There's an industry of NSFW video game box art on eBay, and you'll regret learning any more than that

There's a cottage industry of horny video game box art replacements on eBay, and researching this fact led me down a far, far stranger rabbit hole than I ever expected.

Last week, a number of people began to see eBay listings for popular games like Resident Evil show up in Google search results. But something about the box art attached to those listings was, uh… different. The real Resident Evil Village box art, for example, shows a hybrid image combining Chris Redfield and a werewolf-like creature. This listing showed a CG render of Lady Dimitrescu dressed down to her skivvies.

I'm going to avoid linking to anything racier than that tweet here, but as you can see, that alternate box art can be yours for just $16.99 USD - plus another ten bucks in shipping and handling, for some reason - and there are a lot more of these things on eBay, from a variety of different sellers, and some of them race past the line from 'horny' to 'straight-up pornographic'. Some include new plastic cases. Others simply include the art itself, which would presumably come printed on glossy paper for you to slide inside your existing game box.

If you've spent more than three seconds on the internet, the fact that these sorts of things exist shouldn't be entirely surprising. There's plenty of eroticized pirated video game merch on eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, and those official Mass Effect body pillows show that even actual developers are willing to start harvesting the industry of fandom's collective downbadness.

And hey, not even all these box art replacements are horny. There are box options being printed from some of these same sellers for digital-only games, so that you can still give your non-retail favorites a spot on your shelf. Probably the most ethically questionable bit of this is the likelihood that much of this art was ripped off from unconsenting artists. I certainly can't source every drawing of 2B's ass on the internet to verify that these images are stolen, but there's at least one (totally SFW) Metroid Dread cover replacement that appears to be pulled from God of War art director Raf Grassetti's Samus fanart.

I wish I could end this story here, but then I started looking into '2 Piece Snack Box' - that's the name in the logo at the bottom corner of the Resident Evil Village cover above. Yes, apparently one of these cover art replacement businesses has been prolific enough to design their own logo and everything. But why would you call a business like this "2 Piece Snack Box", as if you were buying some sort of food variety pack?

Well, 2 Piece Snack Box's primary business model seems to be selling variety packs containing mystery games packaged with mystery food. So you'd spend $30 to roll the dice on whether you'll get, say, an old Call of Duty game or an ultra-rare, low-print game from a boutique publisher like Limited Run Games, and get some Oreos or something for your trouble. Other mystery box options include random games and cover art replacements, so it seems the raunchy box art printings started as a way to spice up the variety packs.

A lot of 2 Piece Snack Box's eBay listings are for resales of low-print game releases like those from the aforementioned Limited Run Games. That seems to have inspired another of this seller's sub-businesses, too, as it also has a standalone website with regularly released "limited edition" cover art replacements, many of which are, again, quite pornographic, which is why I'm not linking to anything here.

If you start looking into the social media accounts listed on the 2 Piece Snack Box website, you run into an individual on Twitter called "A-Million", who claims to be a "Multi-Platinum Producer 11X", and points to a SoundCloud page for a track called "2 Piece Snack Box", which includes "2 beats hence why its called '2 Piece Snack Box'".

Yes, you've been reading about an advertisement for some guy's SoundCloud this entire time. I want to be mad, but honestly I respect the hustle.

I look forward to Leon's horny makeover for the inevitable Resident Evil 4 remake box art replacements.