Unlike original Gameboy themselves who were engineered to survive a war, torn and battered gameboy-era boxes are a common issue amongst game collectors. See, card boxes are simply not sturdy enough to survive one's infancy. That means that a Gameboy game that's CIB (complete in box) can fetch very high prices these days.
All that for a box made of card and a manual.
Anyway, that means that boxes and storing these is a very common problem with no official solutions to be had, there are no extra prints that can be ordered or official quality replacements... not even high resolution assets, there are guys selling reprinted scans on ebay and some very crude attempts meant to be printed and applied on Nintendo DS boxes out there but in reality though, these people don't know what CMYK is, can't clean scans for their lives and don't use vectorial assets, I suspect they don't even notice that they ignore the scaling ratio.
Due to that not being satisfying at all I set out to solve the problem myself, trying to go as deep as I possibly could in order to be able to re-enact the professional look and feel of these boxes, had I have access to the original files used to print them back in the 90's. This meant I had to re-do everything.
^ Remade logo.
Just remaking the box and and respective cutouts would be simple enough with all the work and asset remastering I did but my goal was more than a high quality knock off, if this got re-released today, like turntable records have been lately, it wouldn't make it to the stores in a cardboard box, no.
^ Original boxart scans
^ Proposed remaster
Ignore the colour differences, they are right for print but the output wasn't right for RGB.
Note, the eliptical seal of quality on the original boxart is the american one, the round one being the european version which I used. I had the original boxes anyway so those are only there for comparison purposes.
I even remade the screenshots and artwork. Screenshots in particular weren't such an easy feat because these were from levels from the unfinished game so they don't exist in the final game. I fixed the aspect ratio of those though, because they would otherwise be stretched.
^ Instruction booklet was also redone, the original one was wider and less tall. The insert is new.
I plan on doing it for Super Mario Land 1 and Super Mario Land 2 (perhaps a few more) and I already did some preliminar work on those, but due to the artwork having to be redrawn entirely I haven't been able to find the time lately.
