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There are many articles about box art on the gaming internet. Some mock terrible box art, some praise the greats, many are just about that impressively terrible Mega Man box. Me, I want to take a look at a specific facet of box art's function in the process of convincing you to buy a game: its ability to lie.

A little bit of lying from box art isn't bad. The job of box art, after all, is to convince you that the game looks interesting and exciting. If the cover makes you want to flip the box over so you can read the little blurb on the back, then the box art has done its job. Unfortunately, some boxes try to achieve this by totally misrepresenting the game concealed inside the packaging. This can lead to the wrong people buying the game, or even worse, nobody buying it all.

Incidentally, you'll find almost all of the entries in this list are for older games, from 2000 and much earlier. I didn't set out to bias my selection like that. I examined as many covers as I could find for every Nintendo system's game library, from the NES to the Wii and DS. Older games just seem more likely to try to lie to a reader, probably trying to exploit a probable lack of knowledge about the game.

Castlevania II

NES

In some ways Castlevania II was an obvious precursor to the eventual RPG-like direction the franchise would go in. I mean, by the time you hit Portrait of Ruin, you even have quest trees to deal with. Castlevania II has you chasing around NPCs and gathering items, where the original was a straight-up side-scrolling action title. There's still plenty of grueling platforming and action gaming to be had in Castlevania II, you'll just have to find it first.

This is part a lot of kids just couldn't wrap their heads around, and it left a lot of fans of the original Castlevania unhappy. I know my cousins who had a copy were willing to simply give it to me, since it was the "crappy one" of the series. They found it confusing and, on a fundamental level, stupid. They got it for Christmas thinking it would be like the first Castlevania, which all right-thinking persons loved.

The box art certainly did nothing to emphasize the amazing change in direction for the game. It looks amazingly similar to the box art for the original Castlevania, which would suggest an amazingly similar game waits inside. Instead you get Simon wandering around aimlessly, with no Castle in sight and no real idea of where to go or how anything works unless you felt like unraveling poorly-translated clues.

Castlevania II has plenty of fans and defenders now, and it is pretty fun if you go into it expecting to play what is basically a demented, primitive action RPG. At time of release, its box art was the saddest sort of misfire: it got the game into the hands of people who are least likely to enjoy it. It's a game that calls for planning and mapping. At the time, that was the last thing a Castlevania fan wanted to do back then.

Paperboy

NES

One of my cousins owned a Master System and a NES, and had taste in games that was really nothing like my own. Visiting his house could be interesting just for the chance to sit and sort through piles of games I'd otherwise never seen before. One of them was Paperboy, but it was a few years before I ever decided to pop that game into the NES and give it a try.

Why? The art on the box cover.

Despite being an absolutely insane and challenging action title where you try to keep a paperboy's route alive despite finicky controls and the ever-looming presence of the Grim Reaper, Paperboy has a really freaking boring cover. It's art of a Paperboy sneering at the viewer, as he lobs a paper toward the bottom of the box. That's it. I thought it was one of those boring-ass simulation games and didn't play it until I'd chewed through the rest of his collection.

When you put Paperboy in, of course, it's fantastic. It demands a stiff combination of precision and frantic swerving to get around the many tremendous obstacles that lie in wait to make you flip your bike and break your neck. It was honestly hilarious, but in the sort of gracefully understated way that few games manage. Yards are full of the tombstones of previous Paperboys, citizens will attack you, tornadoes try to murder you, and Death himself shows up to stalk you. There are even suicidal breakdancers.

Why isn't any of this interesting stuff on the cover? That Paperboy should be getting chased by dogs, skateboarders, and grandmothers while breaking a guy's window with a flying paper. It should communicate some rough sense of the frantic speed that drives a Paperboy game. It certainly shouldn't be a smug-looking jerk flipping a paper confidently at the reader. That kid should be long since dead and buried in some guy's lawn.

