Why I love gatefold box covers and my favorite one

Hi, everyone. This is just a little piece I have written on a topic in video games which has always interested me, the type of gatefold PC box cover which were used in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. In particular I want to talk about one example in particular that I find memorable, the classic RTS Rise of Nations

I have had a weird history with strategy games, especially real time strategy games. When I first got into PC gaming at around 10 or so, they were the first genre I focused on, and for at least four or five years it was my bread and butter when it came to gaming. But as time went on I fell out of love with the genre and began to wonder if I had ever really liked strategy games or merely the idea of strategy games.

My love of strategy games had a simple enough origins, I have always liked history. I read pretty much anything on the subject I could get my hand on and one of my favorite joys in life was every Friday when Dad would drive me into town and take me to the library after school and I would just spend one or two hours camped out in the non fiction section. So by the time I got into PC gaming, I was already very interested in history as a subject.

So when one day I had to go with my Mother and Grandmother to Costco, I wandered off into the electronics section which back then actually carried computer games and I saw a game called Rise of Nations that caught my eye.

Rise of Nations came in one of those gatefold boxes that computer games used to come in, not the big unwieldy ones from the 90’s, but the slightly later smaller ones that were commons in the 2000’s. For those who do not know, the way gatefold covers work is that the regular cover of the box is only attached to the box on one side allowing it to be drawn back and second larger cover is revealed.

The issue with most game covers is that they are generally pretty rote, don’t actually tell you that much about the game and half of the title is taken up by things like the title, ESRB ratings and the developer and publisher logo. The extra space allowed to the gatefold cover and the fact that it doesn’t have to be as immediately eye catching as the actual cover, allows for more creative freedom and more opportunity to tell you why this game you want to be is going to be so awesome. This is definitely the case with Rise of Nations where the actual cover of the game is decent, but the gatefold is a thing of beauty.

The gatefold cover shows a scene from the game with two groups of soldiers in the enlightenment era are going at each other, the Japanese in Blue on the left and the British in Red on the right. The center of the picture is dominated by two groups of infantry organized into orderly lines firing volleys at each other, white smoke filling the air. While behind the infantry on both sides, cannons are firing and cavalry is milling about. The picture is framed by the buildings belonging to both sides, the battle evidently taking place in a short gap between two cities. Above reads “History. Strategy. Technology. Power” summing up the themes of the game in four short words.

It really is hard for me to overstate how amazing I thought the game was. The graphics were cutting edge for the time, so many little soldiers rendered in detail and ordered up into tiny little ranks and the battlefield layered in smoke and muzzle flashes. It wasn’t just technically impressive either. I still think that the art design for the game is brilliant with the of the units and buildings having their own distinct look for each era of the game and even varying in some cases depending on the civilization. They are not only visually appealing, but you can tell what they are supposed to be and what faction they belong to, always important in an RTS game . I did not know at the time that video game graphics could even be that good and it looked exactly what I imagined when I was reading about all of these old battles.

What really blew my mind was the text that they had written below the screenshot which was packed with what was in the game. “220 different unit types”, “500 artistically distinct variations based on gender, race and time period.”, “slingers”, “musketeers,”tanks” and “Nuclear Missiles”. Then to cap it all off, they listed all 18 nations in the game, “Aztecs, Bantu, British, Chinese, Egyptians, French, Germans, Greeks, Inca, Japanese, Koreans, Maya, Mongols, Nubians, Romans Russians, Spanish, and Turks”. This is what made the game so fascinating to me, it seemed like I could take all of the civilizations I read about in my books and smash them against each other across time and space in a sandbox environment, just like it showed in that screenshot. My imagination ran wild with what I thought was possible, Aztec archers raining down fire arrows on British Red Coats on a medieval battlefield, D-Day only with Nubians landings on the beach against Maya defenders, Inca laying siege to Russian cities. Of course many of things I imagined were in the game were not actually included, but I didn’t know that looking at the box. To me it seemed like Rise of Nations was a game where anything was possible.

I think this illustrates what I love so much about gatefold covers. The extra space that the publisher gets to play with, space that doesn’t have to include a large logo or focus on being immediately eye catching, gives them opportunity to sell and promote their games in more in depth and original ways that can better entrance the imagination of the potential buyer. I have such fond memories of wondering around electronics stores like in the early 2000’s and just going through the various games in the PC section and poring over every single boxed game they had trying to absorb any shred of info like a sponge.

I think what this did was that it helped open up my mind to new experiences that video games could offer that I wouldn’t have normally encountered otherwise. It showed me that no matter how many great games I would play that there would always be more, that the gaming hobby as a whole was a wide universe which had a level of depth that I could never hope to entirely fathom on my own. This is what the effects of gatefold covers had on my and why I still enjoy looking at and collecting them.

I hope all of you enjoyed my little article and if any of you have any gatefold covers that you thought were particularly neat, please share them in the comments section.

Thank you for reading.