL in their range because it did not fit on their shelves. But as soon as such a game sold well elsewhere, it was included anyway. It was not until the year 2000 that the Polybox really established itself as a standard for packaging.
This text outlines the development of game packaging over the decades with a special focus on Swiss video games that were available on the open market.
The digital transfer of game data via online channels in the internet means that video games no longer require physical packaging. 90% of all computer and video games are downloaded or streamed. As a result, the physical packaging of the box, the physical media of the disc, and all of the printed and supplemental guides and promotional materials are no longer needed. Instead, publishers need to go digital and promote their interactive products in many places on and off the Web, communicate with their communities, and provide materials that rival the cover art, booklets, and posters of years past.
No packaging
However, there was a time in the past when games had no packaging and were distributed “digitally” via source code. When the first games for home computers appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s, they did not need packaging. The media were computer magazines like Creative Computing, Computronic Magazine, and Happy Computer. All you bought back then was the source code. This started in the 1970s with books like the groundbreaking 101 BASIC Computer Games (Ahl 1973), which printed the source code for games in the programming language BASIC. They organized competitions and motivated young programmers to create their own games for computer systems like the TI 99 from Texas Instruments, the ZX81 from Sinclair or the C64 from Commodore. The game code was then printed on two to four pages in one of the next issues of the magazine. If you wanted to play the game, you had to type it in at home on your own computer. If you made a mistake, the game would not compile correctly and would not run. Troubleshooting was often very tedious. Nevertheless, many young people made the effort to get the “Listing games” to work.
Since only the best games submitted were printed, a large number of these listing games are now considered irrevocably lost. However, there is still a chance that young programmers of the time will find old floppy disks with their game prototypes from the Listing era. CH-Ludens has so far been able to identify and archive only four of the “Listing games” created in Switzerland. They were printed as winners in magazines and are therefore available as printed source code in the archives of computer magazines. These are the games Jagdszene Chicago (1985) by Christoph Cronimund, Cave Flight (1985) by René Straub, Top Tennis (1985) by Bernhard Dalle and Muri (1987) by Markus Wild and Marius Wey.
Wild and Wey had programmed their game Muri (1987) for the Armstrad CPC 464 computer, which presumably refers to the word “Mauer” (wall) in Swiss German. The listing of the game is described in German and printed in the magazine Happy Computer 12/87 on pages 64-66, 68, 69 and 72 (fig. 1). It was the listing of the month for December 1987, and the editors of Happy Computer praised the game: “Our listing of the month is a real treat for Schneider fans.” And in the second caption they wrote: “Some players claim that MURI is even better than the original game for the well-known arcade machine”. (Happy Computer 12/87, p.64) After further praise for the graphics and sound, the rest of the article on MURI is used to provide the reader with installation, startup, and play instructions, very similar to the instructions for packaged home computer games of those years.

The sports game Top Tennis (1985) for Atari was designed by Bernd Dalle from Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Dalle was born in Kreuzlingen, grew up in Rabat (Morocco) and went to school in Lausanne. His game was published in the magazine Computronic (1986/03-04, p.52-60). The article about his “listing” for Atari 8bit on pages 52-60 consisted of half a page of description and seven pages of code. In the lead the editors wrote: “An exciting tennis simulation for Atari 600 (+64k) and 800 XL. To rekindle the nationwide tennis fever, we are releasing a truly realistic tennis game. This version of the game will challenge even the most experienced ‘racket swingers’ in terms of stroke repertoire, timing, feeling for the ball and playing tactics, playing technique and wit.” (Computronic 1986/03-04, p.52-60) Again, there is only a minimal review of the game in the introduction; most of the short article again is used to explain the controls and instructions to potential players for starting and playing the game. However, a specially created illustration by the editorial staff of the magazine greatly enhances the game and tries to give the reader an idea of the game (fig. 2).

