the boxes.
yeah,those big boxes with fat and colorfull manuals and 3 to 4 cds just to install the games.

Same. It was always exciting to buy a game at the store and come home and rip that big box open. I think the last game I bought with one of the big boxes at a store was NOLF. Such a good game. I wish it'd come to gog.

Or those games that came on 12 floppy diskettes...

When you were hoping that on your next command, the game won't require another diskette.. oh! the joy when changing wasn't required!

I know what you mean.

I caved recently and bought Alan Wake for the PC (the first Steam game that I've bought that DIDN'T cause a fuss when I tried to activate it and download several gigabytes of forced patches - hurrah!) and it came in an absolutely gorgeous box with postcards and full colour manual.

It's just a shame that such effort is a rare thing these days.

I paid €40 for the game on DVD although the Steam version was €30, and the extra €10 for a decent box and a full manual was more than worth it.

my last was Battlefield 2142.and played it for 4 years.
that game was awesome

The boxes were ridiculous, and rightly replaced. I think it was because they were in violation of a European law about the product not allowed to be a certain size bigger than the packaging.

It got to the point where there would be a repackaged game (i.e. old) which contained just the CD, with the manual on the CD, then a massive box to hold it.

I like the new boxes. I think Black And White was the first.

I missed them a while.

Now I don't care.

Yeah they were ridiculously large and at times unnecessary, but heck with that. I just love collecting em. Hoarder's mentality I guess.

I just got my copy of Rocket Jockey recently. Inside was just the game and a manual. That's it. In a 2" x 14" x 9" box. Still it's really nice for displaying. Putting just the jewel case on display just isn't the same.

I fully identify with this. I just don't care about boxes or manuals, and I consider collector editions of all kinds just wasted money. That's what I like the most about digital distribution, actually. Much less cardboard and plastic I have no use for.

Ugh, I hate clutter.
Digital Distribution all the way.

I don't think that's the case. As far as I know the Amaray standard established itself in Europe simply out of a desire to reduce the size of packaging of games when they were in storage and bring it in line with the packaging of the era. The use of Amaray started more or less at the same time the PS2 came out, and I think Australia introduced the same thing at the same time. There are still a few big-box collector's editions being brought out in Europe with plenty of empty space in them.

I know that the US stayed with the big-box format for a long time, not sure when Amaray came in for PC games over there.

+1 but I'm still holding on to my Blizzard boxes... They too will fly away soon, but just dunno when.

I'm also glad that we don't have to deal with those huge boxes anymore. While there were exceptions, most did not contain anything of interest anyway, just a CD in a jewel case and a small manual. There were absolutely exceptions though, some had huge manuals and came with a lot of extras, but most did not. And for those games that needs large manuals, they still rarely needed manuals THAT big.

I seem to remember reading at the time that the law was being flouted, and that had been noticed. So it wasn't that the law was introduced, so much as pressure was introduced to subscribe to it. I think the current format was simply a convenient way to obey.