I Miss The Cursed Aesthetic Of Old Graphics Card Boxes

thegamer.com:

Graphics card packaging is so boring these days. It's usually just a photo of the GPU itself on a dark background, which is deeply unexciting. But in the '90s and early-to-mid ‘00s, the art on graphics card boxes was absolutely unhinged. For reasons I'll never truly understand, manufacturers used wizards, weird little goblins, aliens, amphibians in mech suits, and other poorly rendered oddities to sell their graphics cards. Here are some particularly wild examples of this brilliantly chaotic aesthetic. This is how you get people excited about an expensive chunk of silicon.

I don't know what inspired the marketing team at Palit to choose a frog wearing a mechanical exoskeleton as a company mascot, but I'm glad they did. Look at this little guy. Incredible. This GPU came bundled with a free copy of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, so they probably could have put Lara on the box. But nah: mecha frog. I know which I prefer.

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Now we're talking. Compare this to the soulless GPU packaging of today and you can see why the ‘00s were such a golden era for this stuff. What does a gross little goblin brandishing a knife have to do with cutting edge computer graphics? Nothing, but who cares. Put it on the box anyway, and have him emerging from a lake for some reason. Just do it.

Woah. WOAH. What the fuck is this? Sapphire looked at what the other GPU designers were doing and thought, screw that: we'll invent our own little freak. This thing is like the result of an unholy union between ET and Shrek. That's weird enough, but why is it striking such a seductive pose? I don't wanna know what's behind that daintily raised leg.

Back to the '90s now. This is a 3D accelerator, not strictly a