There was also a Swiss listing for the British homecomputer Sinclair ZX81. The game Cave Flight (1985) was a shoot’em’up that was printed in the June/July 1985 issue of Homecomputer magazine on pages 55 and 56. The short description was followed by a code listing that was only 1.5 pages long. The subject matter was somewhat unusual. “Fly your plane safely through the cave! On an exploratory flight through unknown territory, you have accidentally passed through a giant gate into a cave with a huge amount of diamonds at the bottom. Try to collect as many of them as possible by flying your plane over them.” (Homecomputer 1985/6-7, p.55-56) The description was illustrated with a very coarse-grained black and white photograph of two jets to stimulate the imagination. The author René Straub had already written his Cave Flight in January/February 1985.
However, the first published Swiss “listing” (according to current research) was written by Ralph Cronimund. He wrote his game for the Texas TI 99 computer. Jagdszene (1985) was published six months after being written in May/June 1985 by Computronic magazine on pages 57-62. The headline of the article reads: “Chicago’s most feared escapee, Dale Dieb (thief), has broken out of prison. You, as Commissioner Capture, now have the task of catching this villain.” (Computronic 1985/5-6, p.57-62) The whole article consists of one page with a description and an illustration of a prisoner reading Computronic in his cell. This page is followed by 4.5 pages of code as a code “listing”.
As early as the late 1970s, manufacturers and publishers began marketing their computer games on data carriers for so-called datasettes and floppy disk drives. This also marked the beginning of the “box art” era for computer games. The boxes were decorated with artistic designs. In the beginning, there were no rules. And as is often the case with the emergence of new industries, computer games initially borrowed heavily from other classic media such as books and movies. The pixel art of a game screen never really impressed anyone. A cover was too good a place for just pixels, so pixel screens were ignored and very classic, usually very realistic scenes were invented for box covers, similar to what was done for a book or movie poster at the same time. Even for the listings that influenced the home computer market for a while, computer magazines deliberately did not use pixel screens from the game, but instead created funny scenarios as cartoon illustrations to give players an ideal image of the game. They often used heroic characters or striking and impressive objects such as airplanes, and spaceships.
First game packaging for consoles
The design of all parts of game packaging was deliberately based on other (older) entertainment media such as movie posters, book covers, especially paperbacks, vinyl records, and VHS video cassettes (Forster 2020:68). The very first physically purchasable video games, however, sought to establish their own brand not primarily through graphics, but through a clear ID for their hardware and software. They numbered their games and released them as uniformly designed series. The console manufacturers were several years ahead of the computer manufacturers. Fairchild Channel F and Saba (in Europe) were the first to release a series of 26 and 23 video game cartridges. Tha data carriere was a yellow plastic case, the packaging of which was primarily characterized by the number of the game within the series. Philips took a similar approach with the Videopac series for the Magnavox Odyssey 2 console and the Philips Videopac G7000 (in Europe and South America), which was a continuation of the Magnavox Odyssey console. The cartridge was black, numbered and had no other distinctive design (fig. 3). The packaging fort he cartridge, however, was a cardboard box that tried to attract customers with colorful fantasy scenes from the game (fig. 4).


Only with Atari (2600 and VCS) does the packaging really become a fantasy portal for the game. The sophisticated graphics literally draw you into the game world and make you dream of adventures and dangerous challenges. It is no longer about a series of games, but about the individual game world that emerges from the shells and modules (fig. 5). For the console games of all the subsequent platforms of those years, graphics professionals were hired to create designs that drew upon the pop culture repertoire of the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in high-quality and culturally sophisticated design (fig. 6).


Simple audio cassette cases for home computers
At the same time, computer games were different. They were packaged simply, and instructions could be hand-copied and typed. In the beginning, many were simply photocopied in black and white, such as Sierra’s Mystery House (1980) and Ultima (1981) (cf. Forster 2020:70). The games for the Apple II and Tandy TRS80 computers initially had no boxes at all; they came on thin floppy disks that were simply inserted into flat paper sleeves. The same applied to some of the C64 games that came on floppy disks. These sleeves also served as covers with the title on them. Sierra Online and others then began packaging their disks in a clear sleeve for shipping and retail; they placed it in a Ziploc bag to protect the fragile disks.
Apart from Saba and Philips, no console games were produced in Europe. In the early 1980s, however, the first home computer games were produced, starting in the UK and France. The computers from Sinclair (ZX81 and ZX Spectrum), BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC and Commodore C64 used audio tapes as data storage for some years. The first games for these machines were nothing else than cassettes that were sold by mail order. It was sufficient to pack the game cassettes in the same transparent polystyrene plastic case as the music cassettes (fig. 7). It was inexpenisive, and the cassette was accompanied by a small folded paper insert, which often contained a short photocopied instruction booklet. If you were lucky, it might also have contained an ASCII graphic or a hand-drawn logo.
As the potential of these games for the video game market was recognized, the added material became a printed brochure with a cover on the front, a blurb on the back, and minimal instructions on the inside pages. And increasingly, professional graphic designers and artists were hired to design the covers, as had previously been the case with console games (cf. Bitmap Brothers 2023:12). One of the first color illustrations was Steinar Lund’s artwork for the game QS Asteroids (1981) by Quicksilva. Like him, virtually all cover artists of those years used airbrushes, brushes, and acrylics in their work to achieve realistic effects for explosions, fire, smoke, metallic surfaces, nature, and sunsets (ibid). The goal was to support the player’s imagination and help them interpret the game, as the pixel graphics of the game itself remained very simple and visually unimpressive. Until the 1990s, cover artists made sure that the imagination of the game box viewers was stimulated, and that they could immediately and imaginatively immerse themselves into the pixel world of the games of those years (cf. Freeman 2023). Early computer games also often included bonus material in the box, from enchanted stones to replica coins to secret decoding wheels in order to draw players into their world.

