Early PlayStation 2 Game Box Design Was Very Different

PS2 sport bins have been fully unremarkable, as a result of they regarded like each different plastic case obtainable on the time, from Xbox video games to DVDs. However an earlier design for them that Sony ended up ditching was much more fascinating.

Earlier this 12 months, Phil Salvador wrote a unbelievable piece on The Obscuritory about Hock Wah Yeo, a designer whose wild and bizarre packaging designs have been the most effective this enterprise has ever seen. In the event you have been alive and wandering into online game shops within the 90s, you’d have seen and remembered his work, on video games like Jetfighter:

And Prince of Persia:

These, and masses extra of his works, have been unimaginable, and would immediately catch your eye as you walked right into a retailer. By the top of the last decade shifts in the way in which the online game enterprise had taken place, nevertheless, and a push for rising standardisation in packaging from retailers and distributors led to the demise of those distinctive sport bins.

Simply as his iconic cardboard creations have been disappearing, although, Yeo was employed by Sony for “one final job with the sport trade”. Within the late 90s, with work effectively underway on the PlayStation 2, Sony was searching for any individual to design the console’s sport bins, and requested Yeo to take a shot.

The outcome was this. Implausible. Like one thing a personality in a 90s cyberpunk anime would danger their lives for, and name it one thing like a DataCel Disk. As you’ll be able to see by the scale of the disc, the quilt artwork was a lot smaller than what we’re used to, and the “backbone” of the case is definitely on the backside. Wildly impractical, positive, but in addition cool as hell. Sadly it was to not be.

“Throughout manufacturing of the prototype, the higher-ups at Sony Pc Leisure in Japan stepped in and canceled the undertaking”, Salvador writes, “preferring to make use of the usual DVD case design, which might have been considerably cheaper and simpler to work with.”

Which it little question was! However nonetheless, stuff like this is sufficient to make you assume, perhaps even dream, a couple of online game trade the place phrases like “retail standardisation” by no means turned as essential as “appears actually cool”.