Until the arrival of PS2, during the 90s, each console had its own solution for the creation and distribution of physical games, whether they were cartridges in cardboard boxes or discs in transparent music CD-style boxes, but it was with the arrival of the second generation of Sony’s console when the industry standardized the elongated plastic boxes that they would use both movie DVDs and other consoles, such as Xbox. Although they were not always like this, there was a previous design much more daring and artistic that ended up being discarded.
At the end of the 90s, Sony contacted the prestigious designer Hock Wah Yeo, who had already designed incredible physical editions of games such as Jetfighter or Prince of Persia, for a new collaboration in the world of video games, creating the boxes of the games of PlayStation 2 (via Kotaku). The result, as you can see in the image below, is a very different design from what we are used to.
From what can be seen, it seems to be a round case where the game is located next to a rectangular section where the cover of the game would go. In proportion to the disk, we can see that the size of the cover would be much smaller to a modern day or PS2 days. The game of shapes and proportions makes that, seen from the front, it seems that the album is coming out of the cover itself.
Anyways, Sony scrapped this design and ended up opting for an already standardized format that would surely make it cheaper production and distribution costs. Since then, physical games, with the exception of some collector’s editions, have followed that pattern by simply modifying the proportions. As in the case of Nintendo Switch, which has a more vertical format because it does not need space to put a disc.