Box Art and Cover Artists
Swiss-born Oliver Frey was one of the most famous video game box artists of the early 1980s. Though he did not call himself an artist, but a commercial illustrator. Born in 1948, Frey came to England with his parents in 1956. His parents were from Ticino and lived near Zurich, so Oliver was fluent in Italian and German. When the family moved to England, he was immediately fascinated by British comics like Dan Dare, the pilot of the future by Eagle Comics. He went to school in Wembley, trained as a graphic artist and after doing the compulsory army service in Switzerland, he eventually attended film school in London (cf. Kean 2016). To make a living during that time, he designed war comics for the War Picture Library series by Fleetway (later IPC). He had to draw war events according to a script that was handed to him. The illustrations were very convincing and Oliver Frey received more assignments. This is how he began a career as an artist. He was able to do many strips and cover illustrations for the War Picture Library and established himself as a freelance comic writer for IPC. He was the art editor for Look&Learn and took over the comic Trigan Empire at IPC in 1975. By the second half of the seventies, his work reached a large audience and he was commissioned to create the pre-title sequence for Superman. The Movie (1978) as a comic strip from the 1930s. This was a big success. At the same time in the seventies, Oliver Frey created erotic art for gay magazines, partly with the pseudonym Zach, but he wasn’t happy with a pseudonym and started to sign the artwork with his real name.
In 1983 OIiver Frey, his partner Roger Kean and brother Franco Frey moved to Ludlow, a small medieval town in Shropshire. Franco researched British games for a German publisher who wanted to import games and software. Franco found that only specialist stores stocked ZX-Spectrum games. So, he came up with the idea to found a mail order company and distribute ZX-games for which was a growing demand. Oliver, Franco und Roger Kean formed a company they called Crash Micro Games Action. The magazine featured short descriptions of the games and advertised them on brillantly designed mail oder advertisement pages. Oliver’s illustrations were essential for success. Their fanbase loved them. A few months later in 1984, they founded a magazine for C64 game with the famous Zzap!64. Soon enough WH Smith asked them to expand those mail order mags into real magazines with at least 16 pages. They did and never looked back. Kean and the two Freys founded Newsfield Limited as their publishing company that edited the two successful game magazines Crash for ZX games (fig.9) and Zzap!64 for Commodore C64 games. Later on, more magazines for different game machines and specific genres followed. Oliver Frey then worked for many years as illustrator for Newsfield Publications, some of his covers became famous far above the fanbase (ibid.). When Newsfield Publications entered the game business with subsidiary label Thalamus a year later in 1984, Frey was able to design most box art for the game packaging (see Bitmap Brothers 2023:92ff.). Oliver Frey and his incredible covers became synonymous with the 8-bit era of the 1980s. Among the many, he designed the impressive cover for the C64 game Armalyte (1988) and game Sanxion (1989) (fig. 8).


There was a business connection to Swiss born publisher Richard M. Holmes, who took over two C64 games from Thalamus and published them on the Amiga with his game label Black Legend. Holmes had the two C64 games Summer Camp and Winter Camp ported to the Amiga in 1993 (Suter 2024e). For the C64 versions of Thalamus, Oliver Frey had already created the design and packaging in his own comic style (fig. 10). For the Amiga versions, his graphics with the sporty mouse Maximus was used for the cover and provided with an additional frame for the new publisher Black Legend (fig. 11).


Individual manufacturers then began to experiment and invented smaller cardboard and plastic folding boxes for the tapes, sometimes still with the cassette sleeve, sometimes without, so that the cassettes could be placed directly into the polystyrene folding box. These formats offered a bit more room for cover art and instructions. Some games also included a number of inserts, such as posters and comics, and used larger case formats. For example, the Amiga game Eliminator (1988), converted by LINEL, came in a cardboard box, the 3 ½ inch floppy disk was placed in a thin plastic insert, which in itself was designed to hold two cartridges of the C64 version, and a large schematic of fighter jets was included as an insert. For Garrison (1987), the manufacturers used a lightweight hinged plastic box with an insert form for a 3 ½ inch floppy disk on the right and space for a manual on the left (fig.13). The tray is impressive since it was suitable for all three disk formats of those years: cartridges, 5 ¼ inch and 3 ½ inch disks. The front and back covers were simply inserted into a transparent plastic sleeve that was integrated into the box.
Individual productions went far beyond the usual, as in the case of the Swiss publisher LINEL. At the end of the 1980s, Markus Grimmer produced an oversized plastic box for the game Kaiser (1989) (fig. 12), which looked and opened like a book and also contained an entire board game that could be played alongside the computer game. The board was a six-piece medieval map of Germany. (cf. Suter 2024d) The video game itself came on two floppy disks with the note “Amiga conversion by LINEL 1989”. Also included was a manual and a leaflet with some important hints for the Amiga version. Relatively few copies of this big box were sold in England. LINEL publisher Markus Grimmer had a hard time convincing retailers to put this oversized box on their shelves. In Germany the unusual product sold a little better despite its physical size. In the USA, the game was only released in a normal box.

