Nuon - A Case Study

[doctorclu]

For some, having a matching look is not a big deal. I think for me, my love for having a shelf of matching software boxes started with an Atari 800 commercial and more specifically this scene where the kid reaches up and pulled down one black box in a group of black boxes. The large black box being the early and way too huge packaging of the Atari computer line for the first year.

 

 

So I've had fun collecting Bubsy games and displaying them on my shelf as displays. When it came to the Nuon, the library is small, so there was no real issue in wanting my collection to look uniform and sharp. I bought a lot of the Nuon games, but games like Iron Soldier 3 and Tetris usually just come as a disc and you have to create a case. Then I have other discs, like the Samsung demo disc that came with the Samsung N2000, plus a few other VM Labs discs. So I decided that I would make them match, and a lot of the Nuon games I bought came in a gold DVD case.

 

It should be noted that some Nuon games had the gold case, and others were a typical black case. As you can see in the picture below, even a game like Merlin Racing came in both colors I suppose depending on when it was made. But if there was any color for the Nuon, it was gold.

 

As I started to hit stores looking for a movie with a gold DVD case to use, I didn't readily find any. I figure certainly VM Labs didn't have a special run of gold DVD cases, that would be expensive. Well, so far I have not found their source. As I searched the internet for DVDs with gold cases I found there have been Zelda fans looking for gold cases too.

 

 

For the most part gold DVD cases were not used in the United States, and I did find a place that sells gold DVD cases, but those are also outside the United States. I did find that there were a few movies that had a gold case as you'll see in the following pictures:

 

So I searched two Half Prices Books, two Movie Trading Companies, two thrift stores, and a place called Entertainmart in Arlington, Texas which I look a picture of thee front of the place...

 

At the Entertainmart I looked at the cases on all these DVD isles shown in the next two pictures. I checked over probably a thousand cases in a day easy at all those stores I mentioned previously.

 

I did learn about DVD cases and how often companies deviated from the standard black DVD case or white DVD cases. Mostly a video game company would be presented by a color, like Xbox and Wii have their uniform colors. Playstation never seemed to get on that bandwagon and just used black. Proud to say the Nuon did it's own thing with gold, which came in handy as you'll see later in this article. In the meantime, some examples of colors:

 

Silver/Platinum - XBOX Platinum with the standard Xbox green also shown.

 

Purple - XBOX Kinect

 

White - Wii

 

Blue - Wii U

 

Green - Xbox (and on some movies as shown below.)

 

For the sake of time, let's just say children's videos have many case colors

 

Other examples of colorful cases

 

Here are some examples of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Some are standard black, but you'll also find a silver box for wide screen and gold for the full screen edition. Very steampunk of them to do that!

 

In my searching for gold cases I actually found another DVD with a gold case in a sea of black and sometimes white cases. It was a Nuon game! Now that was a cool find, and honestly I would have glossed right over Ballistic if it were not for the gold casing.

 

So I bought up all the copies of League I could find and then swapped out casings to the benefit of the Nuon DVDs.

 

The final result is pretty nice with gold as the official color for the Nuon game system.

 

So that concludes my "case study" of the Nuon games, or for anyone wanting gold cases in general. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a good solution here in the United States, and luckily I haven't seen the title, around the time I write this, be sold for on average about $5.99 or less. Happy hunting!

 

 

 

Edited August 6, 2017 by doctorclu

[+save2600]

Nice! Awesome score on Nuon Ballistic in the wild too. Btw: League is a pretty good movie and well worth watching one of these days.

[doctorclu]

Nice! Awesome score on Nuon Ballistic in the wild too. Btw: League is a pretty good movie and well worth watching one of these days.

 

Ballistic was a favorite game of mine. Naturally I looked for other Nuon titles in the lot, but just figured at one point someone must have bought a Samsung N2000 or N501 and got the game, and then just traded that pack in game as a trade in. It was a joy to see it there though. I plan on selling it to a local game store just so they have a odd Nuon game.

 

As for League, great movie. Basically a Steampunk Avengers or Justice League movie.

[ave1]

Thanks- I enjoyed this! I only have two Nuon games so far, and they both have gold boxes... but, I was wondering if I ever manage to find Tetris what I was going to do for a case. Now I know.

[Flojomojo]

If I had known you'd spent $6 each on movies you didn't want just for the cases, I'd buy 100 from the U.K. source you turned turned down (https://www.retrostylemedia.co.uk/product/gold-dvd-case ), buy a lot of them, and hope there were other buying people like you out there!

[doctorclu]

You have a odd way of wording it but yeh, let's take a look at that for a moment. I just needed maybe five cases.

 

So in reality three of the cases were $3. One from a thrift store, and two were from Entertainmart who had then for $6 with 50% off. I added one of the discs to my own collection, and I have two that still need a home, probably give to friends.

 

That left two movies that I bought from half price books, which I bought for $6 a piece. And I was able to recase and sell these two.

 

So all total I spent $9 for the cases.

 

So 100 cases from the UK source? So you have them at .32 pounds if you buy them in a lot of 100.. Currently $1.29 USD to a pound.

