At some point in the future, I look forward to telling my grandchildren that their new holo-GPUs are nothing like the wonderful hardware I experienced as a child. No, our graphics cards were spiky, robust bits of technology—and they came in boxes covered in art featuring robot frogs, or scantily clad cyber elves, or the Terminator if his wife left him and he was having a rough time of things.
Yep, the very specific horrors of old graphics card packaging art are well-documented at this point, but to my knowledge, you haven't been able to get hold of a collection of them in book form before.
Well, saddle up and prepare your card details, because Overclocked: An archive of graphics card box art is now available from authors Mike McCabe and Sam Bailey, and it features what looks like a comprehensive collection of some of the very best.
Yep, the Radeon alien is here, alongside some similarly dodgily-rendered friends. I haven't spotted the Leadtek WinFast wizard on the preview pages thus far, but I shall cause a small riot if he doesn't make an appearance.
Not to mention my personal favourite, the Palit robo-frog. Play it. Tweak it. Get more out of it, the frog demands. I'm not quite sure what was going on in the Palit marketing department when this little gem was conceived, but I do know that I would love to have been there.
Anyway, the book features pictures of over 300 retail boxes from the late 1990s through to the 2010s, along with over 50 GPU print ads from what it describes as "the golden age of gaming magazines."
Forgive me for being self-serving for a moment, but this is PC Gamer after all. I wonder how many of those ads graced our mag pages over the years, or how many were first viewed there by those of you reading now?
Anyway, enough nostalgia. The book is out now, and at the time of writing, it's, err, sold out. But should stock arrive soon, I reckon it'd make a great gift for the PC gamer in your life, or perhaps just something to be left on the table for your mum to read when she pops over for a chat.
Yes, mum, I did have the one with the elf lady on it. No, I did not cut it out and put it on my wall. God, you're soooo embarrassing, mum. I'm going to my room.
