10 Insane Lies Told On Video Game Box Art

Box art doesn't get much more ridiculous than that of the 1991 space shooter Phalanx, where an old man playing a banjo takes up a solid half of the front cover's real estate, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the game itself.

The more appropriate image of a spaceship meanwhile takes up just a small fraction of the cover and the tagline, "The hyper-speed shoot-out in space" is also tiny compared to the picture of the unidentified man strumming away.

Those who worked on the cover revealed in a 2017 interview with Destructoid that the unconventional design was a desperate attempt to differentiate the otherwise unremarkable shooter from the countless similar games on the market:

"We knew the game didn't have a lot to offer, but we wanted to make the package arresting...If we couldn't do anything else, we'd try and get the potential purchaser to stare at the package and try and figure out what just happened. Today it might be called a WTF moment. So [employee Keith Campbell] could have done some predictable spaceship shooting bulls**t that would have been like every other game out there.

Or he could create a story that would make people stop and think about it. And I guess it's proof that was a good idea because people are still thinking about it. Phalanx was a very average game with an unexpected cover design. It needed a great/weird idea to stand out from the crowd."

It's easy to appreciate the swinging-for-the-fences ambition of it all, but ultimately the strategy failed as Phalanx quickly came and went without much of a peep.

Believe it or not, obfuscating the actual nature of a game isn't a great way to part potential customers with their cash.