| Type of packaging | Platforms | Period | Swiss Games |
| No packaging | Listing Games | 1970-1986 | 4 |
| Small cartridge cases | First Console Games | 1976-1983 | – |
| Compact cassette case | Homecomputer Games | 1980-1990 | 5-10 |
| Polystyrol folding box | Homecomputer Games | 1983-1990 | 3 |
| Cardboard/Polystyrol folding box | Console Games | 1985-1995 | 1 |
| Mini cardboard box | Homecomputer Games | 1988-1995 | ? |
| Small cardboard box (Euro box) | Computer Games (Home, PC) | 1988-1995 | 20 |
| Big cardboard box (Big box) | Computer Games (Home, PC) | 1988-2005 | 30 |
| Jewel Case | Console and Computer Games | 1995-2000 | 20 |
| Poly Box | Console and Computer Games | 2000- heute | 5-10 |
| Special Packaging | Console and Computer Games | 2010-heute | 1 (multiple) |
| DLC | All electronic Games | (2010-heute) | all |
Table 1: The most common packaging for electronic games from 1970 to the present
Cardboard boxes
Starting in 1988, cardboard boxes became the unofficial standard for computer games on the C64, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple, and IBM PC platforms. The more complex games used more material and carrier media, so the boxes grew from small, flat formats to large, thick formats. And the covers were now designed by graphic and comic artists. High quality artwork required larger formats as well. The small 15x18cm box was usually preferred to the large 20x24cm box. The digital size of the games increased too, so that by 1990 there were not only two floppies in the box, but up to eight. In addition, there were large instruction booklets that not only explained how to play the game, but also provided a lot of additional information about the new strategy, simulation, adventure, and role-playing games (cf. Suter 2023a-c). Standardization had not yet taken hold. There were also some editions for C64/128 in mini cardboard boxes of 11x14x2,5cm or second releases of Amiga games in small square boxes of 13x13cm. The fundamental change from the small box may be observed best on the example of Lucasfilm Games. While Maniac Mansion (1987) and Zak McKracken (1989) were still packed in flat and thin cardboard boxes, starting with The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) all further adventure games were sold in the big box.
Looking at Swiss games, surprisingly, LINEL started with a large when their frst game Insanity Fight (1987) was released. The game came in a large and flat box. It measured 23×18 cm, but was only 2.4 cm high, and consisted of a thin cardboard box that could easily be dented when the boxes were stacked (fig. 14). The fact that the illustrated cover was printed separately and glued to the box is particularly evident from the inside edges of the box. At the same time, many games were being shipped in smaller boxes, such as the Swiss games The Champ (1988) by LINEL, Rings of Medusa (1989) by Starbyte, and Rolling Ronny (1991) by Starbyte and Virgin Games. LINEL itself quickly switched to the “Euro-Box”, a smaller but relatively thick cardboard box measuring 15×18 cm with a standard height of 3.5 cm. For some years the “Euro-Box” was a quasi-standard for Amiga games.

The entire production of the games for LINEL did not take place in Switzerland, but in England. Publisher Markus Grimmer relied on the experience of the British industry, with which he had built up connections. He used John Allen’s duplication factory in High Wycombe, northwest of London. The name of the production site is only mentioned in the masthead of the LINEL game Necronom (1991): ‘Copytec, England’. Copy and print shop entrepreneur John Allen was over 50 years old which meant that he already had years of experience in duplicating tapes, cassettes and disks, particularly for the Sinclair machines and the Commodore C64. Consecutively, he did all the duplications for the Swiss publisher LINEL. John Allen also organized the boxes and the printing of the sleeves and manuals. The entire production ran through him (cf. Suter 2024a-d).
John Allen made the packaging and sealed it with plastic to make it ready for the stores. The German versions of the LINEL games were also largely produced by Copytec in England and then shipped directly from England to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The other countries produced their own games through distributors. Markus Grimmer explains: “Once or twice we produced in Austria, in Vorarlberg, at a large print shop. It was the only one that printed directly on the box. Everything that came from England was laminated. It was a cardboard box on which they glued the print as paper.” (ibid.)
At that time, all Euro boxes were laminated. Later, Grimmer switched to the production of directly printed boxes. From then on, LINEL ordered the boxes from various manufacturers in Germany. The Italian versions and packaging were produced in collaboration with the Italian studio GENIAS. GENIAS had a duplication plant in Bologna and worked with the Italian publisher Sofitel. LINEL items for Italy were duplicated there fort he local market. These were games on cassettes and duplications of 3 ½ and 5 ¼ inch disks. Later, other specialized duplication facilities were used for CD-ROMs. However, according to Grimmer, LINEL never produced a game for the CD media itself. The later LINEL games on CD-ROM, such as Kaiser Deluxe (1995), were always licensed to other publishers such as Softgold, Software 2000, Gong Verlag and Computec Verlag which then were responsible for the duplication.
Some of the later Swiss Amiga games again were packed in big boxes. This was the case with Traps’n’Treasures (1993) by Roman Werner, which was first published by Starbyte and then by Krysalis (fig.15). The box for the adventure platform game is comparatively thin, but the dimensions correspond to the standard of the large boxes that were also used for PC games in the 1990s. The box of the game Timo’s Castle (2024), which Roman Werner released more than 30 years later as a retro game for the Commodore C64 – both on disk and in a cartridge –comes in a comparatively more compact version of a large box in a thick, sturdy cardboard packaging from Britains’s retro label Bitmap Soft (fig.16). The width and height of the box with 23.5x17x3cm are a bit smaller than a regular Big Box. The lamination of the cover has also been retained and shows a high quality print. The box art was created by artist Ogan Kandemiroglu and designer Darren Doyle.