SkyKid

NES

SkyKid is a classic case of box art trying to get you hyped up for the game inside and way, way overshooting the mark. SkyKid is a Namco arcade game that has justifiably been lost to the mists of time. It's not terrible, but it's not very good, either. When ported to the NES and shackled with downgraded graphics and crappy music, it's extremely not good.

Given that SkyKid wasn't a great arcade success by any means, it's quite possible that NES owners back in the day might've known nothing more about the title than what the striking movie poster-style box art promised. And man, that cover art promised a lot: some kind of real World War flying ace action, maybe with some Indiana Jones action-adventure tucked in. That's cover art that makes you want to go find a Nazi and punch him.

If you actually play SkyKid, it's sitting at the most awkward possible point between arcade simplicity and complex stage-driven action. You control a crappy little plane, weirdly named after the Red Baron, and you have to make your way through hordes of enemy planes to first pick up a bomb, then drop it over a target. Later levels have multiple targets and bombs to pick up, and the bombs are on the ground so you have to dive dangerously for them. Coordinating everything at once, including dodging fortress fire in the course of bombing targets, is not impossible. It's just not any fun.

Now, I'm not saying SkyKid's boxart should've made the game look lousy, but it could've at least been representative: a cartoony plane fleeing in panic from other cartoony planes, while dropping bombs at a target below. There you go, that's SkyKid in a nutshell. There's no square-jawed he-man hero types or breathtaking world-spanning adventure to be found here.

Breath of Fire I & II

SNES

I could almost just let these bits of box art sit here and speak for their awful selves.

This is clearly the work of some well-meaning American comic book artist, who got asked to take Breath of Fire's typically flamboyant anime character designs and redraw them to fit the aesthetic mold of Western swords n' sorcery, as established by John Buscema's classic 70's images of Conan. I mean, the characters on the cover all appear in the game, more or less, but they're distinctly more... big-eyed and cartoony, shall we say.

This is a baffling decision. Breath of Fire's selling point is that it's an RPG full of crazy anime-inspired takes on the fantasy genre. The graphics were quite good for the time, and while it has few good story beats, the game's look and especially the character designs were the real selling point. By 16-bit standards, Breath of Fire was mind-blowing stuff, almost like the SNES's answer to Phantasy Star.

So, of course, Squaresoft and Capcom made sure the actual art style of the game was nowhere to be seen on the American box.

Marble Madness

GBC

Oh God. Okay, take a minute and look at the original box art for the NES Marble Madness.

Isn't that great? All those marbles moving and smashing into each other, and the insidious black marble slamming the blue marble off the side of the ramp to his doom. That promises a weird, exciting game of marble-rolling, and isn't much of a distortion of how Marble Madness actually plays. The box even conveys a sense of Marble Madness's impossibly oversensitive controls. It could only be more accurate if there was a picture of a ten-year-old looking on, cursing uncontrollably.

Now let's take a look at the cover for the GBC version, shall we?

Hmm, let's see... it's a photograph. Of a large, boring marble. Sitting motionless on the track. Doing nothing. Just... sitting there, exhibiting no kind of madness whatsoever. There's some airbrushing that's faintly trying to make it sort of look like it's moving, but it's pretty lame.

I can only surmise that when Midway got the rights to Marble Madness, they forgot to buy the right to make exciting new cover art. Instead of something that promises speed and fun, the GBC cover promises a marble doing nothing of interest whatsoever.

Dynowarz

NES

Jeez, how could this cover not be lying to you? What this cover presents us with is an image that is the spirit of early 90's gaming personified: a heroic musclebound cyborg-robot-guy in power-armor shooting a laser right through the head of an attacking T-rex. How could such a battle ever happen? Who the hell cares! It's a cyborg fighting dinosaurs, it's totally rad! Let's play it while we drink Ecto Cooler and eat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pudding pies.

