Recreating the Zak McKracken PC big box from scratch

13 min readFeb 17, 2023

This is the translation of my original artice in french about big boxes — https://medium.com/@bennywhitebread/recr%C3%A9er-la-bo%C3%AEte-du-jeu-pc-zak-mckracken-and-the-alien-mindbenders-from-scratch-673b15993aa8 .
This project started a year ago and was originaly discussed in my first article (still in french atm) https://medium.com/@bennywhitebread/big-box-love-les-r%C3%A9pliques-de-bo%C3%AEtes-de-jeux-pc-comme-on-les-aime-bcbde75d6b42
Be kind with this translation, it’s homemade :)

Hello everyone,

Today I would like to talk about the project of recreating the mythical PC game boxes of the 80/90s in real cardboard!

This project has been going on for almost a year and I was working on it from time to time. Honestly, it’s been going on for too long so I had to finish it asap or else I’d be disappointed :)

This article follows the one about the genesis of the project.

Big box love, les répliques de boîtes de jeux PC comme on les aime !

EDIT: Ceci est la première partie du récit car je compte l’écrire au fur et à mesure de l’avancement du projet

medium.com

You will find in this article the reason of the project and the findings on the big boxes market today.

I wanted to recreate the boxes of the PC games of the 80/90’s with all the content: disks, box and manual(s).

In short, after many trials and tribulations, I chose to recreate the box of the mythical game “Zak McKracken and the Aliens Mindbenders” instead of “The Secret of Monkey Island”.

Pictures taken on an Ebay sale of the game…at 415 euros :-O

Why Zak McKracken and not Monkey Island?

Well, originally it was supposed to be the box of “The Secret of monkey Island” (aka MI1) but I didn’t have enough HD content to make a satisfactory result. What slowed me down the most was the green marble-like background which is very very difficult to recreate in the original version (at least for me!).

Version of the game on 5 1/4" floppy disk

In fact I tried with MI1, spent money on a graphic designer (At first, I’m a programmer) and in the end…I didn’t get anything qualitative enough.

In one word: disappointed!

I wanted to outsource and actually realized that there was too much work to explain, too much research, too many changes, etc. So I told myself I had to do it on my own and learn Illustrator and Indesign by the way :) !

Through a visit on the mixnmojo forum, I came across the amazing work of a German designer, Laserschwertz, restoring video game posters. He recreated it in HD and put in download the posters, mainly Lucasarts’posters.

Well it could be a good start for some cover art !

Simply superb. There are even some backgrounds that he recreated very faithful to what was originally designed.

While discussing on the forum, I came to the conclusion that I had to work on the design of a box where I would have the “easiest” (we’ll come back later about that), where I’m sure to have quality for the printing but also where there is the most appeal considering the rarity and the price of some boxes (which imo are crazy !).

That’s why I was going to make it for “Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders”, one of the very first point ‘n click adventure games from Ron Gilbert’s (creator of Monkey Island) universe, created in 1988.

Ingame screenshots fo the FM Town version

A totally crazy game that I never played in my life before the project :D

Phase 0: Specs

Before starting I had to determine what I wanted to recreate.

And I don’t want to settle for just the box, I want the whole package: diskettes and manuals!

1°/ The cardboard box will be 24cm x 18,1cm x 4cm in big box format with a full lid.

I took the measurements on the original game boxes that I own, including Day of The Tentacle (DOTT).

There are several sizes of boxes but I used the size from most of my originals. There were also other sizes with just a top opening (see Zak’s picture above) or a 2-parts box like the one from DOTT but all white with a sleeve.

2°/ The floppy disks

I also wanted to remake the floppy disks with the original stickers and so I collected a lot of floppy disks.

I got some old floppy disks from friends, relatives or clients so I can put new labels on them.

I got about 1500 floppy disks of all sizes and shapes, white, black, blue, red, marked, unmarked, 720k, 1.44 MB, etc. I then sorted them out so as not to have to put new labels on them.