Replacement of the hand-painted cover art
Until around the year 2000, most game box art was done by hand in an analog format. The base of the artwork was often created using an airbrush. Large areas of color were applied with an airbrush and ink, while fine details were added with a pen and brush. The Swiss graphic artist Oliver Frey (1948-2022), who co-founded the British game publisher Thalamus and published a total of 27 game titles, explained in an interview with Steve Jarrat for Bitmap Brothers: “I like the airbrush because it’s simple and a very quick way to apply color and add effects.” (Bitmap Brothers 2023:98) He recalled a cover with a ship shrouded in fog. The fog was easily applied with a spray gun over the black masts and hull. Using ordinary brushes, it would have taken several days instead of two hours. For a professional illustrator, time was money. But you had to be careful not to lose the depth of color. “I usually make a pencil sketch on the board I’m working on, then spray the background and large areas of color on top, adding the fine details by hand.” (ibid.) Frey mainly used Luma inks, which do not clump but, as he himself said, smell rather nasty. His covers are among the best and most sought after of the genre today.
The Swiss publisher LINEL also placed great emphasis on aesthetically valuable box art. Publisher Markus Grimmer points out that the packaging and cover of Necronom (1990), as well as Skate of the Art (1989), were designed by Englishman Steve ‘The Brush’ Smyth (fig. 17). “We wanted to use professional covers by artists like Smyth. But we also had other graphic artists who did high quality covers and concept art.” (Suter 2024d) John Smyth’s nickname was ‘The Brush’. John Smyth was born in 1946 in Blackheath, Southeast London, England. He worked for Words & Pictures, a studio that designed game packaging for many companies of the time, notably Mastertronic and Melbourne House. He worked as a cover artist for video games from 1983 to 1992. Besides Smyth, Herman Serrano, Dugger (1988), Michael Tschögl, Traders, the Intergalactic Trading Game (1991), and The Neverending Story II (1990), Chris Alan Wilton, The Game of Life (1992), and Roland Petermann also designed covers. Unfortunately, the originals are no longer available. When Markus Grimmer, the publisher of LINEL, left Switzerland a few years ago, he had to clear out his house. He remembers that he had kept many hand-painted covers for the LINEL games. There had been about ten of them, but since no one had shown any interest in them, he had disposed of the originals along with all the other LINEL materials still in his house (Suter 2024d).

The release of the first Deluxe Paint for the Amiga 1000 in November 1985 gradually opened up more digital possibilities for graphic designers. The Deluxe Paint series has been used over the years for all kinds of graphics, especially in games, but also for computer art and computer animation, record covers, music videos and comics. Cover artist Denise Loubet remembers creating the first all-digital cover for a game. In 1993, he used Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Paint) to create the box art for Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993) using a tablet and screen. “There was a brush that felt really good, like oil paint, so I used it to paint, and it worked well.” (Bitmap Brothers 2023: 202) Throughout the 1990s, digital image manipulation tools got better and better, increasingly supplanting traditional art tools. Central to this was the introduction of layers for editing in 1994 with Photoshop 3, Deluxe Paint IV’s competitor. Images could now be divided into multiple layers. This allowed artists to have greater control over the images they created and their reproduction for printing on cardboard (cf. Freeman 2023). And a few years later, around the year 2000, there were hardly any hand-painted originals left, but only, as Denise Loubet had already anticipated in 1993, completely digital images produced with Photoshop and other visual digital tools. They were impressive for their richness of detail, their precise bright colors and shades.
Standardization
Winnie Forster (2020:68ff), who provides an excellent summary of the history of electronic game packaging, notes that a clear standardization of video game packaging only took place between 1995 and 2000. The breakthrough of the CD-ROM as a data carrier, which replaced the floppy disk, brought with it a new packaging: the jewel box, which had been adopted from the music business in a similar way to the compact cassette case. For the time being, however, the big boxes could not be pushed off the shelves. They now simply contained a jewel case with CD-ROM(s), plus booklets and marketing materials as needed. They could also be double or quadruple jewel cases. Eventually, however, the music CD format prevailed over the Big Box. But the transparent plastic case was very fragile, especially for console games, which was especially noticeable with the Dreamcast cases with its smaller but thicker format.

