We finally gave video game box art a full episode. Jess, Jack, and Logan each brought picks, the rules were loose on purpose, and Jess found something so cursed it stopped the show cold.
The News First
Jess opened with a Nintendogs rumor. Leaker Mallow932 claims a new one is in development for Switch 2. Nothing is confirmed, but the account has a decent track record.
The bigger story was the Blizzard union ratifying its first contract. It covers 1,900 employees and includes guardrails on generative AI use, layoff protections, and remote and hybrid work benefits. That is a rare piece of good news in an industry that has spent two years handing out layoffs.
On the Nintendo side, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe got an eight-player split-screen update. Mario Kart World added free tracks, including SNES courses and new knockout routes. Metroid Ravenous got a trailer built around an eat-or-be-eaten hook, with Samus reaching in and grabbing enemies. The Ocarina of Time remake landed the day before, and the reaction here was positive even with people online picking at the new art. The full slate is on Nintendo’s Direct page.
Also worth noting for obvious reasons: Mega Man Duel Override lets you play as Break Man.
What Makes Video Game Box Art Good
Before the picks we tried to define what we were even judging. Nobody landed in the same place.
For Break it has to represent the game and it has to have energy. A white background with a floating character does nothing. Mario Kart Wii is the example of what not to do.
Jess wants to know the genre at a glance. Fighting game, horror game, cozy farming sim, the cover should tell you before you read a word. Jess also wrote an undergrad paper analyzing how often specific motifs repeat across game covers, which is the most on-brand thing anyone has admitted on this show.
Logan came at it from concept art and character design. Break made the case that the best covers are the ones that oversell, because the art fills in what the hardware could not draw yet. You looked at the box, then you looked at the screen, and your brain met somewhere in the middle.
That is also why we were generous with the rules. Manual art counted. Promo art counted. Title screens counted. Steam capsule images counted.
Every Game We Covered
The Legend of Zelda manual art. Dragon Age Origins. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Lunar Silver Star Story Complete. Animal Crossing Wild World. Mega Man for NES. Choo Choo Charles. Zelda II. Trojan. The Sims Medieval. Mega Man X. Pokemon Pinball. Subnautica. Ninja Gaiden. Blue Dragon. Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Goose Goose Duck. F-Zero. Megamania. Kaboom. Silent Hill Shattered Memories. Garfield Kart Furious Racing. Final Fantasy Tactics. Harvest Moon Save the Homeland. Secret of Mana. Content Warning. Star Wars Squadrons.
Write-ins from chat covered Metroid, Kirby Super Star Ultra, Streets of Rage, Sam and Max, and Dragon Ball Z.
The Worst One
Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys. Not dwarves. Clever boys.
It is a bootleg-grade computer game with a cover that appears to have been rendered by someone working from a description of a human face. The proportions are wrong. The eyes are drifting. She appears to have pointed teeth. Jack said it beat the original Mega Man cover for sheer wrongness, and Jack is the one who nominated the Mega Man cover in the first place.
The Mega Man cover still deserves its reputation. Nothing on it matches the game. Mega Man is holding a pistol. There is a castle behind him for no reason. It reads like the artist got a title and a deadline and nothing else.
The NES Era Covers Lied on Purpose
A lot of the North American covers of the late 1980s were commissioned from artists who had never touched the game. Trojan is a muscular guy standing in rubble. The Japanese version is a completely different piece of art with a completely different tone. That regional split is why our box art rounds are so hard to guess, and it is part of why the hardware from that era still holds up as an object. We got into that in the NES restoration episode.
Two Things Worth Looking Up
Once Upon Atari, which Break finally read after Sebastian pushed it for years. It includes a story about Spielberg wanting the Indiana Jones 2600 game to be more like Pac-Man.
And the Okami reprint that shipped with an IGN watermark still on the cover art. Someone pulled the image off IGN’s site and sent it to print.
Also, in roughly 650 episodes, this was the first time Garfield has come up. We are as surprised as you are. Logan is working on a Halloween video next, inspired by our GameCube episode.
The Game Show has been running since 2002. New episodes every week at breakmanx.com.
