Besides being an important consideration for marketing and storage purposes, there are several examples where a custom cardboard box, either for its own merits or its ability to store additional value-added items, becomes a huge selling point for customers.

A complexity in the modern consumer market is whether the recyclable, disposable nature of 

cardboard boxes is fully taken advantage of, given that customised boxes are such an essential part of modern product design and are often kept by consumers for sentimental or resale value.

In some cases, the box ends up becoming not only a useful ad-hoc piece of storage or a way to keep a product organised but becomes a fundamental part of the product itself.

To explain why this is the case, we also have to explore the concept of the feelie and how it became essential to the rise of electronic entertainment and the packaging it came in.

Why Did The Box Become An Important Part Of Computer Game Development?

Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, computer games and software were sold with the most minimal packaging necessary in order to ensure the discs, cassette tapes, or cartridges made it to a consumer.

Cardboard sleeves, envelopes and even plastic bags were sometimes used, but because software was often supplied with multiple discs, an instruction manual, warranty card, additional supplemental materials and additional items known as “feelies”, cardboard boxes quickly became the standard.

What Is A Feelie?

Named after the sense cinema in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the feelie is any physical object supplied with a computer game which aims to create an additional physical connection to a virtual setting.

Despite being most closely associated with computer games, feelies pre-date them by over four decades, with the prototypical murder mystery games written by Dennis Wheatley creating the concept that would be greatly expanded upon in the 1980s.

At a basic level, feelies include written materials ostensibly claimed to be part of a game’s world, such as newspapers, maps or small books, but can be anything from a packet of dried pasta, a piece of fluff, coins, representations of key items in the game and additional physical puzzles which connected to the game.

Do High Quality Boxes And Feelies Increase Product Sales?

Despite the concerns about additional costs, the high-quality boxes and the feelies within them significantly increased sales of computer games when the medium was in its infancy, typically serving one or more of the following four purposes:

• Added Value - A high-quality big box made a purchase feel more luxurious, and having additional trinkets increased the perceived value of the game it was sold with, often justifying a significant premium price.

• Copy Protection - Before digital encryption was an option, many games used code wheels such as Dial-A-Pirate to stop illegal copying using consumer-grade hardware.

• Immersion - Many games blurred the lines between the virtual fantasy and reality by having physical objects in the box represented as items in the game

• Supplemental Information - During a time when digital space was limited, many games such as the SSI Gold Box games supplied additional detailed information in supplementary materials.

There are two major examples of cardboard boxes and feelies not only increasing sales but being a fundamental part of the product package, both of which have been credited with popularising the concept.

Infocom

The interactive fiction designers Infocom were so closely connected to the concept of feelies that nearly every game they made, from Arthur - The Quest For Excalibur to Zork, relied extensively on big boxes filled with additional materials.

What made Infocom unique is how they would use them to immerse the player in the game, as the text-based adventures relied on physical objects to improve immersion and provide help for new players as to what to do in the game.

The first of these was Deadline, a 1982 murder-mystery which included no less than eight additional items in the box, instead featuring many of the clues and pieces of evidence as physical items.

When the company was bought by Activision in 1986, its decision to scale back on the stylish grey boxes and feelies was credited with the developer being shut down in 1989.

The Ultima Series

Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s lengthy series of fantasy role-playing games are credited with popularising the idea of packaging non-adventure games with supplementary materials that became increasingly elaborate as the series progressed.

Whilst the first Ultima only came with a short manual, its sequel, Revenge of the Enchantress, was shipped in an elaborate and beautiful box and included a cloth map of the Planet Earth necessary to complete the game due to it being the only place where the game’s time travel mechanic was explained.

This tradition only increased throughout the series, despite the additional cost per unit, with the cloth maps further supplemented with various coins, metal ankhs, orb of the moons, tarot cards and books containing both lore and spells needed to complete the game.

This tradition lasted until Ultima IX - Ascension, which coincided with a general decline in the big box as the main sales unit for computer games. 

Feelies are still sold as part of collector’s editions, which provide added value at an explicitly higher cost.