With the Retron 5 releasing soon, I decided to get my collection of Retro Games in good working condition. I opened and cleaned all of my NES cartridges, and also decided to replaced the 72-pin connector in my NES so I could test my cleaned games before getting the Retron.
Cleaning all of the games is a lot of work, so I was looking for a way to keep them clean so I hopefully wouldn’t have to go through the time consuming process again. I bought some NES Game Sleeves. The quality was pretty decent, but they are fairly ugly. I wanted to find something that would keep my games dust free but also be something I would want to show off.
That is when I came across the BitBox cases from Stone Age Gamer. These cases remind me of the old plastic VHS boxes. They are big, sturdy, and look great. They offer to print out the cover art for you, or you can download and print it out yourself. The box art comes from The Cover Project, but they have slightly altered it to keep the aspect ratio correct for the box. They don’t have art for everything, but most of it is there. Personally, I had them print it out for me. It was worth it not having to take the time to do it, and the cost of printing it yourself is fairly high when you factor in the need to get decent quality legal sized presentation paper and ink (more on this in my upcoming post on UCGs and my N64 library). You also have the option to add a pouch for game manuals to your order. These come on a sheet backed with adhesive, so you just peel them off and stick them inside the case.
I was hoping that the cover art would already be inserted into the cases before they shipped, but they come in a separate envelope so you have to sleeve them all in yourself. It was a bit of a bummer that they were not ready to go immediately, but inserting them all only took about 10 to 20 seconds per case. I was a bit worried about smudging the artwork, but the print quality seems to be pretty good and had no issues despite touching them when inserting the covers.
The only real downside to the cases is that they are pretty expensive for what they are. You can buy them in larger quantities to save some money, but this will result in either having too many or not enough cases for many people. Personally I had about 12 left over from my order, but I plan to expand my collection so I think those will get used at some point. The breakdown of my order was:
The price definitely makes these a product aimed at the serious collector, since I can’t really see a casual person dropping $100+ dollars on cases (individual cases are $4). Still, the cases themselves are pretty nice. If you are in the market for this kind of thing I would recommend them assuming you can handle the price tag. If not, there are always those NES Game Sleeves I mentioned.
