iNvid02
Member
....But compared to the aesthetics of the PC gaming past, these new creations are positively subtle. In the not so distant past, when computers were beige and monitors were fat, PC gamers had to make do with a different kind of design that of the graphics card box. For roughly ten years, from the late '90s until around 2010, the art on the boxes of PC graphics cards was reliably strange and no one really knows why.
The images on the front of these boxes were ostensibly designed to sell the card inside, to show how much better your rig would run if you plugged the jumble of chips and silicon into your PC's PCI (or AGP) slot. But for some unknown reason, these cardboard canvases became the home of some of the weirdest art to ever come from human fingers. Components were advertised with bored wizards, floating heads, and silver surfers. Amphibians with delusions of grandeur inexplicably appeared on the boxes of graphics cards in a way that sellers of processors, or RAM, or hard drives other vital bits of a self-built PC never used.
The trend has largely died off now, as the smaller manufacturers that were able to license technology from Nvidia or AMD have either gone under or shifted into new areas. Those graphics card makers that remain are generally more subtle in their packaging a shame, because we usually miss out on art like this:
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4039118/palit-x700-box.0.jpg)
check out the article for the rest of the boxes
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9274915/graphics-card-boxes-weird-art
did you guys have a favourite cover art? i was lttp but im pretty sure i would have bought a palit card:
There is no video game with a frog in a mech suit. That means that at some point, someone at Palit called someone else in Palit's art department and said "you know, I really think we need to put a frog on our next graphics card box. But not just any normal frog! Can you put the frog in a mech suit? I think it will be a good idea." And that other someone said "yes, I think it is a good idea to put a frog in a mech suit on the cover. I'll design that for you right now." I want to shake the hands of both of those people.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4039100/frogmech.0.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4042624/frogmech2.0.jpg)
The reappearance of Frogmech means that not only did Palit design Frogmech, but that someone inside the company believed so much in their mechanized frog creation that they made the call to stamp it on a variety of Palit products. Note this time that Frogmech is angry. Who hurt you, Frogmech? I love you, Frogmech.
Will we ever see the likes of Frogmech again? It's tough to say. Many of the smaller manufacturers responsible for some of the wildest art have gone bankrupt. Others have stayed in business but dropped the awkward orcs, robot heads, and warrior women, adjusting their aesthetics for a new breed of gamer that expects huge black boxes and industrial design. Maybe, as gamers now buy their components on the internet, physical boxes don't need to be so eye-catching. Or maybe, like cubism, art deco, and rococo, the greatest artistic movements are meant to explode in a burst of creativity and then burn out fast, leaving the world with truth, beauty, and Frogmechs.
