I most certainly do as I'm collecting them. For sharing my games with other (retro) gaming heads, I decided to turn my collection of over 840 boxes* into shiny 3D
The tech behind the 3D boxes is simple: first up the game boxes sides are scanned. Then, those textures are attached to a 3D mesh based upon the boxes' actual dimensions. All boxes can be zoomed and rotated and some can even be looked at from top and bottom angles. Also, double click/tap a box with a gatefold cover to pop it up.
The site is a one-man show and done in my spare time. I do try to keep it as up-to-date as possible but sometimes, well, life happens and the time from picking up a new box until it's available in 3D with all bells and whistles does vary quite a bit. I'm trying to keep you all posted via the blog though.
Anyway, I better stop babbeling and let you jump right in. Use the search in the top right corner or start with one of the games listed below.
Enjoy,
Benjamin
* Well, lots of boxes and some not so boxy ones
Rotate: drag with left mouse button or with one finger
Pan: drag with right mouse button or with two fingers
Zoom: mouse wheel or pinch
Open/close gatefold: double click or double tap
There's 840 games available in 3D on this site that have been viewed 264,767 times since the site's new version went live on Nov 24, 2023. That's 32 games per hour. Piling those 840 games all up would result in a stack 29.93m high and with a volume of 1.31m³. When adding up all sides there's 92.95m² of boxart, not counting the 66 gatefolds available to explore on this site. Further, there's a total of 784 photos showing the games' contents.
I'm not done yet getting all the data in regard of media included, but with 704 boxes indexed, there's a total of 1,424 media. Here's a breakdown
In regard of fidelity, 472 out of the 840 boxes have all six sides scanned. I'm working on adding more but this comes down to finding the time needed for scanning and editing. There's also 66 boxes with a gatefold cover that can be flipped open by double-clicking the box. Also, 127 boxes do have specific textures for their reflectiveness. It's a subtl effect but IMHO worth all the work, just look at Morrowind or Beneath a Steel Sky.
2 variants
California Games was a huge hit for Epyx and thus released on a lot of platforms back in the day. RetroGamer mag takes a look at all the versions out there in Load 259.
In my second life as C64 graphician jmin I'm pixeling all kind of things for fun. Yesterday, I've submitted a pic for the currently running C64GFX.com Game Loading Screen Compo 2024 which celebrates the visuals shown while a game is loading. Rules are pretty loose, so game wise, everything goes.
The first thing that popped into my head was doing a MDK pic, and guess what, IMHO it turned out pretty neat, so here it is:
For those interested, the C64 file can be downloaded over at CSDb and you'll find some background info on jmin.at.
RSS feed
Never miss the latest blog post!
Subscribe to this blog via RSS using the following URL:
https://bigboxcollection.com/rss.xml
Blogroll
Looking for more blogs?
This one has been on my list for way to long. I fondly remember how my friends and I laughed our asses off playing Caveman Ugh-Lympics on the humble breadbin. Nothing beats a round of fire-making, smacking your oponent on the head when he's dying of laughter. Zoink!
Quite some time ago, Thomas shared a pic of his French Diablo box and boy, I fell in love with it.
Cut to almost two years later, I found a copy for cheap for my shelf.
With this, my Test Drive II set is finally complete.
Getting updates for games is great, getting free upgrades is even better and getting remasters for free is ace. Thanks, id Software and Nightdive Studios for bringing Doom and Doom II up to speed.
Some time ago, I've started to scan the back of the box with the top lid on and thus showing the both on the back scans. It definitely looks better in the 3D box, but it also a sucks having to edit the scans a bit more for fitting the rectagular shape.
Well, not anymore: low and behold, a new contraption for improving scans 1000% or more :-)
With the upload of Space Quest 6, there's now 800(!) boxes available to click through on this site.
Enjoy!
Oh, look what landed on my doorstep today! A boxed US copy of Star Wars for C64!
Misplaced my European double cassette case + inlay decades ago, so I'm more than thrilled having this one now sitting on the shelf behind me.
Sure, it's a small box and yeah, I only played it with my brothers on Playstation 2, but it's a fantastic game and a great looking box.
Couldn't say no to it.
