WiiWare games don’t exactly require the designing of box art, printing of manuals, or production of cardboard boxes with which to put the game cartridges into. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop Capcom USA from creating art reminiscent of the awful box art from the Mega Man series’ beginnings.

It was quickly decided by the marketing group that if we were going to release a game that looked like it came from 1987 that we should run the whole marketing campaign as if we were working in the games industry in 1987. From there, it was a very easy leap to putting in a call to I Am 8-bit artist Gerald de Jesus, who we [commissioned] to create the beautiful/horrible homage to past packaging Mega Man mindcrimes that you see above.

The image above is a photo of the super-limited edition t-shirts (1 of 4!) that we had created for Inafune-san and Takeshita-san to wear during E3. You should have seen people’s eyes light up when they saw this image emblazoned across Inafune-san’s chest… Capcom’s marketing team in the US is super-stoked that everyone is getting what we’re doing with the box art (including the Japanese dev team) and I promise you that we’ll have some t-shirts of this beauty available for purchase soon!

Interested? Hopefully I’ll be able to keep an eye out and let you know the instant these babies go on sale. Check out a larger view of the art after the break!

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Fatal Frame IV now has some box art for us, thanks to Amazon’s Japanese store. It’s definitely emphasizing the key symbols in the game’s Japanese title, Zero: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.

The Wii-exclusive, Tecmo/Grasshopper-developed, Nintendo-published game will be available in Japan at the end of month. We’re supposedly getting the game here in time for Halloween, so I would expect that we’d hear about it from Nintendo at or shortly after E3. After that, we’ll get a TBA release date until the actual press release.

Thanks to George for the tip! …and making me have to search Amazon in Japanese! :P A larger version of the box art has been added to the Fatal Frame IV gallery, found after the break.

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On the left is what Fire Emblem looked like in 1990. On the right is what it looks like in 2008. Did someone over Intelligent Systems get lazy? A golden map, a sword, and the logo. I guess that could cut it… if this were a Zelda game. At the very least, stick some character art on there for when you announce and bring this to the States, Nintendo. I guarantee that putting Marth on the box will help sales.

You can click the picture above for a slightly larger version of both boxes, or simply check the gallery after the break for the DS box art alone.

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