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As the latest initiative in its game preservation program, Good Old Games.com (GOG) has announced that select titles will now include 3D models of their original Big Box packaging, complete with full-size templates to print out and assemble at home.
Working in collaboration with Benjamin Wimmer's Big Box Collection - a one-person project that has been scanning and uploading classic PC packaging for the past 10 years - GOG hopes that this extra will allow players to recreate the halcyon days of PC game ownership, where new games would arrive housed in hefty cardboard, ready to clutter up bedroom shelves and bookcases everywhere.
Each game in the range has had all sides of its original packaging (including spines) scanned in high-definition. These scans, which arrive alongside your purchase, can then be printed out and reassembled at home. Admittedly, bog-standard paper may not quite replicate that Big Box experience - but if you're willing to invest a little cash in the process, you should be able to find a print shop that can transfer the art to stronger materials.
Currently, the Big Box endeavour is only available for five titles in GOG's range: Armikrog (2015), Descent (1995), Myst (1993), Hitman: Codename 47 (2000), and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992), but GOG will be expanding its range of compatible titles in future. In addition to the print-at-home templates, each game includes an interactive, 3D-rendered model of the original packaging that can be opened with a PC or Mac's native model viewer.
When you talk to any collector, especially in the gaming community, it is typically the tangibility of holding a real item that sparks the most nostalgia. Purchasing games back in the 1990s had an almost unreplicable process of excitement - from taking the game to the store counter, to reading the back blurb on the way home, and finally opening the box and installing the game - reading the instruction manual while you waited for the install to complete (it took forever)
Of course, GOG's Preservation Program cannot recreate all elements of this experience. Some of them are almost entirely extinct, or simply misty-eyed nostalgia. But with the implementation of small ideas such as these, collectors can retain some element of physicality in an increasingly immaterial industry. As for me personally, I can't be trusted. And would no doubt end up sitting on, losing, or otherwise ruining these new boxes just as I did their 1991 predecessors.