Overview
In the early days of gaming, box art was rather important. Gamers had few options for sharing information on games beyond conversing in person. As such, if a customer entered a store and saw an unfamiliar game, often the only thing the customer had to base a purchase decision on was the appearance of the game's packaging.
The industry has grown quite a bit since those primitive days, and the Internet has become the primary venue of game promotion, be it via official game company websites, social networking, or enthusiast game websites such as Giant Bomb. Consequently, most gamers already know more about a game when they walk into a store than the game's packaging could possibly tell them.
However, that hasn't prevented artists from continuing to create eye-catching box art. A technique that reliably draws attention to the box is putting a face on there that looks mysterious, and then cropping half of it off the edge of the packaging. Sometimes, even more than half of the face is cut off, leaving nothing more than just an eye or a mouth.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly's box art is a good example of this. This concept should not be confused with other, similar box designs; Tomb Raider: Underworld features half of Lara Croft 's face on the boxart, but shows her entire torso and both of her arms as well. For a game to truly belong to this concept, it must focus more closely on the head.
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