Hilarious box art from 80's/ 90's games

Back before the internet existed, the presentation on the box was likely just as important as to whether or not the game was actually any good. Because of graphical limitations at the time it was extremely rare that the game developers would include actual game footage on the front of the box and would choose only the best scenes for the back where we would all "dig in" to see if we were willing to spend our hard-earned paper-route money on what could be really great or could absolutely suck.

Today I am going to dig in to some of the worst ones and some of these were actually great games.

Just look at that awfulness. We all know megaman these days to be a cartoonish but very fun character but back in 1987 megaman didn't really have a personality yet. I guess they did what they thought was best but honestly, is this cover art even remotely similar to the gameplay? I think not.

Could they possibly have found 2 less intimidating looking people for this box art? This 1992 game received horrible reviews after the fact but mostly when it was released the game went by completely unnoticed. The only attention anyone paid to it was the absurd cover art so it leads me to believe that they were going for a reverse psychology angle - a "so bad, it's good!" kind of cover. However, once you flipped the box over and saw that it was just a Double Dragon ripoff you quickly moved on to the next potential purchase.

Testament to Nintendo; in the early days of the NES all of the games had an artificial representation of the actual game on the cover, pixels and all! This quickly changed as more players got involved in the game but this one is just funny because ok, it's soccer (football) so why are they dressed like jockeys? Is the guy in the blue pulling his pants down or does he have a seriously misshapen left arm?

First off, who the hell is Tommy Lasorda, right? Well back in the late 80's this guy actually was quite famous as the very angry manager / coach of the LA Dodgers baseball team who was consistently good for many years. Also, Sega probably had trouble finding actual baseball stars to sign on to an unlicensed game due to contractual obligations. The game was pretty great actually even though none of the teams were real teams and all the stadiums and player names were made up. This is what unlicensed meant in 89. The cover is bad because I don't understand why they used an airbrushed picture of the guy from a decade prior rather than just doing an actual photo with him.

Full disclosure: I have never actually seen this game box although I would be willing to bet that it is worth quite a lot in good condition these days. Released only in Mexico, this box has very little to do with the actual game. Was a mustached dude considered racist or something? What is that creature on the ground looking up. There was never a clown in the game at all and you couldn't bring the hammers up the ladders. Where is KONG? WTF is going on here??