GOG Adds Printable 'Big Box' Packaging and 3D Models for Five PC Games

The feature, called the “Printable Big Box” collection, currently covers five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Shoppers browsing those titles on the GOG store will see “3D Boxes” listed among the included “Goodies” before purchase. Owners of the games on GOG can download a ZIP file that contains the box art as an animated 3D object file in GLB format, along with a flat printable template in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats.

The report describes the big box format as a pre-Steam-era fixture that made PC games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after in-home collectibles. GOG says the downloads are meant to support “a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes.”

The physical-media expansion of the existing GOG Preservation Program was created through a partnership with Benjamin Wimmer’s Big Box Collection website. That site has grown since 2015 to include more than 1,000 3D scans from Wimmer’s private collection of physical PC games.

In an interview with GOG, Wimmer said he appreciates the artistry of a good old-fashioned big box, but he also said he appreciates their evolution into the “interactive cards” used on modern digital storefronts. Those cards “provid[e] us art, screenshots, gameplay videos and whatnot and that not shown as a box, [it] is just good UX,” he said.

GOG framed the project as a different form of preservation. “Physical media doesn’t survive the way software can -- boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out,” the company wrote in its announcement. “Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in.”

The Printable Big Box collection is limited for now to the five named games. The effort extends GOG’s Preservation Program, which is intended to keep older games playable on modern PCs, to the packaging those games once came in.

Editor's Summary GOG has added printable big box packaging and 3D models for five PC games through a partnership with the Big Box Collection. The feature lets owners create physical papercraft versions of classic packaging while preserving box art in digital form. The collection is currently limited to Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.