GOG Expands Game Preservation Into 3D Scans and Printable Classic PC Big Boxes

GOG collaborates with the Big Box Collection to provide interactive rotatable 3D scans and printable cardboard reproduction templates for iconic classic PC game boxes.

Game preservation is usually discussed in terms of executables, operating-system compatibility and ownership rights, but GOG is extending the idea to something many PC players remember almost as fondly as the games themselves: enormous cardboard boxes. A new Preservation Program initiative announced on 8 September has become a major retro-PC story on 9 September as additional coverage spreads details of GOG's collaboration with the Big Box Collection. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Armikrog are the latest titles joining the GOG Preservation Program, while Descent, Hitman: Codename 47 and Myst are also receiving a new preservation extra. All five now include downloadable interactive 3D scans of their original physical packaging. Rather than photographing only the front cover, GOG says the genuine boxes were captured across the front, rear and spine to create rotatable models that can be viewed through built-in 3D viewing software on Windows and macOS. More unusually, the same artwork is being supplied as flat printable templates. Enthusiasts can therefore print, cut, fold and assemble a reproduction box for their own shelf. The scanning work was created in collaboration with Big Box Collection, Benjamin Wimmer's independent preservation project that has been digitally documenting original PC packaging for years. The exercise may initially sound frivolous compared with ensuring a game actually boots, but packaging contains a considerable amount of historical information. PC releases from the 1980s and 1990s often arrived with elaborate manuals, screenshots, system requirements, advertisements and artwork that were not present inside the game itself. Boxes also document the way publishers positioned software commercially and provide visual evidence of regional variations and changing computer standards. Unfortunately, cardboard is considerably less durable than software copied between storage media. Boxes were thrown away, crushed, faded or separated from their disks and manuals, leaving complete examples increasingly expensive on the collectors' market. Digital scanning therefore addresses a genuinely vulnerable part of videogame history. GOG's Preservation Program is primarily intended to keep classic software functional on current PCs, but adding three-dimensional packaging records broadens that mission from compatibility toward archival preservation. Printable templates cannot replace an original 1990s box as a collectible object, nor are they supposed to. What they offer is access to the design and physical form of something that might otherwise only be visible in auction photographs. Combined with DRM-free game installers, manuals and other archival extras, the approach comes closer to preserving the complete context in which a classic PC game originally reached its audience. For anyone who remembers buying a box large enough to contain ten modern game cases and discovering that most of the interior was air, this is preservation with a particularly appropriate sense of scale.