RELICS OF A RECENT PAST

Several years ago, I was looking for something unique to decorate my walls with. Up until that point, my walls had been plastered with the free posters that came with issues of Sports Illustrated For Kids. Having outgrown that magazine, I was now looking for something different. I had recently bought Command and Conquer: Worldwide Warfare, a computer game collection. The box was just collecting dust, since I didn't feel like throwing it out. Inspiration struck, and a few strips of clear packaging tape later, I had a wall decoration deserving of a gamer.

Since then, my collection has grown to include Diablo, Diablo II, Lord of Destruction, Starcraft: Brood War, Warcraft III, The Frozen Throne, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire, Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, World of Warcraft, Command and Conquer: The First Decade, and H!Zone, a crappy expansion pack for Hexen and Heretic that I picked off a clearance rack for 99 cents. I also have the box that my GeForce 6600GT graphics card came in, mounted above my window.

If you were to look at the boxes in chronological order of release, a pattern begins to emerge. Computer game boxes used to be big. Nine inches wide, ten tall, two deep. Somewhere along the line, game packaging experts realized that you could fit more games on the shelf if you reduced the size. After all, there's mostly air in those boxes anyway. Now they're seven and a half tall, five wide, one and a half deep. Just enough room for a jewel case and a miniature manual that seems way too small for all the information it's supposed to hold.

Recently, I made an impulse purchase that made me realize just where we are now. As a gamer, it seems odd that I haven't played, much less owned a copy of, one of the greatest games of recent times: Half-Life 2. So one day at Target, I picked up the Game of the Year edition (which came boxed with Half-Life:Source, HL2 Deathmatch and Counter-Strike:Source...all this for $40). And as I went to install it, I realized there was no box.

The packaging of computer games have gone the way of packaging for console video games. Now instead of a box with a jewel case, you get a black plastic Nexpak case. It's like a DVD case, but to accomodate for an extra long spindle to hold 5 or 6 CDs, it's about twice as deep. I could mount this on my wall, but then where would I keep the CDs?

We've gained space efficiency, but at the cost of the coolness factor. Less filling, but lost taste. We've reached the end of a seemingly insignificant era.