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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

What I miss about physical games is the full box, the small collectors items inside and reading through the richly illustrated manual.

Ever since games became a disk inside a cheap plastic box buying games in stores lost all magic for me.

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I do miss the manuals, particularly the simulation games that had technical references, historical information and stories.

The art-books that came with some games were pretty cool too.

But for the most part, the packaging and pack-ins were just junk. and while I'm still storing a fair amount of it, I haven't played those games in 20 years - I should probably just write down the CD keys and throw everything else away.

There was a flight sim for the Mac (F/A 18, I think) that I played in the mid-90's that came with a thick paperback book. It included all the different flight envelopes and even a primer on the concept of "lift" and how it keeps planes in the air.

The manual included with Microsoft Flight Simulator (4.0 maybe?) in the early 90’s was thick and dense. I remember using it to learn how to navigate using VOR stations. They don’t make them like they used to.

I heard an interview with Bill Roper (of Blizzard fame back in the day), and he said they included junk on purpose to make the box heavier. If people were choosing between new games A and B, some chose based on which box was heavier as they thought they were getting more for their money.

The higher end VoIP phones sometimes have a bar of metal in them to weigh them down.

Couldn't this be for practical reasons, to keep the receiver from moving when you pick up the phone?

Sometimes it is sometimes it’s in the handset itself.

Sooo many products have this. Sometimes it actually serves a function of keeping the item stable but usually I assume it is for perception of quality.

Blizzard was literally actively marketing its games to imbeciles. I'd love to know how common that type of buying decision gets made and if it carries over to online game buying - Amazon lists the weight of items.

Rockstar Games takes the cake for the best material included with physical copies, every PS2 era game came with a booklet packed with material about the in-game world and GTAs also included a full-size poster and map. Any advertisements or leaflets included were always brilliant parodies that would lead to real sites. I've never seen this level of quality and depth from anyone except Rockstar.

Valiant Video Enterprises Winter/Spring Catalog and Preview Guide https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Sony_Playstation_...

The companion parody website, password's not needed: http://web.archive.org/web/20070225094519/http://www.valiant...

Can confirm I definitely did this. I mostly associated it with manual size though.

While I do miss these old school boxes and manuals, I also realize, I don't care that much that they are gone?

Don't get me wrong, I loved the Sim City 2000, Civ3, MechWarrior 2 manuals, and countless others, but I also just don't care either, like they were a cool thing... but they were something to read while I took a shit, which isn't saying much.

All of that said, there was a fun nostalgia going into a game store in the mid-90s and being surrounded by boxes of games. I remember Media Play and EB Games were big things here and I bought countless N64 games at both. Before that we also had Toys R'US with its aisles of Genesis and Saturn games.

The real good old days before the boxes was bagged games hung up on pegboard behind the counter at the game store or hobby shop. The bags would contain a floppy or two and either a simple backer of card stock or a slim manual, usually with pretty amateur looking artwork. I used to go in to my local store as a kid and salivate at the games like "Fantasyland 2041 A.D." or "Journey to Atlantis" and dream about saving up the money to be able to play them on the family Apple ][+.

>a disk inside a cheap plastic box

The loss of everything but the disk really accelerated my acceptance of digital distribution, especially once the disk only contained yesterday's version of the launcher and you had to download everything once you got it home.

The brick and mortar store never had a chance; the publishers removing all impetus to step inside them was the killing blow.

Same here. It's just a disc that is usually already outdated on day 1, and many times, has many bugs that were fixed in said day 1 patch.

With video games there's often good reasons to want the disc so you can roll back to the v1.0 before any changes are made. Rockstar Games always adds easter eggs to the disc version that typically get eroded with updates. At least on the PS4 Sony won't let you pick and choose which updates to install for digital copies.

Yeah, I don’t get why some people cling to buying physical copies of every game when some of them are literally just outdated clients to pull the latest state from a server

What I don’t miss is the price. Games sold from the cloud tend to be a fraction of the cost just a year after release. The caveat is that you only own a limited license for the game. Still, I prefer the current status quo vs the old days

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