Packaging reduction was an important criterion for Matthias Heubi and Matthias Kohler when they chose a jewel box for their Atari ST game War Heli (1987) in the second half of the 1980s (fig. 18). One of the two young developers, Matthias Heubi, had attended the Swiss Business Office Fairs of those years and was familiar with the standard packaging formats for media and data carriers. So the two of them packaged their game in a jewel box like those used for audio CD-ROMs at the time. However, their game was not pressed onto a CD – Atari and Amiga did not yet have CD-ROM drives – but onto a floppy disk. And the disk with the label of their publisher Argonica was put into a thin plastic mold that fit exactly into the jewel box. The two developers also designed the cover as a leaflet with instructions inside, and the back of the box itself with their own graphics, descriptions, and screenshots from the game. This game box is among the first of its kind and is clearly a well-made product down to the last detail from a time when there were no real standards for video games.
LINEL had similar ideas in 1988. The two games Crack (1988) and Dugger (1988) also came in jewel cases with a cover sheet. However, the 3 ½ inch disks had no special holder in the plastic case and slid around inside, as the case itself was intended for a CD-ROM or a 5 ¼ inch disk as used in Britain for later ZX-Spectrum and C64 games. The same system as Warheli (1987) with a small plastic case and a thin plastic mold for the Amiga disk was also used for Giganoid (1988) by Swiss Computer Arts in St. Margrethen. The leaflet and the backside of the disk were structured in the same way as Warheli, with bilingual instructions in the leaflet and screenshots of the game and a description on the backside.
Double up and head towards the Poly Box
While PC and Mac games have long been double-packaged in jewel cases, which in turn are packaged in a large box, console game makers have searched for and found a new format: the polybox. It is the size of a paperback book, can be opened like a book, and is made of soft but durable polypropylene plastic. It measures a uniform 19 x 13.5 cm and is about 14 mm thin. It holds two CD-ROMs and a small manual. This packaging is used for all games of consoles. Each manufacturer marks their products with a recognizable color: the X-BOX, for example, uses green (since 2002) and then light green from the X-BOX 360 (2005) as well as the X-BOX ONE (2013) and the X-BOX ONE S (2016). PS4 games are also instantly recognizable in blue, PS5 games have a white logo background and come in a transparent blue box. And Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 games have a red spine and a red logo. This packaging product is known by different names: Keep-Case, Amaray Case, Poly-Case or Poly-Box. It is used not only for console and PC games, but also for movies, both for DVDs and Blue Ray Discs. With Nintendo, the packaging for Wii games was white and had a small holder for the memory card. For the Wii and the Sony PS3 consoles, printed instructions were first omitted, and today there are practically none to be found (cf. Suter 2023a-c). For the Nintendo Switch, the polybox was reduced in size again (16.5×10 cm), but is still very large for the small memory card (fig. 19/20). Some PC polyboxes go a step further and are completely devoid of media, only offering a code that can be used to download the DLC with. Winnie Forster is convinced that with this concept, “the evolution of packaging has reached its Spartan end point.” (2022:79)


Funnily enough, however, larger specialty and super markets have already found a slightly more advanced iteration of an empty disc. After all, an empty box also takes up a lot of display space in a store. At least in American markets such as Walmart, vouchers or plastic cards – slightly larger than credit cards – have been available for some time. They feature cover art of individual console games as if it was a box. They offer the buyer a code that guarantees the download of the corresponding game from the respective online provider (fig. 21). The store can conveniently hang a large number of vouchers on top of each other. The only remaining advertising space is the cover of the game voucher.

However, as this “end point” is reached, the opposite exceptions are increasingly coming to the fore. Special and collector’s boxes deliberately present certain games as luxury or participation products, filling oversized boxes with toys, jewelry, T-shirts, and other goodies for loyal fans of the game series. However, these elaborate and expensive game editions are usually limited to fewer than 10,000 copies, with the remainder sold as normal. These special collector’s editions are often released to coincide with the launch of a new game and are accompanied by a major advertising campaign to promote the new game. Fans are very happy to buy these special editions, but the rest of the clientele is happy with a normal box or the DLC. The limitation to a few special boxes for enthusiasts and collectors also applies to the indie game scene, which usually cannot afford more, but would like to see their game as a designed physical item, such as the two Swiss games Mundaun (2021) (fig.19) and FAR Lone Sails (2018) (fig.20).
Transition media
As an aside, I would like to mention a little packaging story of my own, which illustrates very well how difficult it was to find new packaging solutions during the transition period of carrier media. The author of this article was the Swiss publisher of edition cyberfiction from 1999 to 2004, publishing a series of interactive works of electronic literature. It began in 1999 with a book on hyperfiction, accompanied by a CD-ROM with 24 works by German-speaking authors. The innovation here was the reciprocal linking and referencing of book text and places in the digital medium. The medium was a CD-ROM and a website. This publication was edited by a group of interested students at the German department of the University of Zurich, it was published by Stroemfeld Verlag (Suter, Böhler 1999) and sold out within two years. In 2000, a separate folding cardboard was designed for the individual issues 1 and 2 of the cyberfiction series. It contained information about the digital project and a CD-ROM embedded in the cardboard (Berkenheger 2000) (Auer, Döhl 2000). In 2001, for cost reasons, a simple, flexible, thin plastic case (thinner than a jewel case) was chosen, in which the CD-ROM could be dispensed via a small clip. The products of this third publication in the edition cyberfiction series were then produced “on demand” (Gassner 2001). The edition cyberfiction 4 of Spätwinterhitze by Frank Klötgen (2004), a hyperfiction that was also referred to as a game in the reviews, again received a flat folding box like numbers 1 and 2 (fig. 22). However, the thin box was not made of cardboard but of plastic and came in a smaller format chosen by Voland&Quist Verlag in Leipzig, which cooperated with the Swiss publisher update. The cover was made of light cardboard. It contained the title and picture on the outside and a description of the new product on the inside.

