When I was growing up, our household computer was a Commodore 64, but sadly, my arsenal of video games was pretty limited, probably because my parents thought it was more important to be outside than cooped up indoors in front of a glowing monitor. Glad that never happened to me. But this didn’t stop me from staring at the amazing artwork on packaging and game cartridges that I would see at my friend’s houses or at the local video or gaming stores.

I still love looking at them and imagining a parallel universe that allow for badass guns, cool space ships and friggin’ sweet fast cars. Let’s face it, the box designs were often way cooler than the games themselves. Den of Geek‘s Ryan Lambie profiled 50 of the best video game box designs, check some of them out below, and go here for more.

Of course, being a pretty novice gamer lacking skill, when I did find myself playing something at the local arcade (remember those?), I wasn’t that good. So I became very familiar with the continue game screen. There’s nothing like a flashing, beckoning screen that seduces you in dropping more quarters and more time into a game that is all too often unwinnable to most. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t include Gauntlet, one of my favourite games growing up. Alhtough amazingly I found a sound clip of what a quarter sounded like going into the game. Visit Kotaku for the original article by Gergo Vas with tons more awesome gifs.

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