Big Box Collection Is A Lovely Website Where You Just Look At The Boxes For Old PC Games

I don't know what else I can really add to that headline. It's a good website.

Aftermath reader Benjamin Wimmer emailed in the other day to tell us about his pet project, which is an effort to digitise his collection of retro PC games. At time of publishing he has turned 758 boxes into 3D objects that you can pan around on the page, checking out the front, back, sides and, in many instances, what was inside them as well, from disks to CDs to foldable maps.

"The tech behind the 3D boxes is simple", he says. "First up the game boxes sides are scanned. Then, those textures are attached to a 3D mesh based upon the boxes' actual dimensions. All boxes can be zoomed and rotated and some can even be looked at from top and bottom angles."

So how long has it taken to put this all together? "I don't count hours and to be honest, I couldn't come up with a good guess either but to me, it grew into this additional hobby within my hobby and it all makes perfect sense spending my evenings scanning and coding and then again some more scanning", Wimmer tells me. "In my eyes, it's time well spent, especially since I'm the main target audience for the site really, but as it turned out, it does paint a lot of smiles on other people's faces too whenever it's stumbled upon."

With over 700 boxes in his collection Wimmer says his physical collection is running out of space, "but there are always things you can add or tweak on the virtual version, like adding the top or bottom of the box, re-scanning the backs of two-part boxes and enhancing the rendering and lightning so I can get as close to the real boxes as possible".

You can check out the Big Box Collection here.