I'm with ya, can't resist those BigBox editions, waiting for Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 to give me my cardboard-fix.

Last one I snatched via auction was Cryos Lost Eden. Lovely.

I also really prefer DD much more however I can understand how some people still value big boxes or collector's editions a lot

Hell..I still have my WC3 Collector's edition on my shelf...

I definitely do not miss those. I prefer all my games to be digital.

I actually am glad I don't have boxes anymore.

Few boxes actually had some good cover art that was worth putting on a shelve. And 4 discs!? Are you nuts? Disc swapping was the worst. Especially in those horrible late ninties when CD rom was in full blow, but HDD couldn't catch up. Baldurs Gate was probably the worst in that regard. And while I love my RoA 2 2 disc version, the swapping really sucks, even now, as I've made some handy images.

Boxes only served a purpose when there was actually something in them. Big ass manual, map, feelies, that stuff. (Arcanum was great). Or when the box itself was gimmicky (Fallout). But in the end, those ressources are better spend on the game itself.

I miss just the manuals. The boxes were too big, but these pathetic leaflets nowadays aren't good even for wiping my arse with. The old ones were mostly enjoyable to read, at least for me. On the other hands, there are some which are poorly translated (Dawn of War 2), or even completely missing, if the community did not make them by themselves (Heroes of M&M 5). And I cba to print them.

Was talking to a friend recently about this, due to the lack of manuals in Amalur and ME3, I still have all me boxes and manuals from back in the day, even though I have current versions of the games like Arcanum etc from gog.

I miss the most the word wheels, and the games asking for a certain word from certain page and row in the manual. It felt so personal, as if the game really cared. It felt like a real dialogue, like "Hon, how about little sex? I'll wash the dishes tomorrow, promise!". You were asking for game's approval for little quality time together.

Nowadays games are just "yeah, whatever", showing no interest to you at all. At worst, you have to first get an authentication from their online pimp, and sometimes they put a cap on how many times you can be together.

Pandora Directive came on 6 CDs and while they tried to minimise disk swapping, you still ended up swapping every 10-15 min, etc. Real pain in the ass. I also had a 4x CD-ROM at the time and it took forever for anything to ever load.
Hooray for large HDDs and the internet!

edit: oh and all 6 CDs were inside this large, thick CD case that was an absolute piece of shit. The CDs barely attached to the case and you had to yank the case open. Meaning that every time you changed CDs, at least one would fly across the room along with bits of plastic behind it. I never got to finish the game because my CD-ROM no longer was able to read one of the CDs. And then I found out that GOG had the game!

I miss the artwork of some of the old big boxes, and the manuals for sure.

Some of them I don't miss though as with the unwieldy example attached below, which I think is still lurking in my closet somewhere.

Actually it's not difficult to see why brick and mortar stores are going bust. Every time I enter one and see a game I like I just think of how much of a nuisance the box and optical media are and proceed to buy a digital download from somewhere instead.

Having said this I do still remember them with fondness, it's just that... well that was then and this is now really. So yeah basically I liked them but I don't miss them one bit.

The stupid thing about PC game boxes was that games tried to get your attention on store shelves by either being bigger than other boxes (still mostly empty), and/or being odd shape or something else that made sure they'd also take lots of room in your home shelf and would be bitch to stack on top of each others.

Thank god PC games eventually started to move to DVD boxes, but I prefer (DRM-free) digital even above that.

I detest the boxes, especially the big ones that never justified their size by basically having nothing in them. I don't miss those days, to me they weren't worth missing. When the boxes shrunk I was only pissed that they didn't all go DVD sized.

And sometimes they would do strange things, like releasing two different boxes, to make it even worse for the store. Thief for an example, a game which i bought near launch, had a box that looked like a triangle with its top cut off and a flap on the front, and a regular box. Both were pretty big and came with a manual that fit into the jewel case.

The worst offender that I've come across was the Fantasy Pack, which contained Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance (with a small manual that, if just resized a little would fit into a DVD case), Betrayal in Antara (which had an even smaller manual), Rama (which had a manual that fit into a jewel case) and Outpost 2 (which had no manual). All of this was crammed into a box that was more than twice as thick as a regular big box. Had they wanted to, they could have fit all of this into a box less than twice as thick as a DVD case. There was also 50% sci-fi in it, so the name was a bit misleading...

The worst two offenders I remember were (and I've probably mentioned them here already but I never get tired of telling about them):

- Leisure Suit Larry 5: considerably bigger than most PC game boxes, yet mostly empty (the game disks and a leaflet for a manual, if I recall correctly)

- The Journeyman Project Trilogy I ordered from US: it has to be the biggest PC game box ever I've seen. Maybe the size of five normal PC game boxes, a gigantic yet flimsy cardboard box.

What was inside? I recall a cheap cardboard sleeve containing CDs, from which the CDs had of course come out during transportation, badly scratching at least one of the game CDs. I don't recall if there was even any actual manual (or if the manuals were pdf files on CDs), but if there was, it was probably a leaflet as well. The gigantic box was 99% empty as I recall.



I had forgotten about the Thief box you mentioned, I fortunately got the rectancular box, but I indeed remember the box. Well, as a matter of fact, I have Thief Gold, not the original, maybe it was Thief Gold in rectancular?