American Box Art Sucks

[Kenjitsuka]

I love Extra Punctuation, but this was very image heavy and that dampened my love a bit.

Yathzee, you Charismatic Stallion, you!
Next time please rely a bit more on text for humour as usual.

 

[JuryNelson]

The thing about America is that it is fucking huge.

When they brought over the Office, they had to change quite a bit about it before it would be palatable?not to An American Audience, but to an incredibly massive and varied one. Lowest Common Denominator doesn't mean that we're a pack of idiots, it means that we're a nation that's so loosely connected, there's very little that we can all legitimately enjoy.

Design by Committee happens so often here because we usually Enjoy by Committee, too.

That's changing, it should be noted. Inception, Mad Men, Even Kanye West. The vision of a single auteur seen through from beginning to end is coming out more quality, and getting the critical recognition and commercial success we hope for it.

As for why we hate the French, it's partly that we're jealous of their cheap wine and delicious bread, and partly because they take every chance they can to just up and quit working, and that looks too much like laziness to be ignored.

Europe has twice as many people and a dozen times as many languages, and completely different cultures every few hundred miles too. Don't try selling that varied culture crap.

That's a good point, but you're all much closer together than we are. If you don't get a joke, you can shout out your window, "Oi! What they laughin for?" and someone will explain it to you.

If Americans don't get a joke on TV, they just start writing letters.

 

[tzze]

We need big face on box! If there is not big face on the box then we get confused. We say, "WHAT IS THIS IS IT CEREAL." Big face on box tells American brain, "Do not eat! This is heroic journey not breakfast food. You will identify with the massive face and/or breasts on this box and want to become giant head and/or chest for heroic journey adventure. Thank you." Then we understand and are able to place contents of box into correct hole.

 

[twicesliced]

What's even worse is in Canada, we get shitty US cover art twice because they have to include French inserts as well!

Anyway, here's one of my personal favourite offences...

North America:
<img src="http://images.wikia.com/vsrecommendedgames/images/0/0e/Egg.jpg" width=343>

Japan:

 

[AllHailShake]

You know, call me crazy, but it seems to me that we can pretty much trace these issues back to a few select films.

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1416%2ba-new-hope-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-iv-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1417%2bthe-empire-strikes-back-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-v-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

<img src=http://popartuk.parklanecomputing.co.uk/getframe.php?itmSRC=http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lgfp1418%2breturn-of-the-jedi-original-movie-score-star-wars-episode-vi-poster.jpg&itmWidth=64&itmHeight=90&mouldURL=http://www.popartuk.com/images/framing/repeating/2.jpg&mouldWidth=2.4>

 

[cheywoodward]

Please Note: This is all just guesswork.

The most likely explanation that I can think of is a very simple one (at least for the 1980s and 90s cover art). The answer is that the average American gamer of the 80s and 90s was younger than his Japanese and European counterparts. The reason for this is videogame crash of 1983, which was caused by the over-saturation of the videogame market with hundreds of poorly made games. Home console gaming effectively died out and until the NES was released in 1985 new videogames in America were nonexistent. Japan and Europe didn't experience this crash on the same level as America and therefore, while American gamers moved on and found other hobbies, gamers in Japan and Europe kept playing. When combined with the fact that the NES was marketed towards children and not adults the age of the average American gamer was much younger than it was in Japan and Europe. Teenagers would be more attracted to violence and action than a well drawn piece of art that portrays the themes and elements of the game. Therefore publishers ordered the remaking of box art for America in order to make it more "action packed" and "cool" or, in other words, kinda crappy. As for the more recent games, no clue. Maybe we really do just have horrible taste and I just wrote a paragraph for no reason.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

I havent looked at box art in sooo long... And it always seemed normal to me... Maybe we should start shooting and see if we hit the right people

 

[PorkChopXpress]

I've seen some horrid bluray art that came from the UK, so nobody is innocent as far as bad cover art goes.

 

[Deacon Cole]

None of those covers grab my attention. Therefore, they must be for shitty games.

 

[Snotnarok]

Leave it to Yahtzee to talk about a game that I thought no one knew about, Flashback. For someone to bring up that gem in this day and age brings a certain warmth to my heart that someone actually played it. Betting he played aproper version, that wasn't the slow SNES version too.

Anyway, this happened to SO many games, hell Sega was notorious for this with their games, Ecco, Phantasy Star 2 and 4 these games were not only redone but they were redone by Boris Vallejo the famous painter. I'm not making it up, I got the PSIV box right here and there's his bloody signature.

While the art is all well and good, the Japanese version of PSIV has a better cover, it's ..well, more accurate. And to make things more insane, if you open the manual to PSIV it has JAPANESE ANIME style art so what the heck were they thinking?? Heck the game is filled with anime style because the story is told through comicbook cells to tell the story vs sprites.

 

[hyperlasers]

Mass Effect 2. We've all seen the non-American box art, right?

 

[RockPlazaCentral]

I remember thinking that the cover of the instruction booklet of Metroid Prime should have been on the cover of the box instead of Samus just standing there. The instruction booklet cover was much more dynamic.

When I visited Japan in Nov. 2002, I noticed that the Japanese made the choice I preferred.

 

[gphjr14]

I'm too busy watching/playing to be overly concerned about the cover art.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Yeah, I'm going to side with the folks that mention the primary style of American movie posters (and the slavish devotion that American box-art creators have to them) with their, as another poster put it, "One man will...." centrism. We don't like big ensemble casts here, what can I say?

