Box art standard size?

[80sarcadeboy]

I think it might just be me but I have a real OCD about box art being all the same size. I have even deleted games where the box art is a different size. A real noob question but is there actually a standard size for box art? Loving the constant development of launchbox - the live dev streams mean nothing to me but are still great viewing!

[Jason Carr]

Thank you @80sarcadeboy. It depends on the platform; unfortunately for some platforms, like MS-DOS especially, there really was no standard physical box size. Old-school PC games come in many different types of boxes and sizes.

[Zombeaver]

Yeah, the short answer is "no". The longer answer is "It depends on the platform, but generally still no". Some platforms like 90's PC were kindof a free-for-all when it comes to form factor, as Jason said. There are also platforms like Playstation and Sega Saturn that went through multiple iterations of their game boxes (long boxes vs standard cd case). Even something like the SNES, while it had predefined box dimensions (barring weird things like Earthbound and Mario Paint) the layout of the covers themselves were somewhat inexact which means there's generally some variance in the dimensions you'll find between covers online (which is exacerbated by the fact that you're dealing with images uploaded by myriad different sources). There's a really interesting article on Gamesradar that shows some of the incremental changes in game packaging and illustrates some of this. All of that said, I wouldn't mind having the option to force covers to set dimensions in LB/BB, by crop and/or resize. It's not a huge deal and it might look bad in certain cases, but it'd help keep things a little more consistent visually as well.