If you have been paying attention to the console side of things, you'll be aware that Sony is planning to end PS5 discs in 2028. You'd also be aware that the move has met with plenty of backlash. Xbox is also leaning into digital, but with a less hostile approach, giving players a way to turn physical games into digital codes. So despite the best efforts to fight back, it's inevitable that the video game industry is slowly moving toward an all-digital future.
However, it's not all over yet. While it can't bring back physical PC game releases at retail, GOG has found a clever middle ground for its Preservation Program by letting players build the boxes themselves. In other words, GOG is reviving the distinctive "big box" era of classic PC game packaging.
The storefront has partnered with Benjamin Wimmer's Big Box Collection, a passion project that has amassed more than a thousand 3D scans of vintage PC game boxes since 2015, to bring downloadable box art to five titles. Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, and Myst, which were already part of the GOG Preservation Program, make up three of them. Armikrog and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, added just in time for the franchise's 60th anniversary, also joined the program with box art.
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Each game now comes with a rotatable 3D scan of its original box, viewable through the 3D viewer already built into Windows and Mac with no extra software required. "We had the actual boxes scanned, front, back, spine, the works, and turned into rotatable 3D models you can download after purchase," GOG explained in its announcement. "Just spin the box around on your screen like you're holding it."
For anyone who wants more than a digital look, GOG is also offering flat, printable templates in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats, letting players cut, fold, and assemble their own physical replicas at home.
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Which five classic PC games are included in GOG's first box-art Preservation Program rollout?
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GOG frames the initiative as preservation in a different form. "Physical media doesn't survive the way software can. Boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," the company wrote. "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."
