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Title: GOG Brings Back 'Big Box' PC Games, One Printable Template At a Time

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/09/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Those who remember PC
gaming in the days before Steam may have fond memories of the "big box"
packaging that made those games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after
in-home collectibles. Today, PC gaming platform GOG is hoping to reignite
some of the nostalgia for those days by adding downloadable 3D models and
printable, foldable high-res packaging scans for a handful of PC games on the
platform. Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to
just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek:
25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see
"3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of
those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box
art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat
printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those
downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone
who misses shelves full of PC game boxes." The physically focused expansion
of the existing GOG Preservation Program comes through a partnership with
Benjamin Wimmer's Big Box Collection website, which has grown since 2015 to
include over 1,000 3D scans from his private collection of physical PC games.
In an interview with GOG, Wimmer said that while he appreciates the artistry
of a good old-fashioned big box, he also appreciates their evolution into the
"interactive cards" on modern digital storefronts that "provid[e] us art,
screenshots, gameplay videos and whatnot and that not shown as a box, [it] is
just good UX." "Physical media doesn't survive the way software can -- boxes
get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning
them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape:
the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the
objects they used to come in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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