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Box Art is the first of two Chewing Pixels spin-off sites that I intend to launch this year.

It’s a straightforward tumble log, which will daily post a piece of awesome videogame box art. The game’s title, year of production, platform and country of origin are listed beneath the image. The idea is that it’s something you stuff in your google reader to make your day brighter for three happy seconds, once a day.

The physical aspect of videogames interests me, not least because very soon videogames will cease to be physcial objects at all. Rising manufacturing costs, the ubiquity of high speed network connections and an increasing scarcity of oil make digital distribution not only convenient but also economical for publishers. Within five to ten years the idea of visiting a shop to pick up a videogame will surely seem anachronistic.

With this shift we will lose one of my favourite elements of the videogame experience: packaging. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade titles (only available in digital form) do boast box art (which shows up in your game library on the console’s dashboard) but it’s digitised, showed off in a small size, and nothing like holding in your hands a physical box that an artist has spent time and thought putting together.

Box art is a dying art and I think we’ll be all the poorer for its inevitable demise, even if the reduction of humanity’s bulk of packaging can only be a good thing in wider terms. This site then is a place to celebrate the most interesting box art of games past and present from across the world.

If you have any suggestions for entries, please let me know in the comments or via e-mail.

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