◼ Of course, it wasn’t just paper and cloth maps that gamers often discovered inside their newly’s blood capsules to the more regular music tapes and posters (as popularised by Ocean Software inside and , respectively), those big boxes often promised a lot more than the mere disk and instruction manual. Books such as accompanied licences based on literature, while games like and included bespoke novellas, written exclusively to expand the game’s backstory. As the big box phenomenon grew during the Nineties, a whole range of paraphernalia accompanied most games: registration cards, adverts, special offers, badges, T-Shirts, keyboard overlays and copy protection schemes or dongles. Somewhere among that lot were the most important bits: the manual and game disk.