In the transition period around the millennium, media carriers and formats were replaced very quickly, forcing producers and vendors to develop new formats. Most of these formats for multimedia products offered interesting and exciting new solutions and certainly attracted attention, but for various reasons (economics, niche players, online publishing), they were unable to establish themselves in the market. The problems seemed to increase further when replacements of carrier media took place within a short period of time (CD-ROM > DVD > Blue Ray) until finally DLC and data streaming became the standard in virtually all areas. But in fact, the physical format of the round pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data and is a type of read-only memory for three consecutive data carriers helped immensely in finding a standard for packaging games in polypropylene boxes for a period of 20 years before physical media became obsolete.
A box isn’t just a box
50 years of game distribution shows that all the stops were pulled out to get the games to people. As soon as it became clear in the late 1970s that there was a market for video games, marketing and distribution strategies for the new products were put in place. The amateur community of “listing games” and the first home computer games on home-recorded tapes and disks became increasingly professional. Images in the form of drawn and painted graphics were particularly important; they had to be spectacular and emotionally charged and stand out from other media. The cover of a game had to capture the imagination and paint a picture of the world of the game in a way that computer and in-game graphics at the time could not do. The simple pixel world of the 1980s, so characteristic of in-game interactions, only found its place on the backs of boxes and covers in the form of screenshots intended to show how the game would feel. On the front, the fantastic and often dramatic covers by artists like Oliver Frey and John “the brush” Smyth were used. Until well into the 1990s, they were painted by hand, usually with an airbrush and colored ink. It was only by the end of the 1990s around 2000 that digital imaging for game packaging became fully established.

