Acornsoft box screenshots, recreated by hand
This page contains every box screenshot from every Acornsoft game (see Wikipedia for more about Acornsoft). Each screenshot has been carefully reconstructed, pixel by pixel and entirely by hand, using scans of the original boxes, magazines and brochures for reference. The collection covers the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Atom Atom.
I hand-crafted these images during the lockdown of 2020. It was a surprisingly therapeutic experience, and I had plenty of time to devote to making these shots as pixel-perfect as possible. That said, the original box screenshots were produced back in the 1980s by physically photographing the games running on CRT screens, and then developing the films and printing the resulting photographs on the boxes. This means that some of the original box screenshots, particularly the early ones for the Acorn Atom, are quite blurry and warped, which makes it more difficult to recreate modern replicas. For example, see this PDF of the original Acorn Atom brochure; Games Pack 1 is a particularly murky collection. Luckily we have the games themselves for reference, but it's still s challenge to work out exactly what the original CRT screen would have looked like.
For the BBC Micro range of games, the box screenshots are typically huge and take up almost the whole box cover, so these are easier to work with. However, both Elite and Revs have iconic artwork on the front of the box and only a small screenshot on the back, which makes them much harder to recreate accurately; and the Electron boxes all use smaller screenshots too, so they are also a bit tricky. This means there will definitely be errors in my recreations, but this page contains my best efforts at recreating each screenshot as closely as possible, given the sometimes rather shaky source material.