I then sorted them to keep only the ones that are not marked with any logo (like SONY, BASF, MEMOREX, etc).

On the left, it’s neat and tidy! On the right, the disks I won’t keep for the project

3°/ The manuals

So there I found 3 main elements:

The basic manual
The anti-cheat manual (called Visa Codes)
The “National Inquisitor” newspapers

The scans I could get had a low resolution (except the anti-cheat manual and the newspaper). So I redesign the main manual in Adobe Indesign in A5 format.

For the code manual, I stayed on an A3 recto-verso folded in several parts (so unfoldable) that is to say 8 pages folded in A5 format.

On the left, the main manual, in the middle the anti-cheat code manual and on the right the “National Inquisitor” newspaper

Well, the specs are here! Just have to do it !

Phase 1: the logo and the diskettes

I started to work on the floppy disk design and thus on the logo with the nose and the moustache.

I hired a designer via Fiverr to get a vectorized logo usable in Illustrator and I was happy with the result! (+- 58$)

A good thing done! So I made the labels for the 3"1/2 and 5"1/4 sizes in Illustrator.

Vectorized logo and 3"1/2 floppy disk template

Phase 2: the front and back box

So the most difficult part is this one for several reasons:

I impose myself a qualitative level of result
The available covert arts are poor quality scans (mainly recovered from the Mobygames website)
I’m not a designer and I have a basic knowledge of Illustrator/Photoshop/Indesign

But I am motivated! So I decided to make the “Front/Bottom” box parts in Illustrator by vectorizing as much as possible.

Front & Sides

I made the front part with the blue-green background and the main image thanks to the high quality work of Laserschwertz.

The starting point: High resolution background and main image reworked by Laserschwertz

Then I recreated the logo on the sides of the box, integrated the Lucasarts logos and specs on the left, right and bottom sides, including the original barcode recreated in SVG using Barcode Pro.

Well, this part is quite simple (but it takes time) if you have all the elements. :)

You just have to proportion and position the whole thing keeping in mind the original.

Final result! In red, the outline of the box

Rear side

So for the back part, this is clearly where it took me the most time.

Indeed, the first thing that takes time is to identify the fonts used. Here, there are many different ones!

For this, I mainly used the WhatFontIs platform and compared with the scans I had. There is an Adobe solution integrated to Photoshop but frankly it doesn’t work much.

I also took into account that at the time editors often used the same fonts so I sometimes just tried one of the top 20 most used fonts over time.

Just on the rear side, I identified 7 different fonts…and again I think there is one that is not 100% the same (but very very close). It was laborious but I was able to get them back to start the job.

With the fonts identified, I got the torn newspaper background and the black and white photo of the cowboys which I cleaned up and upscaled in quality with a great paid toolkit called “Topaz Labs”.

It’s AI powered and honestly it blew up my mind!
Here is a little preview with the code wheel of “The secret of Monkey Island”.

On the left the original scanned version. On the right the cleaned and upscaled version. Isn’t it amazing?

For the last parts, I redid everything from scratch and integrated almost the same in-game images but from the FM-Town version of the game.

But really, the work on the texts (positioning, size, which font, etc) is what took me the most time. I wanted to make it almost pixel perfect. I took a lot of time but I also gained skills using in Illustrator :)

After a few hours of work and research, here it is!

Quite happy with the result!

Step 3: the manuals

Last phase, the manuals.

For the main manual, I recreated it in A5 format with Indesign and I redid the inside illustrations with Illustrator (keyboard, in-game images, etc).

The illustrations of the manual vectorized on the left and then 4 pages made with Indesign

For the anti-cheat manual, I could have redone it from scratch (8 pages) BUT the problem is the codes :)

Original version of the anti-cheating manual in A3 format on both sides

I tried to recreate the different codes in Illustrator but I quickly arrived to BIG difficulty: the assembly of the codes.

