We don’t talk about box art so much around these parts any more. Maybe that’s because we don’t see much by way of video game boxes anymore – they’re fast becoming a thing of the past, for better and for worse. Playing the surprise Switch release of The Collection of Mana recently, though, I was reminded of the power of a strong piece of cover art – and of an artform that’s in danger of being lost.
I never played Secret of Mana first time around in the 90s, though it’s lodged in my consciousness just as firmly as all those SNES classics that I did. It’s one of those games that was a constant presence on shelves of game stores – – usually nestled behind the counter, a luxurious item that was available on import those long months it took to finally come to Europe.
There was always something special about Square’s 16-bit RPGs of the time – something , these entire universes condensed into a single cart, and that feeling was only underlined here in Europe by how these things were. For most ordinary 11-year-olds, unless you got lucky and had a friend with rich parents, these things were almost entirely out of reach. And, when you’re a kid, when something’s out of reach you tend to fixate on it.