Spent some time tweaking various things to speed up the page. 3D boxes are of course still quite a load, but starting up bigboxcollection.com should be a bit faster now.
Also squashed a couple of bugs along the way.
RetroGamer Magazine takes a look at the enduring legacy of the Thief series which first appeared on our monitors back in 1999.
The article can be found in Load 260.
Came home from a short vacation with two more Big Boxes waiting on my door step: Al-Qadim had been on my wishlist forever and Thunderscape just had to be picked up due to having added Endomorph.
A couple of C64 games arrived today:
Another fantastic article in RetroGamer magazine load 259: The Making of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.
Back in the day, I definitely preferred DuoTris, but at the same time, MirrorSoft's Tetris always had a special place in my heart. It was all I had while all the boys and girls around me played the superior GameBoy version, and boy, was I jealous.
Then again, there's Wally Beben's mind-blowing 20+ minutes tune and all is balanced again
Cut to 2024. I've just found out on CSDb that there's a remaster, err, remix, err, recoded version out there and it has just received an update!
Let's boot it up!
The update is not just some graphical tweaks, no, it's a full re-implementation of Tetris following how the game played on other Platforms at the time. Further, there's an optional shadow as well as music and sfx options.
It does play great, not as snappy as current versions of Tetris, but still. The addition of slow/hard drop is great and the sfx are a nice touch too.
My main complaint is that the original tune is only played on the title screen and can't be selected as background music thanks to technical limitations. Bummer.
Anyway, grab a copy of version 1.1b and give it a try!
Oh boy, I'm lagging behind big time! Sry for the spare updated these post months.
Boxes are piling up everywhere but the time needed for scanning and uploading them is very, very rare at the moment but I do hope to manage at least one or two games per week from now on again.
Curious, what's gonna show up? Yeah, I thought so, so here's my backlog of unscanned big boxes:
California Games was a huge hit for Epyx and thus released on a lot of platforms back in the day. RetroGamer mag takes a look at all the versions out there in Load 259.
With pixeling for the C64 being my new love and of course still loving my big boxes too, it only was a matter of days before those two worlds crashed into each other and formed something exiting! Below, a work-in-progress screenshot of my BigBoxPixel.
It's a HiRes picture (with expanded borders) showing the first 21 games turned from 2k textures into tiny 8x40 spines using only a hint of color due to the C64's restrictions. But still, I'm sure most of the boxes are recognizable, so enjoy figuring out what's on this 8-bit shelf
OK, I've got somewhat carried away this week by joining the C64GFX.Com CharSet Logo Compo 2024 and working on my first CharSet pix. There wasn't really any concept to follow but I stumbled along while learning the graphic modes as well as the editors (Petmate and PETSCII Editor) I used.
For the PETSCII pic, I've fooled around with tiles, as in ceramic tiles and one thing lead to another an a 3DBBG (short for my social media handle @3DBigBoxGames) thingy appeared waiting to be tweaked over and over again:
Next, I tried my luck with HiRes mode, which means, pixels and color are separated and thus easier to handle. Well, it got all out of hand and I've ended up with the whole screen filled and (almost) all the available colors used in a bright fever dream color splash. One of the problems that arised is, that there's no logo there and reworking the charset to have once again 3DBBG or something there felt too tedious. I've somewhat fixed it by making this the core and just turned it into "Oh, no! What logo?" and called it quits
The competition runs from Feb 7th to April 30th, so there's still time to join in. Voting will be May 1st to May 14th.
Make sure to check out all the submitted entries:
With Nightdive Studios working on their System Shock remaster, RetroGamer magazine sat down with them and Jon Chey, the lead programmer of Shock 2, for discussing the series' beginnings, how it could be updated and what's up with Shock 3. It's a lenghy 8-page article well worth the read.
This article appeared in Load 249.
I'm a nerd living in Vienna, Austria and host of this site. You can get in touch with me via benjamin@bigboxcollection.com and over at Twitter @3DBigBoxGames.
It all started back in 1988 on the humble C64 before moving on to DOS/Win with GameBoy, SNES, and N64 on the side, so to speak. I'm not only a gameer but also a collector, although I didn't set out to be one; I just kept all the games that I've bought over the years. Well, until 2005ish at least. That's when big box games got replaced with first smaller boxes and then later DVD cases until Steam and gog.com came around and we all went digital on PC.
