It’s not just your nostalgia playing a trick — video game art used to be a lot more festive. For proof, you can check out Archive.org’s absolutely massive dump of game covers for titles on the once touchstone home PC, the Commodore 64.
The collection is the third installment of an ongoing series called the Ultimate Tape Archive and contains 1,500 different tape sets with re-scanned covers according to archivist Jason Scott who runs the site textfiles.com.
You can both view and download the extensive collection — which contains cassettes in addition to front and back covers — here. While the game industry might not ever recapture the magic of illustrated covers, this is pretty much the next best thing.