But seriously, the utter hack-job Out of This World got for its boxart made me gnash my teeth, especially the SNES version (which also looks nothing like the main character). Thankfully that's been the worst example ever, and certainly box-art designers have learned their lesson and will never again create such an affront to-

Amnesia.
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/9024/boxartj.jpg

Guess what one belongs to who.

...if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go fellate an oncoming bus now. *storms out*

 

[Robborboy]

You should have brought up resident evil 4 boxart.

here is the pal version:

It's very stylise and a litte scary too.

Now here is the american:

So generic. Nothing about this cover is good. It's so damn bland.

American box art is just more descriptive of the game.
So if you are browsing the store, you see both of these game cases, knowing nothing about the game, you are more likely to get a better idea of what the game is from it.

It's not a creepy dark game where you are in a empty desolate place like the top cover suggests, you are in a village packed with zombies carrying chainsaws, like the bottom.

I don't know, the first one definitely conveys the feeling of being alone in an alien and threatening environment, that feeling that something can pop out from any corner at any time.

Completely correct. It conveys something that does not exist at all in the action shooter that is RE4 whereas the American box art shows what it is. An action game

Must be a really slow week if we're sitting around bitching about box art from the DOS era.

True that.

Cover Art is usually irrelevant to buying games as if its on the big display board in shops then its big and you heard about it, if not then you only get to see the side of the box so art is pointless..

Eh? What stores do you go to? Every store I've been to shows the cover not the spine. Some stores like EB Games sometimes have one shelf per console that has only spines showing, but the new releases and so forth are the covers not the spines.

Any Gamestop/EB I go to has such a large amount of games that they stock them so that only the spine is visible.

typical american video game boxart is designed after typical american movie posters, and i think the logic behind those are "shove every characters face on the poster and hopefully people will identify with at least one of them".

secondly, our boxart is NOT meant to convey what the game is about... it is all floaty heads as you said, and it is meant solely to get someone to buy it, with no mind to what the hell its actually about. look at the whole add campaign for dragon age, heavy metal action scenes for a damn RPG, and what does it say about our box art that superimposed witches over a field of swords inside a dragon shaped blood splatter is probably one of the most minimalist boxart designs for recent games? also take the famously atrocious ME2 boxart; not a week after it was shown, forum goers posted their own vastly superior photoshopped boxart pleading for bioware to use that instead, but nope, they had to have as generic a boxart as possible, as apparently no one seems to catch on that doing that makes your game just blend in with all the other floaty head boxarts in the video store.

There is a problem with what you just said. All American boxart DOES tell what the game is about.

Take Enslaved for example. The bottom of the box is covered in red flowers. Red, denoting conflict, strife. But also being represented in such fragile form as a flower. This shows softness, possibly romance. Move up a bit more and on the left side you see ruined buildings. Something wrong has happened. Moving up more, the sky. It is a lightly cloudy blue. This represents that something nice still exists in this broken world.

Now to the characters. There are six total. First you have Monkey. And aggressive look on face, what looks to be metal boxing gloves, and a headband with an ominous red glow. From this alone you can tell he is a fighter, more of a no-nonsense kind of guy. Ready to take something down when the time comes.

With Trip you see a lightly clothed woman, running close behind Monkey with a concerned, piercing look aimed towards Monkey.

And behind them you see a large mechanical beast. It appears to be chasing Monkey and Trip. With Monkey's fierce attitude this shows that there are things bigger than he. Things even he will tackle "cautiously". And that Trip is looking towards him for protection.

The birds and "dragon fly" lend their own part to what the cover-art story is, but I won't bother with it. At this point you either see that you are wrong, or too pig-headed to admit it.

 

[Emily Boogades]

I'm pretty sure people that actually decide what will go on the box are from marketing, or advertising, not the actual graphic arts department, so insulting the people who design it is largely unfair. It's like when you (if you work in retail) are told to go stack a product so that it's a cube, or so that it's an inverted pyramid. It's idiotic, possibly unnecessary, but it's what they want, so you do it so that they will give you money.

I think that, possibly, the difference may have to do with American social relations. First - I don't appreciate Americans on a whole being insulted. It happens a lot, I get it, we're all apparently retarded and violent and we love beer or... whatever it is. That said, Americans do tend to be more detached from the people around them than certain other countries (see: Japan) when it comes to the workplace. I don't know about other people's jobs, or people who love their jobs, start companies with friends, etc, but most people are doing the above: doing what their boss tells them to avoid conflict and to get "teh moneiz." You never ask your quest givers why they can't just go find twenty badger eyes for themselves, you just start mowing down badgers to get them.

Some other countries (and this comes from a place of heavy conjecture, so if I sound intelligent, I'm sorry) tend to have more inclusive attitudes towards work. They work /together/. I'm not saying people in other countries love their jobs like no tomorrow, but there are notable differences in the way that some countries raise their kids in mind to work.

This is an extremely long, rambling post, and I've gotten away from the point. Basically, box art in America may suck - and I'm not saying it does every time because, well, I buy off Steam and there is no box involved - because certain larger companies in America don't give a rat's backend what their graphic design team thinks is a bad idea. Marketing says slap a giant floating head on it to grab people's attention, so you slap a giant floating head on it and die a little more inside, go home, drink, and write a webcomic.

 

[Senaro]

The main one I can think of are all the subtle changes we get in some covers, like Kirby being given an angry face on US ports of his games instead of a smiling one.

 

[Strixvaliano]

As an American I can say that I am not proud of most of the alternate box art that we get. Then again now most of my sales go to steam so I don't really care about box art much anymore.