About the BigBoxBook project

Remember when buying a game wasn't just a single click & a quick download, but a trip down to the store, browsing shelves full of big box games for ages before finally grabbing a good-looking one?

Well, BigBoxBook is here to celebrate the good ol' cardboard box without having to sacrifice too much self-space in your own four walls. The main goal is to recreate a tangible experience of browsing through computer gaming history and the enjoyment of looking through the various big box games and their content. All this, but in a compressed form: books!

Each of these curated Books follows its own theme with a selection of roundabout 20 games. The books can be viewed (and shared) on this site or also be downloaded in high-res to turn them into real physical books. For this, upload them to your local photo book service, get them printed, and then cut the pages to size… Wait, what?
It sounds like a weird idea, and it sure is a lot of work, but trust me, it's worth it. Cutting the pages will transform the books, getting those boxes even closer to the real deal.

Your Remixes

The available books are fine, but you're missing a specific game in each of them, you say? Well, when composing the first books, it became obvious right away that despite having a general theme for each book, picking suitable games is and will always be a highly personal process. We all have our favorites, the one game that we played back in the day that still makes us smile, and there's another one that absolutely needs to be included because it's our cherished hidden gem that the world just needs to know about. The whole process feels like recording a mixtape for a party: we want the best of the best in there, but perfectly tailored and filled with surprises.

That said, flicking through a finished book is fun, but sitting down, making, and sharing your own book is even more exciting, so let's bring it on: start remixing!

If you think so too, check out the Remix feature, compose your own book, and get it published here on this site and thus ready to be printed.

How it all came together

First of all, there's bigboxcollection.com, a virtual representation of all the boxed games that are sitting on the shelf behind me, each and every one turnded into a high-res 3D model that can be spinned around and zoomed in on. Having all those scans for hundreds of games available has sparked a couple of ideas before, e.g. making posters or puzzles. There's even a papercraft feature that allows everyone to print miniature modes of those 3D boxes, but that's as far as it had swapped back into the pysical world yet.

In August 2022, though, a short exchange with fellow retro-head @Retroldies on Twitter not only sparked a new idea but also caused a real wildfire for a quite different form of my big box collection:

Turning my boxes and memories into an album and getting it printed in book form? Now, that sounds like a challenge!

The first test pages were created on the spot. After all, a mockup was needed to find out how flipping through a retro album filled with big box games would feel like. It's all about exploring the general concept, focusing on how to present the boxes while the underlying layout was evolving along the way.

Oh, the joy and excitement grew with every step taken, and the positive feedback on the various results shared. Skipping any of my written memory bits was a no-brainer. The main attraction here is the boxes, their art, and bringing them to life in this new, flat form.

The main layout — suitable for all boxes — kind of defined itself naturally, and with this, the next step was to get a printed prototype of the BigBoxBook:

Flipping through the pages just felt fantastic, even despite using placeholders for the boxes' content pages. This led to a monumental task, something planned for bigboxcollection.com for years but out of laziness, successfully being postponed repeatedly: unboxing all ~700 games and snapping photos of their content.

Editing the hundreds of photos was time-consuming too and ate up November and December of 2022. In parallel, the underlying data needed some love, with developer and publisher information being added for each title, and release dates and other bits being updated where needed. With all these side quests running in the background, work on a "photo book page" generator started. This tool grabbed all the available files and data of bigboxcollection.com and rendered them as fully layouted pages for the BigBoxBooks.

With everything ready, building a website was the final task. Here, the remix feature is the hidden star, allowing everyone interested access to 2,820 pages generated from 689 games.

Main goal was of course getting those books online, allowing everyone to flip through a digital version as well as making all the pages of each book available for download and thus printing. Second corner stone is the Remix feature: I've generated pages for all the games on my shelf, so all the resources are there for coming up with gazillions of book remixes.

Development took way longer than anticipated but I just wanted to make sure exloring and sharing books as well as composing remixes are polished before going online. At this point, shout-out to my beta testers clicking through.

Anyway, the site's ready and I don't know where all this will be heading but trust me, I'm more than happy with it.

So, long story short: Have fun!

Benjamin

Library index

Remix your own Book!

Those BigBoxBooks are fun, aren't they? Well, generally speaking. I'm sure you wouldn't have picked the very same set of books for the given themes. And why sticking to theme anyway? I'm not interested in any of these, I hear you say.

Well, listen up. How about composing your own book, following your own theme and only putting games in it that are dear to your heart?

How about a Remix?

There's close to 1,000 games in my BigBoxCollection.com and guess what, I working on generating book pages for each and every single one of them. All in all there's currently 2,820 pages from 689 games in printable quality waiting to be shuffeld, browsed through, put together and reordered to your liking for creating your very own BigBoxBook.

Five easy steps!

Creating your own Remix is rather easy and only five steps are needed:

Pick your games
Come up with a title
Write down a short blurb
Publish your Remix

Create a Remix book

Here's all the details of the Remix that you've just created.

There's no user account system in place here on book.bigboxcollection.com which means a secret edit link is used as password for accessing your remix. Keep this link to yourself; sharing it with others would allow them to make edits.

Grab your secret Edit Link for this Remix

Unpublished remixes are stored for 10 days; each edit resets this deadline. Make sure to publish your remix after you're done. With this, the remix will be sent for a quick check and then added to the BigBoxBook library and thus becoming available for everyone. Further, downloading all those pages added in high-res will become available.

Your Remix

Publish this remix

This not yet published remix will be automatically deleted in .

Title

Your name or handle

Blurb

In this Remix

Re-order by Title | Release

No pages yet

About me

Hi, my name is Benjamin.

Nerd living in Vienna, Austria and host of this site. You can get in touch with me via benjamin@bigboxcollection.com.

Hi, my name is Benjamin and I'm a gamer.

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 also a game 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 when big box games got replaced with smaller boxes and then 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!

Hi, my name is Benjamin and I'm a gamer and collector.

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 2016, I launched BigBoxCollection.com. Here, I host 3D models textured with high-resolution scans of my boxes, allowing visitors to click through and explore.

Hi, my name is Benjamin and I'm a gamer, collector and creator.

Having a database of hundreds of games with all their data, as well as images of their cover artwork, at my fingertips opened up numerous possibilites. Not only were my games available as 3D models, but I could also export them as .gif . I even added a papercraft feature, allowing anyone to print (minature) replicas. Additionally, I implemented a feature that enabled me to export my entire collection as a single, shareable image This (private) feature severd as a poster generator and also provided source files for a 2000 piece puzzle. Phew, that's a lot of tiny projects.

Well, with the launch of book.bigboxcollection.com, I embarked on my second major online project. While it goes hand in hand with everything else, it also marked a significant stept from the digital into the physical world: not just a poster here and a puzzle there, but real, heavy hardcover books. Of course, it's all do-it-yourself, but the result are tangible books that we're bringing into existence here. Creating things for oneself and sharing them with others is truly rewarding and — hopefully — fun for everybody.