Box Art Brut

The no-rules design of early computer games

[Feb 2019: A more recently edited version of this article is found on lizadaly.com]

Visual design is central to modern gaming for both independent and AAA studios, where art teams may outnumber engineers and marketing is well understood. Even games that may never ever see the inside of a physical box still get “cover art,” in dozens of aspect ratios and sizes, for distribution into digital channels and promotion online and off.

But there was a time when gaming was so new that all of this was unknown. Were games sold in computer hobbyist stores? Book stores? Toy stores? Through mail-order? Was a videogame more like a book or more like a movie? Should the aesthetic be futuristic or familiar?

There’s well-deserved regard for early console box art, particularly Atari’s signature montages. But not everyone wanted to follow the Atari style, and there was a lively home-brew trade in early computer games before the industry became commercialized. Literally anyone could sell games on disk or cassette tape by throwing a booklet and some media into a plastic baggie.

I’m fascinated by the fertile period between ’79 and ’83, when computers and consoles went mainstream and hundreds of game companies sprung up overnight. These developers were often obscure — sometimes just a P.O. box and a single teenager—but a few racked up enormous profits. And while there were no real rules yet, there was one agreed-upon convention: graphics were primitive and were never to be shown on the cover. This led to an awful lot of experimentation, for better or worse.