The boxes themselves went through a kind of evolution, from small to large and then back to small, until the physical form of packaging became obsolete and as superfluous as it had been in the early days of “listing games”. Over the decades, boxes and sleeves of all sizes and materials were created, from small plastic cases for tapes to large cardboard boxes that could also hold jewel cases. There was never a single standard for packaging that really caught on. Instead, there were always several formats that competed with each other but also made the market more interesting (fig. 23). This was partly due to the economic opportunities for producers and distributors. There was always a strong focus on existing entertainment media and data carriers, and quite simply on the existing formats produced by the packaging industry of those years. Audio cassettes and their plastic cases were already cheaply mass-produced for the music industry when the game industry in Europe, mostly in Britain and France, started using them to package their ZX and C64 games. The same was later true for jewel cases for CD-ROMs, which were also adopted by the music industry.
In between, however, there were a lot of adaptations and in-house developments, which today give a rather chaotic picture of the physical game market of the 1980s and 1990s but always had to do with the respective computer systems and their different data carriers, as well as their capacities and their progressive development, which constantly demanded new packaging and packaging strategies, and also needed inventive marketing strategies. Whether made of plastic, polystyrene or thick or thin cardboard, whether with a small leaflet, with an eye-catching laminated cover as a print of an original hand-painted graphic, whether as a purely digitally created envelope or slipped into a transparent poly box, a game box is never just a box.
Ludography
Armalyte (1988), Thalamus, Thalamus.
Asteroids (1981), Atari, Atari.
Bulldog (1986), Gremlin Graphics Software, Gremlin Graphics Software.
Cave Flight (1985), René Straub, Homecomputer 1985/6-7, p.55-56 (Listing).
Crack (1988), LINEL, LINEL.
Chuckie Egg (1984), [MSX], A&F Software, A&F Software.
Dugger (1988), LINEL, LINEL.
FAR Lone Sails (2019), [Nintendo Switch], Okomotive, Mixtvision.
Garrison (1987), Digital Dreams, Rainbow Arts Software.
Geoff Capes Strongman (1985), Martech, Martech.
Insanity Fight (1987). LINEL, LINEL.
Jagdszene Chicago (1985), Ralph Cronimund, Computronic 1985/5-6, p.57-62 (Listing).
Journey of a Roach (2013), Koboldgames, Daedalic Entertainment.
Joust (1982), Williams Electronics, Atari.
Kaiser (1989), LINEL, LINEL.
Little Computer People (1985), [C64], Activision, Activision.
Maniac Mansion (1987), Lucasfilm Games, Lucasfilm Games.
Mundaun (2021), [Nintendo Switch], Hidden Fields, MMW Interactive.
MURI – Breakout für Profis (1987), Markus Wild und Marius Wey, Happy Computer 12/ 87 No. 50, p. 64-72 (Listing).
Mystery House (1980), On-Line Systems, Sierra Entertainment.
Necronom (1990), LINEL, LINEL.
Oh No! More Lemmings (1992), [Acorn], DMA Design, Psygnosis.
QS Asteroids (1981), Quicksilva Ltd., Quicksilva Ltd.
Rings of Medusa (1989), Starbyte Software, Starbyte Software.
Rolling Ronny (1991), Starbyte Software, Starbyte Software.
Sanxion (1989), [ZX Spectrum], Thalamus, Thalamus.
Skate of the Arts (1989), LINEL, LINEL.
Stealth ATF (1990), Activision, Nintendo.
Summer Camp (1990), [C64], Thalamus, Thalamus.
Summer Camp (1993), [Amiga], Black Legend, Kompart
The Champ (1988), LINEL, LINEL.
The Game of Life (1992), LINEL, LINEL.
The Neverending Story II (1990), LINEL, LINEL.
The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Lucasfilm Games, Lucasfilm Games.
Timo’s Castle (2024), Bitmap Soft, Balboa Software Productions.
Traders, the Intergalactic Trading Game (1991), LINEL, LINEL.
Traps’n’Treasures (1993), Starbyte Software, Starbyte Software.
Top Tennis (1985), Bernd Dalle, Computronic, 1986/03-04, p.52-60 (Listing).
Ultima (1981), Origin Systems, California Pacific Computer Company.
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993), Looking Glass Studios, Origin Systems.
War Heli (1987), Matthias Heubi und Matthias Kohler, Argonica.
Winter Camp (1992), [C64], Thalamus, Thalamus.
Winter Camp (1993), [Amiga], Black Legend, Kompart.
Zak McKracken (1989), Lucasfilm Games, Lucasfilm Games.
Magazines
Computronic (1984-1987), Roeske Verlag (later Tronic Verlag), https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Computronic%22
Crash Magazine (1984-1991), Newsfield Publications (later Europress), founded by Roger Kean, Oliver Frey and Franco Frey, https://www.crashonline.org.uk/
Creative Computing (1974-1985), Creative Computing Press (later Ziff Davis Publishing), founded by David Ahl, https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
Eagle Comic (1950-1994), Hulton Press (later IPC Magazines), Southport/London.
Happy Computer (1983-1990), Markt & Technik, https://www.kultboy.com/Happy-Computer-Zeitschrift/22
Zzap!64 (1985-1992), Newsfield Publications (later Europress), founded by Roger Kean, Oliver Frey and Franco Frey, https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine
Literature
Ahl, David H. (1973). 101 BASIC Computer Games. Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard Massachusetts.
Auer, Johannes und Reinhard Döhl (2000), kill the poem! Digitale visuell-konkrete poesie und poem art. Edition cyberfiction 2, update Verlag, Zürich.
Berkenheger, Susanne (2000), Hilfe! Ein Hypertext aus vier Kehlen. Edition cyberfiction 1, update Verlag, Zürich.
Bitmap Brothers (2023). The Art of the Box. Bath: Bitmap Books Ltd.
Blankenheim, Björn (hg.) (2020). Game Designers & Software Artists. Inszenierung und Selbstverständnis der Künstler/innen bei ELECTRONIC ARTS, 1983-1988. Verlag Werner Hülsbusch, Glückstadt.
Forster, Winnie (2020). Vom Ziploc-Beutel zum DLC: Geburt, Wachstum und Endstufen der Spielpackung. In: Blankenheim (2020), S. 67-80.
Freeman, Will (2023), From Airbrush to ZBrush: The Evolution of Game Box Art, Blog on Bitmap Books,
https://www.bitmapbooks.com/blogs/news/from-airbrush-to-zbrush-the-evolution-of-game-box-art, September 4, 2023.
Gassner, Oliver (2001), tExtraTouren. Edition cyberfiction 3, update Verlag, Zürich.
Klötgen, Frank (2004), Spätwinterhitze. Edition cyberfiction 4, Voland & Quist, Leipzig.
Suter, Beat und Michael Böhler (1999); (Hg.). Hyperfiction. Hyperliterarisches Lesebuch: Internet und Literatur. Mit CD-ROM. Basel/ Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld/ Nexus.
Suter, Beat (2023a), “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 1: A Serious Manual”, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/996, Bern, 30.10.2023.
Suter, Beat (2023b), “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 2: Story Booklets”, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/1021, Bern, 06.11.2023.
Suter, Beat (2023c), “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 3: From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter”, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/1053, Bern, 06.11.2023.
Suter, Beat (2024a), LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 1: A complete list of LINEL’s games”, revised and expanded edition, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/983, Bern, 29.05.2024.
Suter, Beat (2024b), LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 2: Collaborations and Unreleased Games”, revised and expanded edition, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/1296, Bern, 29.05.2024.
Suter, Beat (2024c), LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 3: From EUREKA! to the Neverending Story – People and Work at LINEL, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/2604, Bern, 24.06.2024.
Suter, Beat (2024d), LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 4: The Publishing Business, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/2743, Bern, 01.07.2024.
Suter, Beat (2024e), Richard M. Holmes und die Hochpreisinsel Schweiz, in: Confoederatio Ludens, Blog, chludens.hypotheses.org/3073, Bern, 16.09.2024.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Beat Suter (May 5, 2025). A Box is not just a Box: Game packaging in the course of time. Confoederatio Ludens. Retrieved November 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13v22

Postscript:
Since this article was written, the Galactic Empires developers have held three new play sessions. The author of this article had the honor of participating in one of these sessions on May 17. However, he seemed to lack strategic understanding. In any case, his planets and fleets were captured first. In the end, Radek and Peter fought a relentless duel for the universe, and Peter came out on top, as he often does. This may prove that the strategy simulation game can still be played with enthusiasm today!
—Beat Suter
Hi Daniel
Thank you for your attention and the link from your great site.
Hi James
Thank you, I will gladly correct this.
Best, Beat
Hi Beat.
Thanks for the article. We have reported both on this English-language as well as the German-language version:
https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-06-00013-EN.html
https://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2025-06-00013-DE.html
Little typo found: “Wild and Wey had programmed their game Muri (1987) for the Armstrad CPC 464 computer…” (Amstrad)
All the best!
Daniel
Fig. 3 & 4 are showing separate games for separate systems (cartridge of Philips Videopac game #4 vs. box cover of Interton VC 4000 game #3).