Over the holiday weekend, word leaked that video game industry rock star Cliff Bleszinski (lead designer of the Gears of War franchise) is launching a new studio, Boss Key Productions. The brand new identity we created for Boss Key also found its way into the daylight as well.

But now it’s officially live, and we’re excited to show the world – just a prelude to the amazing things Boss Key has in store for gamers.

Super inspiring thoughts from Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and father of the video game industry:

Video games are no longer a niche market. They’re big business, having long-since eclipsed Hollywood blockbusters in revenue. Culturally, we’ve grown used to video game franchises with their own storylines, plots, and characters — a complex web of merchandising, marketing, and gameplay.

It’s easy to forget that these paths were forged by a cast of simple, clever little characters of ’80s videogames. Their screen time may have been short, but Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Mario, and many other characters were bursting with personality, fun, and an ethos that we wanted to capture in the book, SUPER iam8bit: More Art Inspired By Classic Video Games of the ’80s. With our client-partners and co-publishers, iam8bit, we designed the entire volume, helped curate the mass of excellent artwork, and launched our creative imprint, Plastic Highway.

For more details about this project, power up to our iam8bit portfolio page.

And if that’s not enough ’80s video game goodness for you, be sure to check out iam8bit’s 5th art show in Los Angeles, where the book will be officially released and available for sale.

While the book won’t be officially released until next month, here are some fun moments we’ve had during the process:

The photo shoot for the cover in LA. We did the art direction for this shoot both in Los Angeles and via Skype to Chicago. Cover photography by our great friend Love Ablan. Love also shot all of the artwork for the book interiors as well.

Press proofs from the interior of the book, showcasing some great video game inspired art by artists from all over the world.

Some shots of the book on press (a web press, to be specific) at the press check with our printer, Quad Graphics, in Massachusetts.

We’ve just added some work to our portfolio — the redesigned identity of our client and partners, iam8bit. Take a look at the link for more details.

We’ve just added our poster series project for iam8bit to the Hexanine portfolio. Follow the link for more iconographic video game fun.

We collaborated with marketing partners iam8bit to create and design a set of four commemorative posters that will serve as giveaway items for each of the attendees of the 25th annual Game Developers Conference. The limited-edition posters are jam-packed with classic and modern video games references, a kind of scavenger-hunt that tromps through 40 years of video game history. More info on the posters and conference can be found here.

One of the great things about design is its ability to act as a window in time, for us to get a taste of what that era was like. If we’re old enough, those combinations of words and images conjure up powerful memories, associations and emotions. Great design does that.

And even if we weren’t around the first time, these designs give us some sense of what that world was like — the fashions, the typefaces of choice, trendy color palettes, the lingo and candor of the day. So, for your pleasure, I’d like to present more packaging examples of an era that has gone by, a decade of hi-fi cassettes, arcades, and the first generation of video games.

[Note: All these game box images were shot at Hexanine, and come from the nerdy collection of Tim.]