Games where the box art is a photo!

I've been thinking a lot about this katamari damacy TGS 2003 demo disc box art and how it is probably my favorite videogame boxart ever

And that got me thinking about photos in videogame box art and my mind went straight to Minna Daisuki Katamari

And then I thought about the three beautiful limited edition covers that Iam8bit released for wattam

Is keita takahashi the only interesting enough person in videogames to have photos in his box art? I hope not, are there more examples of this?

I can only think of phalanx

I guess there may be some overlap with the ~~~~Touchy Game Art thread because a lot of that touchy art are photos, so maybe let’s not include those here? or maybe let’s include them? I dunno

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I just thought about sports games and shovelware, a lot of them have photos… Maybe we can include just the ones that are interesting? This tread concept is kind of quickly falling apart lol

Great thread idea! Agree that there may be some Touchy Game crossover (I guess the difference is that Touchy Games are likely do be dioramas and not actual life-size things in the world?), but here's a couple PC Engine guns

And PlayStation food

and an album for good measure

We should also probably exclude movie-tie-in-games as those are generally just a repurpose of the films poster.

The Chessmaster! They sure did reuse this one picture a whole bunch.

The guy on the cover was Will Hare, an actor who you may better know from his role as Old Man Peabody in Back to the Future. Benj Edwards did a fantastic write up on his life a few years ago.

My gambling-loving uncle passed this down to me… I think it’s a photo.. it has to be a photo!

Yeah, that's a good idea! I was kind of talking about that when I mentioned shovelware, but now that I think about it shovelware with photos is kind of interesting, (like the picture below) while movie tie-in game covers are not so much

Here‘s a case where I can’t decide if this is belongs here or on touchy game art, I guess here?

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@Dunkr oh lord! It was only a couple of years ago that I discovered that Mavis Beacon wasn’t a real person. Was my whole childhood a lie?

Do these count as “a photo”, when they are composed to look like movie posters?

(I struggled to play through both of these on my 486. I bought a new video card because of these! I really noticed the difference going from the Cirrus Logic VGA card I had to a Trident that had support for VESA Local Bus)

The Intellivision (original from Mattel, not the upcoming horrible Amico thing) hosts some real good (bad) examples:

There were also a lot of games that had box art where I never really knew if they were painted or edited photos. Things like:

Top one is not a photo but a painting by Sam Yeates in the style of Hollywood poster legend Drew Struzan. Not sure about the WC4 one.

All paintings by (or in the style of) Jerrol Richardson.

that truckin cover gives me anxiety

@yeso

lol that one doesn’t bother me because it’s less plausible

@hellomrkearns I love that shisensyo match-mania cover!

Probably not actually a photo…but still, lmao