Of Box Art and Imagination

When I was a kid, RPGs were king.  There was nothing quite so much fun as getting together with a bunch of friends, eating pizza, slaying orcs, and getting killed by terrible traps.  My first character was killed by a medusa in the second room of the first dungeon he ever went into.  But RPGs involved coordinating people and rides, so the next best thing was video games.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, when video gaming was still in its relative infancy, there was a wonderful dichotomy between the way video game box art represented the games and how those games looked in real life.  The ability to do computer graphics was extremely limited, and nowhere were those limitations felt more than on home systems.  As a kid, I was forever going to places like Sears or Montgomery Ward and staring at the fascinating images that graced the boxes of those games.  

Now some are probably thinking Sears?  Isn't that where people go to buy tools and tires and things?  More still are probably wondering who, or what a Montgomery Ward is.  Well, those were the places we went in those days, long before the Gamestops of the world came into being, but I digress.  

The boxes of those games contained wondrous images that transported my young imagination to lands of seemingly infinite possibilities.  Of course the art for those games had to be good for in many cases it was all that could attract someone to buy one of these games.  Now make no mistake, I loved many of the games of this era, and I still do.  In the end, the gameplay was what really made me love them and kept me playing, but something had to get me to even buy the darned game in the first place, and that thing was the box art.  No matter how crummy the actual game images on the back of the box might look those pictures on the front still gave hope that the game would be awesome.  Here are a few of my favorites, showing what the front of the box tempted me with and what the I actually got.

Let's start with probably my all time favorite game ever, Atari's Adventure.  Behold the mighty dragon in his maze!  look with awe upon the great castle high on the hill!  I played this thing to death.  Again and again, I would play the random setup version of this game.  I would even make up my own versions of the game where I had to kill all of the dragons then get as many of the items into the gold castle as possible before returning the chalice to end the game.  I was obsessed. 

Adventure: The box cover

Adventure: The reality. :-)

Next we have The Quest for the Rings for the Odyssey 2.  Now this game was not only a video game, but a board game too!  Just look at that box with the warrior deflecting the dragon's flames with his sword and the wizard killing, well whatever that thing is.  This game just looks magical.  Admittedly, I didn't play this one all that much because I didn't have an Odyssey and had to go to one of my friend's houses to play, but not being able to play it all the time may have made it seem even better to me.

The Quest for the Rings:  The box cover

The Quest for the Rings: The Reality

And finally, my holy grail from that time period.  Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:  Cloudy Mountain for the Intellivision.  I was a bit of a D&D nut and would buy just about anything with the D&D logo on it.  I only got to play this a handful of times at the home of one of the kids I was in Boy Scouts with, but I wanted this game more than anything.  Of course I would have needed an Intellivision as well, and those things were really expensive.  I never really got to play this game until much, much later, when I got it as part of the Intellivision Lives compilation for my Game Boy Advance.  In the end it remembered better that it played. :-)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The box cover

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The reality

Now as I've said, I love each of these games in their own way.  And sometimes, even when I'm running around in the amazing landscapes of Skyrim, I still miss them.  I long for the days when my imagination was the Graphics Processing Unit and those box covers beckoned me with sights that the games themselves could never hope to deliver.

Does anyone have any favorite box covers that really inspired them?

Cavern Dragon

This is a new photograph of one of my favorite miniatures.  A great cavern dragon rearing up as if to strike down some unfortunate delvers.  As I get older, I enjoy painting larger miniatures more and more. ;-)

Miniatures Monday

There are undreamed of horrors in the dark places of the earth.  This slime creature dissolves its most recent victim as it flows through long forgotten caverns.

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday is a reclamation project.  Here we have a barbarian miniature that I painted during my senior year in college.  Since that was 22 years ago, I decided to try to spruce it up a bit this year.

1992

2014

Miniatures Monday

Miniatures Monday returns for 2014 with an elven warrior.  Now this certainly isn't going to win me a Golden Demon, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I still haven't decided on whether or not to add grass to the base.  It would certainly make the miniature look better, but tends to make it harder to use in actual play.

Tales of the glory of Christmases long long ago...

Two of the things that I associate the most with Christmas presents from the past are Atari games and Dungeons & Dragons.  Now I can play a lot of those games in a browser.  :-)

I need D&D in a browser too.  Maybe I should look more closely into Roll20.

Merry Christmas (A bit early)

 On this day one hundred and seventy years ago, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was first published.  17 December 1843.

John Cleese - a lecture on Creativity

Miniatures Monday

A fearsome wraith stalks its living prey from beyond the grave!

Happy Thanksgiving!

From the Barbarian Horde!

Dwarven Forge Kickstarter Results

I finally unpacked all of my new Dwarven Forge dungeon tiles last night and used them to build a test dungeon.  This dungeon was built entirely with my kickstarter rewards, and I would say that the results were quite good.  There are certainly enough pieces to do a decent sized layout.  I was tempted to break out my old sets and just keep going, but I think I'll save that adventure for over Christmas. :-)

Miniatures Monday

In benighted chambers far beneath the earth rests this altar of evil, stained with the blood of countless sacrifices!

Who knows?

He has grown very old, but his voice, that hasn't changed one bit.

50 years in time and space

Happy 50th anniversary to Doctor Who.  That I remember the 25th anniversary makes me feel a bit old though...  :-)

Well, I've seen the 50th anniversary special, and they cheated.  Of course they cheated.  With time travel you can always cheat.  It's not the same show from my youth, similar yes, and still tied to it's heritage, but it's different.  That doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy it.  I did.  But they still cheated. :-)

Miniatures Monday

A dreadful cyclops hurls the skulls of his victims at his enemies!

Another of my very old miniatures.  I got this one for Christmas in 1982 as part of one of the Grenadier Dungeons and Dragons Action Art sets.  Those were the sets that came with paints.  I was always very excited about the idea of painting this one, but it still ended up taking me 31 years to get around to it. :-)