Video game box art has to tell potential buyers what the game's all about in one eye-catching image. Zelda shows you an elf with a sword, Call of Duty shows you a soldier with a gun, and SoulCalibur shows you a nearly naked woman with physics-defying tits. They are all absolutely accurate depictions of the game within. But those are the success stories, and as we've seen before, it often goes hilariously wrong. And nobody manages to screw it up more hilariously than game pirates -- while most just lift the original cover, a select few decide that stealing is wrong halfway through the theft and have to scramble to create original content themselves. It never turns out well:
(With the money you save buying hilarious bootlegs, why not buy the Cracked De-Textbook?)
CCE
And now, a brief retrospective of Brazilian bootleg Pac-Man covers. Put on your learning monocles, this here is art history:
CCE, the company responsible for bringing countless pirated games to the land of Pele, started off with this vaguely sane approach. Maybe they didn't want to use Pac-Man's classic look for fear of a lawsuit, and maybe the enemies are furious germs assaulting the ghost of a murderous clown because the artist was getting paid in mescaline. Still, it makes a certain tenuous sense, but it's all downhill from there:
CCE
This one made him French when everyone knows he's Canadian.
The second cover makes it look like the Pac-People were brutally slaughtered by giant, lightning-spewing robots. Are Pac-Man and his wife the sole survivors of the robot apocalypse? Is that why they nurture such terrible pill addictions, lost in the maze of their own madness, hounded by the ghosts of their loved ones who died in the uprising? And also cherries?
CCE
"But they're joysticks, what do they use to contro- eh, fuck it."