Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Box Art Gets a Facelift

With the release of the Disney film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time based on the game of the same name, Ubisoft and Disney are in full promotion mode. When walking through Walmart yesterday I happened upon this.

That’s right, the Sands of Time box art for the PS2 has been completely changed. Its been revamped to more closely fit the look of the Jake Gyllenhaal’ed version of the character. While initially shocking, having the new box art isn’t all that weird. Books do it all the time. Many novels that are released as movies get a reprinting with artwork mirroring the promotional materials for the movie, so why should games be any different?

At first I thought that Ubisoft was trying to sneak this into the retail channels, since I had heard nothing about the change, but a quick look at Amazon shows the updated boxart. The weirdest part is that the new cover is identical to the cover of the latest Prince of Persia series entry The Forgotten Sands.

This screams of “last minute change”. The time wasn’t even taken to redraw the artwork and properly repackage it with a “Now a Major Motion Picture” blurb on the front. Instead the title on the front was changed a PS2 Greatest Hits logo was slapped at the top and the discs were sent into production. Tacky? A bit, but again, you can’t really blame them for wanting to get as much money out of this movie project as possible.

I have a bit more to say about Prince of Persia experiment that we are in the midst of, but I’ll hold that for later in the week. For more on this facinating look into cross promotion, check out my forthcoming review of Prince of Persia: The Forgtten Sands coming later this week.

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