13th March 2011, 12:08 PM
You gotta give Sega credit, they were the first to use long lasting durable containers for their games, starting right from the Master System. Granted, Master System box art was incredibly boring (if I ever saw them as a kid, I probably thought they were computer office applications), but the box itself was brilliant. To this day, most of my old Nintendo game boxes are gone, as I ended up taking the game and manual and throwing the card board away. However I still have all the plastic cases. It's funny. Sega got it perfect with the Master and Genesis, but when CDs came along, everyone's first thought was "let's use clear incredibly fragile plastic, so people can see through it even though most of the time we'll be blocking that view with inserts anyway, also every last one of these hinges is going to break". Sega's answer was giant sized CD cases that were just as fragile, but took up ridiculous amounts of space. Finally, DVD cases came along, which were basically just slimmer versions of Sega's old game cases, and everything came back full circle. It's weird how that works.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)