Outside the box: the mind-boggling video game packaging of designer Hock Wah Yeo

The early 90s were a golden era for designers wanting to experiment with game packaging because there were no industry standards to which a product had to conform to reach the market. Yet, designers tended to work with only one area of their toolkit – colour. Video game shops at the time were awash with glaring graphics and intensely lurid palettes. Seeing a gap in the market, Yeo approached packaging video games with an unusual notion; “If Toyota introduces a brand new car, we wouldn’t take a second look at it,” he thought. “But if Toyota introduces a three-wheeled car, we’d pay attention because our reference is that a car has to have four wheels.” Shapes, he decided, were the perfect way to “disturb people’s mindset”.

Yeo never wanted to repeat his designs. This, and the urge to create work no one could copy pushed him into new territory. Armed only with cardboard and an understanding of how complex interlocking forms came together, Yeo began designing boxes with moving parts, boxes that could reshape into entirely new forms. Ultrabots, a 1993 robot fighter simulation game, saw the designer split a box into two connected compartments which, when pulled, slid apart and rotated around a bar of metal. Undeniably robotic, in motion, the box resembled a transforming mecha appendage. For another, entirely contrasting work for a game not unlike Microsoft Paint, Flying Colours, Yeo created a strikingly serene package with three compartments that could be spun and twisted to allow the box to stand on end. Around the edge, various ‘plug-ins’ that featured within the game – butterflies, snowflakes, shells – could be matched together by turning the box.

When Yeo’s experiments with movement were a hit, he ventured into delightfully stranger territory. In 1995 Yeo worked on a post-apocalyptic game called Havoc for Reality Bytes. This time, he wanted to create a box that would transport customers to a dystopian world. Imagining a radio monitor you might pick up in a Mad Max landscape, covered in nuclear debris, Yeo decided graphics and shapes alone wouldn’t cut it. He needed to depart from the conventions of cardboard altogether. The answer came from his own kitchen cupboard, in a humble pack of eggs. Yeo contacted an egg carton manufacturer, who made a mould, although not before trying to convince Yeo that his packaging would look crisper if he used the other side of the material. “I said: ‘No, I don’t want it to be neater’,” Yeo tells us, “‘I want it to be ugly’.” While Havoc looked crumbling and monstrous, Yeo says they actually held together well on the shelves. “It travelled well, I mean it protects eggs,” he laughs.

While Yeo seemed to bound through boundaries with each of his projects, his attention to the smaller details never faltered. For example, if buyers were to lift up the lid on Yeo’s Prince of Persia box, they would find a small, gruesome severed head printed on the packaging underneath; “This is what happens when you die in the game,” Yeo grins. From the drifting, slanted type of Flying Colours to the immersive subaquatic graphics of WolfPack, Yeo managed to make subtle design flourishes just as impactful as the image of a giant transforming robot box. His work served as a testament to not only his dedication to the work, but his love of it too; “When I go to bed, I think of a design problem, and that lulls me to sleep,” he says.

Yeo’s groundbreaking work in the game industry eventually drifted into obscurity. Aside from a loyal following of fans who continue to hunt down Yeo’s work online, often paying hundreds of dollars to procure an original Ultrabots, his impact had been largely forgotten – until 2021, when game historian Phil Salvador published a feature on his career. Later the same year, Colpa Press published the first monograph on the designer. The renewed interest in Yeo’s work has meant a lot of revisiting for the designer, something he says he enjoys, as a time full of fond memories. The only hardship, Yeo jokes, comes from having to “dredge up the bottom of my memory to come up with why I did this, or how I created that”.

While Yeo hasn’t kept up with the game world, he still drifts to sleep thinking of design problems. To this day, he experiments with shapes, now through ceramics and, despite having no architectural training, he recently built a two story sunroom at his home in California: a steampunk creation clad in galvanised steel with rose petals encased in the walls.

Looking back at Yeo’s career in video games today, it would be easy to take away that commercial industry stands as the antithesis of creativity, but the real story isn’t as clear cut. Yeo’s designs worked because they brought something artful, visceral and exciting to a space where experimentation is unexpected. His body of work serves as a compelling reminder of what can happen when a client opts for the riskier option, for the uncharted choice. They begin to shape an everyday world where rose petals might hide in walls, and severed heads lie under box lids.