Ah, but what game could possibly be that exciting, especially when released on the humble NES and published by Bandai, perennial source of licensed crap? Certainly not Dynowarz. If you actually play it, you'll find it's actually just a sluggish platformer with bad controls and poorly designed levels. You use the cyborg dude to shoot small enemies, and then he hops in his cyborg dino and uses it to fight other cyborg dinosaurs.

These sequences give the impression your cyborg dino buddy is a worthless tub of lard: all of his enemies are much faster and smaller than he is. Winning fights comes down to mashing the B button like a madman, regardless of which power-ups you're using. Any sense of excitement at knowing, hey, I'm a cyborg piloting a cyborg dinosaur! is muted by how miserably primitive the graphics are. You are a grey blob commanding a slower orange blob. That is all.

This game is the sort of thing that would leave a kid weeping in bed at night. Because you know that game cost sixty bucks, and your parents aren't going to let you have another one for at least a couple months. A couple months to be spent with the sad, broken reality of Dynowarz.

King's Knight

NES

Hey! Look at that cover art. Hmm, knight rescuing a princess, weird-lookin' PC dudes in the background, Squaresoft logo, explicit promise of "Action-Adventure"... bitchin', it's an RPG! Or like Legend of Zelda, maybe!

Ah, but so you think. Then you open it up and find yourself playing an innovative but cruelly difficult shooter. Yes, a shooter.

King's Knight is one of those games that tries to be innovative and subversive by attaching the visual tropes of one gameplay genre to the mechanics of another. Imagine Mass Effect, but unquestionably incompetent. King's Knight suffers from somewhat missing the point of vertical scrolling shooters to begin with.

Shooters are a genre that require memorizing stage layouts so you can develop your reflexes. King's Knight doesn't let your game end until you've killed off all four of your prospective party members, who each start with totally different level layouts. So, well, good luck memorizing anything without devoting large expanses of your lifespan to mastering King's Knight. Add in weird controls and a strange power-up system, and it gets pretty hard to enjoy the game's gimmick.

When you try to do something fancy-shmancy with your game and don't really have the controls to support it (or graphics), then you end up with a game that's just not going to work. This is also going to make it hard to sell, and practically forces the box art to start lying like crazy.

Puzzled

GBC

This cover, to some extent, inspired this entire piece. I saw it while looking for something else, and I was utterly baffled. What the hell could this game be about? You have a giant screaming Dr. Wily-looking mad scientist, a tiny child rendered in a completely different art style who points at him accusingly, and a small anthropomorphic blob that looks kind of embarrassed to be there. They stand on blocks floating in an infinite void. My best guess was some kind of ill-conceived spiritual sequel to A Boy and His Blob, but perhaps somehow playable.

Then I played the game, and frankly, this cover is still totally baffling to me. Puzzled is, naturally, a puzzle game, and the little blob shuffled off into the corner of the box art is actually your player character. The blob can slide blocks around, and then split into two. By covering two identical blocks at once, he can make them disappear. It's not a bad little game, really, but a little on the easy side.

All of the insane imagery on the the cover is from the game's opening cutscene, which has nothing to do with the gameplay, and is... good lord. Just look at it.

See? Insane, and probably drawn in MS Paint. What do the little kid and the scientist have to do with the blob solving block puzzles? Is the scientist hundreds of feet tall, or is he normal-sized and being menaced by a one-inch kid? How did the kid think he was going to beat the scientist to begin with? Does the scientist rule a world, or a featureless grey void? Oh, if only I had a copy of the manual around, I bet not one of these questions would be answered.

(Moby Games claims the scientist turns the kid into the blob, which makes some sense, but only casts the cover in a more questionable light.)

Anyway, in some way involving bad art, a blob begins solving decent block puzzles. That's Puzzled for you. It's a shame that the cover focuses on following the ridiculous opening cutscene instead of giving you more focus on puzzle-solving aspect. Puzzled seems to have been almost entirely forgotten by the gaming internet, despite being a 2000 release. Did the crap box art drive people away, convincing them not to give Puzzled a chance? It's impossible to say at this point, but it couldn't have helped.

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