I've been thinking, if it would be possible to get original, high res game box art as bonus items for games, especially because older games tend to have pretty damn cool box art.

I would sign this petition :)

When I was young, I always cut out the covers of the boxes to keep it together withoug wasting too much space... loved the old boxes.

If I would take some time, I shall still find my box of Duke 3D somewhere.

I am still proud of my collection of game boxes, especially my Gold Box games, Fountain of Dreams etc.... love the classics! I agree it would be awesome to get hi-res images!

Glad to see I'm not alone with this. Thruth to be told, I got some crappy games in my shelf just because they have nice looking game boxes.

It would be a nice thing to have. Preferably the original, unlettered art. But I do have to wonder how many publishers retain copies of the cover art. After all, not many seem to bother keeping so much as the source code.

That might indeed vary graetly. I remember reading a blog of some collector, who had bought himself original box art of some pretty old games from the 80's directly from the artists, but I could imagine in some cases the art work has been left in the developers vaults and lost in time.

By all means, yes!
If GOG had a chance to supply us with cover arts, the unofficial gamebox covers would rock even more [and we'd have a HQ Age Of Wonders cover], not to mention the orgy of posters on my wall..

You people and your box fetishes, I will never understand that! :p

I think it's like all the other bonus materials, they release it when they can, and that's why you see things being added from time to time. A lot of it comes from their own collections.

In the case of traditional artwork, even the original artist won't have a copy. So if the publisher lost it or it got sold off then there's no easy way to trace it. It would be far harder for GOG to track down these works than the rights to the games themselves.

Unless the rightholder thinks that boxart is part of the physical form, and does not give GOG permission to add that as an extra.
Then again, since GOG is a digital distribution site, they may not want to add such addons, despite the popularity of the Unofficial DVD Covers for GOG.com games" thread.
It's up to us, i guess to bug GOG for some hires boxarts as much as we can.:)

Right, that would normally be in the licensing agreement. GOG does license the bonus content when available, I suspect the license for that other materials is likely tied into how the developer licensed that for their product in the first place.

I seriously sometimes just sit and look through my collection for no reason other than just to do it. The way I touch the original Fallout boxes borders on being classified as cuddling.

That said box images wouldn't do much for me, chances are if I love the game that much I either have or want the original box anyway. What WOULD be cool, for me anyway, would be custom disc images so I could burn a backup and then put a disc label on it.

Which AoW in particular?

The first one, as i remember [and see on my harddrive] was only available in low quality, as in, there was no HQ scan on the web. Has that status changed? *hopes*;)