However, back in 2012, I stumbled upon a new release for Commodore 64 called C64anabalt, and guess what?
It's a physical release! In a box! A (very) small one, but a box!
With finding C64anabalt, my love for boxed games was reigneted, and I began to track down all the games I had only owned as budget release, as well as all the classics that I had always wanted to play but never had the chance to. Classifieds and eBay offered almost everything for a few bucks, and soon enough, I had more games than I could keep track of.
To share my growing collection online with other retro gamers, I started taking photos of my games. Although it worked, managing multiple photo albums and a private spreadsheet with all the data became quite cumbersome and far from ideal. I realized that combining both elements was the way to go — building upon my spreadsheet and creating a website that would showcase a virtual copy of my NerdWall™.
In 2015, I launched BigBoxCollection.com. Here, I host 3D models textured with high-resolution scans of my boxes, allowing visitors to click through and explore. The site has changed over the years staring with a more dark and gritty look before restarting with a clean one in May 2016. In 2023, I thought I'd add a dark theme but instead of just tweaking the CSS files, I've reimplemented the whole site, reworked mouse & touch controls and added features that I've always wanted to have but never found the time for like panning the 3D boxes as well as visualizing gatefolds.
This privacy statement is for bigboxcollection.com, a site run by me, Benjamin Wimmer, and according to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I have a duty to protect your personal data. In this statement, I outline which data is reached during the use of bigboxcollection.com, how it is collected, and also what I use this data for.
Your data are collected by the following data processing operations.
Each time you access the website, the visit is recorded in a log file (server logs) for a period of 190 days with the following log data:
This data is used for system security verification, error analysis and for statistical purposess.
bigboxcollection.com counts how often a 3D box is viewed, from where the 3D box was accessed from and also tries to map those views to sessions. For this, the following data is processed:
For mapping views to sessions, an anonymizised fingerprint is generated using a combination of the IP address and the user agent data. The fingerprint is generated using a one-way hash function with the given user data and other, internal data as input values. The provided input will always result in the same fixed length set of characters but it is impossible to determine what the original input was because the encryption algorithm only goes one way.
Adding other, internal data that's only known to bigboxcollection.com to the set of input data is done for forcing the result set's uniqueness, increasing its complexity and thus hightening the level of anonymization.
The fingerprint is used to clear the "Games, that have just been looked up"-panel on the starting page from the boxes that have been looked up during your current session and thus only show boxes from other sessions. Further, it is used to help spam detection.
The 3D box viewed, the provided referrer and the generated fingerprint are stored and used for internal statistics as well as for generating content for bigboxcollection.com, e.g. how often a box has been viewed so far and for generating the "Games, that have just been looked up"-panel.
bigboxcollection.com does not use any cookies.
To ensure the availability and reliability of bigboxcollection.com, I utilize the services of an external web hosting provider. This hosting provider securely stores and processes data associated with your interactions on the site. While I maintain responsibility for the data collected, certain technical aspects of data storage and server management are outsourced to the hosting provider. I have chosen a reputable hosting service committed to data security and privacy, and contractual agreements are in place to ensure compliance with relevant data protection laws.
Other than that, there is no transfer of your data to any other third parties.
To ensure the secure transmission of data between your device and bigboxcollection.com, I utilize SSL technology. SSL is a cryptographic protocol that provides a secure connection by encrypting the data exchanged between your web browser and bigboxcollection.com. This encryption safeguards your personal information, such as IP addresses and user agents, during the transmission process, enhancing the overall security of your interactions with our website.
By using SSL, I aim to protect your data from unauthorized access and ensure that your online experience on bigboxcollection.com is conducted in a secure environment.
You have the right to information about data concerning yourself, as well as the right to have data rectified or deleted. You have a right to restrict or to object to data processing, as well as the right to transfer data.
If you consider that your rights are not being complied with or are not being ad-equately complied with, you have the possibility to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Authority.
Benjamin Wimmer, Vienna, Austra
benjamin@bigboxcollection.com
Benjamin Wimmer
Vienna, Austria
benjamin@bigboxcollection.com
Main
General info
Settings