Indeed, there are 11 illustrations to combine (with repetitions) by group of 4. I take out my math classes and that makes 1101 possibilities of assembly (correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a long time :D) …

If I do this by hand by assembling 4 by 4 the illustrations, I have hours and hours to do…

Calculation to do: l * e * c where l = 30 (number of lines per page), e = 4 (4 elements per assembly) and c = 7 (number of columns per page) = 840 assemblies per page. There are 7 pages or 5880 assemblies :-/

My developer background immediately told me “Well, try to assemble this via a script”. I’m sure I can generate an SVG with all the possible combinations and then place them. That would reduce the work but it’s still 1470 placement operations to do…

Too heavy.

In the end, I found an acceptable version of the manual and I worked on it by colorizing the backgrounds of the pages and upscaling the definition of the code pages.

Please note that the manual is not in the form of a classic A5 manual but in the form of an A3 folded to A5 (if you still follow me :) ).

Well, not too bad after all!

For the newspaper, I found a very good quality scanned version that I will use to print in tabloid format (26cm x 37cm) so that it fits in the box.

STEP 4: Printing

Finally, I had to find a printing house that could

Print me the labels for floppy disks
The manuals and newspapers
Design me the cardboard boxes in the format 24cm x 18,1cm x 4cm.

I contacted a few local companies but none of them could do it all.
In fact anyone could make the stickers and manuals but for the boxes, the answer was always: “Not possible”.

So I turned to the Internet for the boxes.

I quickly found the Pack.ly website which allows me to print a lot of boxes of different sizes and designs.

Create online custom printed packaging, dielines and 3Ds

Packly is the complete packaging solution: create and download dielines immediately, view a 3D box model with your…

www.pack.ly

Convenient because you can order one at a time (the basis of the project is to remake the boxes only for me) but after investigating, the thickness seems really too thin. Max 0.5mm. But the original boxes were at least 1 to 2mm thick.

I don’t think it will be strong enough for my taste. I will test it anyway and post the differences.

So I continued my research and I found a Spanish company that could make any size with a thickness of 2mm. Bingo!

The only problem is …. that you have to make 100 minimum at once :-/
Without that, no interesting price.

I ordered a sample based on my illustration work (paid 120 euros shipping in :-/ ...but it’s much much less for 100 copies) and after 15 days it arrived!

Honestly it looks really good! Happy with the result!

I had a printing problem and some typo mistakes (read again! read again!) and the company sent me one back and honestly…the quality is really great! Nothing to say! Solid and clean printing (even with 3 or 4pt font sizes).

So it’s possible !

Conclusions

So in the end? Happy?

Yes I am happy with the result and the process. I can conclude that :

1°/ I am happy with the final result! It looks good and the qualitative objectives I had set for myself have been reached!

2°/ I learned a lot about the subject and especially about the layout and my new skills with Adobe tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, etc) !

3°/ I spent a lot of time on it! Collecting the diskettes, searching the Internet for printing companies, creating the box, etc. It’s a lot! Maybe too much?! But don’t we say “When you love, you don’t count!

I think that I can now, thanks to this first try, reduce the time spent on a box and that I could reduce it even more by mastering better the graphic tools (within my technical limits).

4°/ It brought back a lot of good memories of this magical period and it made me feel good :D

Lya Luft said “Childhood is the ground on which we will walk all our life” and she is more than right!

I also fell in love with a Pentium 233 MMX like in the old days!
I reinstalled the games of my childhood on floppy disks and my heart capsized during the first game of Wolfenstein 3D ! :P

What’s next ?

My final goal is not yet reached because the box is done but I wanted to see if I could find 50,100,300 people interested in a copy.

I don’t want to talk about copyright details, etc. The goal is not to sell it but to pay back my expenses (I don’t count the hours in it :D ) and to be able to invest to make others (aaaaah! ).

I got a taste for it :D I keep buying original boxes anyway.

As far as expenses are concerned, I spent a few hundred euros between the first unsuccessful attempts, the logo, the Topaz/Whatfont licenses, the expensive test box, etc

Otherwise, as said above, I already started other tests with other cult games (including manuals). Feel free to give me feedbacks about it.

Nostalgia ! Happy gaming to all of you !