Serious Player

Six years ago, I had to move from a place  to another one, and I needed a lot of space so I decided to re-organize my stuff and sort it by categories : things I wanted to keep VS things I wanted to throw away. Many old junks have been thrown in the garbage but the hard part was about all my videogames. There was no way for me to throw any of my games away but in the other way, I really needed space and all these boxes were taking so much space ! It was a heavy dilemma for me, but I had to make a choice and I finally find a solution : If I could just fling away the boxes and only keep the disk/cd I would still have the games ! After all, boxes were useless or at best decorative, and there was no other motivation for me than materialist one… Finally I was nearly convinced and proud to be separated from these materialist object which were invading my place, year after year !

Recently, I just felt stupid about this choice because I thought I was making a kind of “preservation of video game heritage”, but in fact, I wasn’t ! Nowadays it is generally easier to get a good “abandonware” copy of any of my old games than get a good scan of their covers or even their handbooks. If you consider this from a player point of view you will probably don’t really think there is much to worry about. If you consider this from a historian point of view, it is a real shame. As an art historian and a game studies researcher I now realised that I have lost precious informations. Video games covers and handbooks embody a part of video game history. I will try to summarize why:

- Marketing and audience : Video game covers are all different depending on which country they are sold. It can help to identify editors marketing approaches according to national audience and local rules/laws and give us some clues. If we take a look at two samples of Carmageddon (1997) back cover : German edition and US edition, you will notice the german one didn’t praised the violent part of the game (for reader who don’t know this game, it’s about car race, bloody crash-car and crushing pedestrians), while the US box did use textual and visual information. The reason why is that the game has been harshly censored in Germany (mature-rated content are also interesting informations you can find in different versions).

- Design and extension of the game : Some games was delivered with goodies inside their box. For instance, Sam & Max: Hit the Road came with a funny handbook, including boardgame, Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter offered a fake valuable coupon for a Keronian ale or Leisure Suit Larry 7 came with its “Odorama” which reproduces contextual smell according to the scene (in fact, the player had to rub one of the 9 areas on the “Odorama” card to create the odor). Collectionors enjoyed these kind of objects very much. Indeed, these goodies embodied the spirit of the game. In 80’s and 90’s, when you got a new video game, you usually take some time to read, or at least to browse, the handbook. Most often, you read it during the installation time (believe me, it took times to install some of these old computer games at the time they were released) and by doing this, you did your first encounter with the game’s world. Handbook was usually the first step before playing a game. It provides you useful informations about the rules of play, but also about the story you will soon be a part of…

- History of technology : A lot of computer video game covers and handbooks displayed information about system requirements you needed in order to run the game on your computer. Many boxes displayed these informations on the corner of the back cover. Such information could be useful to draw a map of technological requirements through the years. It can be also interesting to have such information when you play and analyse an old game with an emulator.

Of course, I’m exaggerating a little bit about the importance of video game boxes and handbooks, but I think that a good historian could get interesting information from such object. From a video game museum perspectives these objects might be as important as the software itself. According your approaches of game studies, I’ll be interested in your opinion about it if you have one, so please send me an email or put your comment below.

For those who are looking for some scan cover of old video game you can check these website:

- Mobygame

- CoverBrowser (Dos Games category)

- Wikipedia Category: Video Game covers