WWW.MCVUK.COM
MCV 18/09/09 35
GAME PACKAGING: BOX ART
TEN YEARS OF PACK DESIGN Collector edition sets can certainly grab consumer attention, but nothing does that better than the traditional pack shot. Design specialist Fluid takes us through the last decade of its pack design and discusses how evolving technology, improved marketing and consumer demand have played a part in changing the way games look on store shelves... 1999 – KULA WORLD: James Glover, Creative Director: “Back in the 1990s, pack art generally wasn’t renowned for its artistic merit. More often that not it would feature just a blown up screenshot and would be really simplistic and poorly edited.“ Mark Harris, Image Creation: “Although this game wasn’t the biggest title we worked on that year it’s an interesting one to look at as it signifies the introduction of more sophisticated design tools. Rather just using flat ingame imagery this pack was created by us using 3D modeling to give a more dynamic representation of the game.“ 2000 – PRO BOARDER JG: “This is definitely one of my favorite packs of the past ten years. Falling within the lifestyle genre, we were given much more freedom to play with the design. Rather than having to strictly represent in-game artwork, this pack art represents an evolution in how marketing teams targeted consumers. It was starting to become more about understanding the wider cultural context of the consumer – what they wore, what music they listened to, where they partied and so forth. These influences were then included in the game branding.” 2001 – RIDGE RACER Neil Roddis, Operations Manager: “This pack came at a time when developers had just started creating intros to the games using high quality renders of the ingame characters. In the case of Ridge Racer we were provided with high polygon 3D renders of the female character and the car meaning that visually we were able to do a lot more, as the artwork was higher resolution.” 2002 – XIII Lee Basford, Deputy Creative Director: “XIII was one of the first celshaded games released on to the market, a design style which has recently seen a resurgence with the likes of Madworld. It was created for PS2 and highlights how the evolution of console technology directly affects the quality of the marketing campaigns – quite simply because the games visuals got better.”
2003 – DEVIL MAY CRY 2 LB: “This game came at a time when Capcom was trying to raise consumer awareness in slightly experimental ways. Video games had now become more mainstream and big brands from other areas of popular culture were taking notice of their consumer appeal. In this particular instance Diesel had facilitated a brand tie-in and I remember creating point of sale standees featuring the main character wearing the brand’s clothing. Rather than being literal with the presentation of the game this pack art lent towards the neo-gothic style that was in fashion at the time.”
2006 – DEAD RISING Jonny Costello, designer: “This game came out of nowhere and is a great example of how a well thoughtout marketing campaign can propel an unknown title to the number one position. “Japan gave us a key piece of zombie artwork and we had to create everything around it, so the escalators that are seen in the background was actually taken from a photo shoot in Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre at 6am in the morning. The images were then ‘zombified’ and reproduced 100s of times imitating the swarm technology, which is a key feature of the game.“
2004 – VIEWTIFUL JOE JG: “This game is quite nice as it’s really different to everything else we’ve picked and it obviously went on to win a whole host of accolades for it’s style and personality. Essentially there had been nothing else like it before and the development team had its own cult following. The assets we were provided with were so strong we felt that rather than over complicate the pack art this time we would go back to a more traditional style of presentation.”
2007 – MOTO GP NR: “This game raises the issue of localisation and how crucial it is that the pack art is specific to the country. “In this instance the individual territories were given the choice of featuring their star rider – so the person on the pack was different for Italy, US, Spain and Australia. In the past ten years we’ve seen marketing teams massively increase their awareness of cultural sensitivity, what works for one regional audience may be completely unacceptable for another and it’s important that the branding messages don’t get lost in translation. However, that said we’ve now begun to see a move towards global packs, so trends are always constantly evolving“
2005 – RESIDENT EVIL 4 LB: ”Probably one of the most important pieces of pack art we’ve ever worked on. Although it was really well known, the Resident Evil franchise had come to a point where it needed to be refreshed. The game and its marketing campaign came along and just blew the brand up to a completely different level. We weren’t supplied with any assets and were allowed to just run with our own creativity – a brave move by the marketing team, but it paid off. “Because the brand was already familiar to the consumer we could afford to be really subtle with the artwork, focusing on creating a really eerie atmosphere that left most of the marketing up to the imagination. This must have been quite scary for the marketing team, but it shows how much more intelligence they now credited their consumers with, compared to the ridiculously literal interpretations of the early days.”
2008 - CRISIS CORE: FINAL FANTASY VII NR: “This pack is particularly demonstrative to us of how far the combination of technology, design tools and marketing savvy have come in the past decade. If you compare the pack art we created for Final Fantasy VII in 1997 to its 2008 incarnation as Crisis Core the two designs are a world apart. “The 1997 marketing campaign was completely print based, whereas everything for the 2008 campaign was really high tech, escalator step video advertising, web banners, pre-orders online and so on. The entire campaign reflected how the industry had grown up in the past ten years and is a great benchmark of how much technology has progressed as well.”
2009: HOUSE OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL LB: “This was a well known Japanese arcade franchise that was developed this time in the UK. It was an important release for Sega and they allowed us a decent period of research to ensure that the look and feel of the pack art concisely conveyed the fantastic imagery in the game. Marketeers were starting to acknowledge the importance of investing time and budget in creating a powerful look and feel to all elements of a game’s branding.” JUST OUT: DIRT 2 JG: “There’s so much going on in this pack – it incorporates such a diverse variety of cultural references, brands and design styles. It goes to show how ingrained video games have become in the mass entertainment market. We’re no longer designing just for gamers, consumer interests are multi-layered and complex and marketing teams understand this.” THE FUTURE…? JC: “With the way the market is going it is fair to say that games are slowly but surely moving away from the shelves and onto the internet. Presence online is now just as important as offline and there is a bit of a concern that we will see a repetition of what happened with sleeve art in the music industry. “However, in the same breath, gamers like to hold a physical object so taking that point into consideration I don’t think we’ll ever see pack art totally wiped out. Whatever the future holds, design wise the standard of pack art has never been stronger and I think we’ve got a lot of exciting developments to come.”
Fluid is a design specialist and boasts clients such as Codemasters, EA, Sega, THQ, Capcom and Warner Bros. The company has developed some of the most memorable pack designs and marketing creatives of recent years. For more information visit fluidesign.co.uk or call: 0121 212 0121.