 

So .32 x100 comes to 32 pounds or or $41.28 USD.

 

So $9 verses $41.28, I came out ahead.

Oh here is another reason I didn't go this route, that website ship out worldwide for orders of 50 pounds or more.

 

So very much came out ahead.

[doctorclu]

So Question for you ten Nuon fans out there, if I bought a bulk order of the gold cases, who would be up for some prints of Nuon cases sleeves with gold cases at $7 a case?

 

We could make it where your entire library has gold cases. Mind you, it may not be EXACTLY the gold case used by VMLabs, but at least it would match better than black cases.

 

Could make cases for Tetris, Iron Soldier, make new cases for the others (Tempest, Space Invaders, Merlin Racing, Freefall, Ballistic)

 

And could have cases made for the home brews (Doom, Pac-Man, Breakout, aBomb, etc). Just need to find good images for them.

Edited August 12, 2017 by doctorclu

[Blazing Lazers]

So Question for you ten Nuon fans out there, if I bought a bulk order of the gold cases, who would be up for some prints of Nuon cases sleeves with gold cases at $7 a case?

 

We could make it where your entire library has gold cases. Mind you, it may not be EXACTLY the gold case used by VMLabs, but at least it would match better than black cases.

 

Could make cases for Tetris, Iron Soldier, make new cases for the others (Tempest, Space Invaders, Merlin Racing, Freefall, Ballistic)

 

And could have cases made for the home brews (Doom, Pac-Man, Breakout, aBomb, etc). Just need to find good images for them.

I was actually about to pull the trigger on an order of 100 cases myself, as I've actually been meaning create gold cased copies of some of the loose discs I have, such as the Demo CD, the homebrew CD, Tetris, Doom, the Sampler, etc. If or when I do, that project would leave a lot of leftover cases. Unless there's a sudden Nuon homebrew Renaissance (someday, hopefully) every single homebrew, demo, and original title could have it's own cases and there'd still be plenty left over.

 

Honest to God, I had known of the particular gold case from LoEG, and had planned on buying up a bunch copies entirely for their cases to enhance my collection. I'm very, very glad for that link to the bulk cases, though- I had not known of those and had been searching fruitlessly for exactly that sort of thing. I'll be happy to go in on a bulk order, as I really only need around 50 cases or so.

Edited August 13, 2017 by Blazing Lazers

[+sixersfan105]

Needless to say, I followed your lead on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen DVDs, @doctorclu! The top listing is what I paid for two DVDs, so fear not. Thanks for sharing this, as it was very helpful!

[doctorclu]

In a way that makes me sad.  League was a fun movie, kinda a Steampunk Justice League movie (which some might say also sells for pretty cheap these days)      Anyway, yeh, it was the quickest way to get a hold of gold cases for a Nuon collection.

 

I love how you are revisiting the Nuon threads.   So for the Nuon cases and collection, I have them behind my Bubsy collection...

 

 

So moved all that aside and found the Nuon collection...

 

 

Of these, copies of Merlin Racing, Tempest 3000, Ballistic, Freefall, and the Nuon Dome disc are originals.

 

And these...

 

 

 

And this one...

 

 

But as you can see, the gold cases really bring the look together.

[doctorclu]

On 8/12/2017 at 8:21 PM, Blazing Lazers said:

I was actually about to pull the trigger on an order of 100 cases myself, as I've actually been meaning create gold cased copies of some of the loose discs I have, such as the Demo CD, the homebrew CD, Tetris, Doom, the Sampler, etc. If or when I do, that project would leave a lot of leftover cases. Unless there's a sudden Nuon homebrew Renaissance (someday, hopefully) every single homebrew, demo, and original title could have it's own cases and there'd still be plenty left over.

That is so cool.   Yeh, I should make a case for Doom, that would be a nice addition.  Be nice if one day we could ENCRYPT Doom especially.

[CatPix]

On 8/6/2017 at 10:14 PM, doctorclu said:

I did learn about DVD cases and how often companies deviated from the standard black DVD case or white DVD cases. Mostly a video game company would be presented by a color, like Xbox and Wii have their uniform colors. Playstation never seemed to get on that bandwagon and just used black. Proud to say the Nuon did it's own thing with gold, which came in handy as you'll see later in this article. In the meantime, some examples of colors:

Interestingly, Sony might have decided on more standard cases in the US for PS1 (crystal CD cases) which I knew about, but that PS2 games were black is a surprise to me.

I don't know about Japan, but European PS2 cases were (with a few exceptions) blue.

 

 

I don't know why some cases are black in European games. In the games I have, some are from Japan, from the Us or Europe (I mean the developers and editor, all my games here are PAL versions) Some are very early games (2001) some are late ones (2005) some are on CD but several on DVD. There seems to be no rationale behind it.

For a game like The Getaway : Black Monday, the black box could be a deliberate choice to go with the tone of the game, but why Sky Odyssey or Half-Life are in black too?

[doctorclu]

I like the blue look.   Yeh, PAL and NTSC seem to get different treatment, which is great for collectors.