Did you/your family keep the cardboard game boxes?

[gbpxl]

My mom kept all the boxes and manuals, stored them away and kept them in excellent condition. She sold them with the games for next to nothing at a garage sale in the mid to late 2000s.

I heard Funcoland used to stomp on the boxes and then throw them away lol

[goldenband]

Only a few of ours survived, and I have no idea why those did. The rest we tossed, if we even had them to begin with.

[Tupin]

Yeah, my parents always insisted on keeping boxes for everything in case the game "broke." Sadly it's mostly just relatively inexpensive GBA games, but there's a few good ones (FF Tactics, Oracle of Seasons on GBC, etc)

[jb143]

I don't necessarily think my parents did, but I did. Though when I moved for college I left a lot of the boxes packed away in a box at home (just the boxes and manuals, not the games and systems). When my parents moved they all disappeared. There's a good chance they saw it all as garbage and threw it out, I don't really remember.

[Gameguy]

I kept all of mine from back then, mostly Genesis or Gameboy boxes. I don't have the system box for my Genesis though.

[mkenyon2]

I wish I had.

[Steve W]

I have a lot of my old boxes in storage, from the Atari 2600 upward. Some have taken damage over the years but I tend to try and hang on to them.

[Cornelius]

My family maybe did at first, but they quickly got beat up and tossed. My wife's family kept all of theirs, but they also used them to keep the games in, so they are all pretty ratty. Getting their box of games is one of the things that got me into collecting. I initially just said I'd like to play them sometime, so they gave them to me to get them out of the basement. Once I played them and started noticing games/systems at garages sales, I was hooked.

[WulfeLuer]

When I was little, anything Mario-related got hoarded, including game boxes and manuals. Time and exposure to kids wrecked the boxes, but the manuals survived for a long while. There was this Ebay consignment joint that I handed the manuals over to about a decade ago (a little NES, but mostly GBA, SNES, and loose PS1) and we made a fair bit of cash out of it. I keep boxes now, but it's mostly GBA stuff I managed to get CIB to begin with.

One thing I like about the CD era forward is that the cases lend themselves better to keeping together.

[jb143]

One thing I like about the CD era forward is that the cases lend themselves better to keeping together.


This is true but I know people who used to keep all their games in one of those CD binders and presumably threw away everything else except maybe the manuals.

Prior to that though, having found most of my collection at thrift stores and garage sales over the years, it's Genesis cases that got saved the most. Makes sense because they come across as actually protecting the game rather than "just store packaging". Master System as well, though I haven't found nearly as many CIB as Genesis, but the overall CIB to loose ratio is pretty high for both. On the other hand, I've found a ton of NES games over the years as well but maybe only 5 total that still had the box.

Though, now that I think of it, a large percentage of my Intellivision collection is CIB whereas Atari2600 is mostly loose. I wonder if needing somewhere to keep and organize overlays had anything to do with that?

[goldenband]

Though, now that I think of it, a large percentage of my Intellivision collection is CIB whereas Atari2600 is mostly loose. I wonder if needing somewhere to keep and organize overlays had anything to do with that?

I'd think so, but another common thread is that gatefold boxes, like Sega's clamshell boxes, give easy access to the contents without putting wear and tear on the boxes or the manuals.

It takes care and effort to put the contents of a NES, SNES, or N64 box back the way you found them. It's a tight fit, you have to get everything in place before you slide it in, and the manual doesn't really have a specific, secure place of its own. Plus there's an art to opening a box flap without bending it, and few adults have that skill, let alone children.

I think that's why so many Intellivision, Odyssey², Master System, and Genesis games have kept their original cases: the box design facilitates access to the contents, rather than interfering with it.

[gbpxl]

N64 game boxes are impossible to open without damaging the flap

[Aussie2B]

My parents wouldn't have cared one way or the other if I saved my game packaging, so I can't blame anyone but myself for throwing away game boxes. I saved every manual I got at least, but I saw the outer cardboard boxes as disposable and stuck them in the recycle. The only exceptions were my Chrono Trigger box and my N64 box, which I kept around for sentimental reasons. My thinking didn't change until around 1999, when I got into collecting retro games and was talking to other collectors online. I started to appreciate game boxes and regretted throwing away boxes prior, especially the ones for rare and/or valuable games like Harvest Moon, Lufia 2, and Castlevania Legends. So my collection is kinda of weird in that there's an abrupt shift in almost nothing having boxes to suddenly almost all my late N64 releases being CIB, same with GBC and GBA. Any older boxes I have I bought secondhand, but I can't say I come across many retro carts with their cardboard boxes. To this day, I only have like five boxed NES games, and that's out of nearly 200 NES games I have. That's part of the reason why I enjoy collecting imports. It's nice getting cheap retro games CIB.