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If you were alive and sentient in the nineties you probably harbour some fondness for the “big box” PC games of yore. Back then, rather than buy an ephemeral digital license for a game, you’d head to a store to buy a huge box bedecked in lavish art, inside which you’d find a handful of 3.5-inch floppy discs or a CD-ROM, usually a substantial glossy manual, and if you were lucky, maybe even some extras like stickers or drink coasters.
There’s been renewed interest in the ye olde big box PC game, especially in the wake of Sony’s announcement it will discontinue physical PlayStation games. Some proactive folk have gone viral for manufacturing their own physical Steam games. Now GOG has offered its own alternative: printable big boxes based on scans of real commercial packages from the golden era of game packaging.
In collaboration with Big Box Collection—which is a fan-operated trove of big box 3D scans—GOG is now offering those 3D scans with five entries in its GOG Preservation Program. These include the newly added Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Armikrog, while games already in the Preservation Program including Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, and Myst will also receive the treatment.
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“We’re delivering flat, printable versions of the same box art, so you can cut, fold, and glue your own physical big box at home,” reads GOG’s announcement. “A proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes.”
It’s a neat idea for people who long for the days when they could display their collection on actual shelves. As the capriciousness of so-called digital ownership becomes clearer with time, and as streaming platforms become more cynical, exploitative and AI-flooded, people in their droves are returning to physical media. Revenue from CD sales, for instance, have jumped 58% in 2026 compared to 2025. That’s a pretty good result for a format long considered dead.
The elephant in the room here is that obviously GOG isn’t selling physical discs. But of all the major PC games platforms, it’s best positioned to offer this service: GOG is DRM free, so there’s nothing stopping you from burning the game files onto a CD or DVD, all the better to archive on your physical shelves.
