Random: PS2 Game Boxes Were Nearly Extremely Weird pushsquare.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from pushsquare.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Photo: Jesse Kumin/Permission of Hock Wah Yeo
With GameStop’s stock exploding and shrinking on a weekly basis, it’s easy to forget that until recently, it was an open question whether the next-gen of gaming consoles were going to come with an optical drive at all. Physical games managed to avoid the grim reaper, for now, but little care is put into their packaging these days. A whole generation missed out on a time when you could walk into a Babbages and an encyclopedia-sized PC game box practically leapt into your hands.
During the video game industry’s adolescence, a visit to the shelves of the computer shop meant finding shareware games in ziplock bags beside boxes adorned in the state-of-the-art of graphic design of the time. But some designers went further and took the opportunity to turn those standard cardboard boxes into eye-catching sculptural objects. One of the unsung heroes of the PC box is the designer Hock Wah Yeo.
Packaging for the Asciiware Sphere 360 PlayStation controller (photo courtesy of Hock Wah Yeo)
When Hock Wah Yeo was hired by the game publisher Velocity, the head of the company gave him an unusual order: “Scare me.”
1
Let’s say you go to the store and buy a video game. What does it look like? Chances are, it comes in a plastic box, roughly the size of a DVD case, and there’s a logo on the top that tells you what platform it’s for — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. It’s easy to understand, and it’s easy to fit on shelves. Retailers like it. The platform owners like it. This is the way it’s been for decades — simple, predictable, and safe.