Before the days of brand awareness campaigns and digital marketing, a game's only source of advertising was often limited to the box artwork you'd see on high street shelves.

With early game graphics offering little visual interest, it fell to the packaging to conjure up engaging images of deep space battles, medieval knights and wizards, explosive military operations, and monstrous alien creatures. And every cover had to be hand-crafted by an artist using traditional media, often with a short deadline and the vaguest of briefs.

The Art Of The Box features 26 biographies of those artists who, at some point in their careers, found themselves illustrating video game packaging, including Bob Wakelin, Steve Hendricks, Ken Macklin, Tom DuBois, Steinar Lund, Marc Ericksen, Julie Bell and Susumu Matsushita among many others.

Publisher: Bitmap Books
Pages: 564pp
Size: 8 x 12
Notes: hardcover, color
Release Date: September 3, 2024
ISBN: 978-1838458584