What came in the Lunar collector's editions?
The boxes that taught the West what a collector's edition was, item by item.
Long before deluxe editions were standard, Working Designs sold Lunar in North America as treasure. Silver Star Story Complete (May 1999) launched at $60, above the standard game price, as a four-disc collector's edition; it became the company's best-selling title, moving over 223,000 copies in its first year. Eternal Blue Complete (December 2000) answered with the most elaborate game box of its console generation. The census, as documented:
SILVER STAR STORY COMPLETE (1999)
Four discs and a mapThe discs
Two game discs, a soundtrack CD of arranged series music, and a Making of Lunar disc (documentary video, plus a hidden Warlords clone, Lords of Lunar, unlocked by a code found in the game). Later printings and the 2002 Fan-Art Edition, whose disc art was drawn by fans from the Working Designs website, dropped the extras.
The book and the map
A hardbound instruction manual (part art book, part guide excerpt), and a cloth map of the world of Lunar: the two objects owners name first, and the two most often missing from secondhand copies. A complete census of any used copy starts with them.
The number that proves it
Heritage Auctions' graded census has counted sealed collector's editions in the dozens, not hundreds (25 copies of one variant on VGA's October census, as documented by the auction house): a $60 box sold in the hundreds of thousands, yet sealed survivors are genuinely rare.
ETERNAL BLUE COMPLETE (2000)
The pendant boxThe contents
Three game discs; a cloth map of Lunar a thousand years on; a replica of Lucia's pendant; a set of character standees; a soundtrack CD; and a hardback manual that doubles as a walkthrough of the game's first portion. Pre-orders added the era's most famous bonus: a Ghaleon punching puppet.
Why these boxes matter to the Library
The Japanese releases were handsome but conventional. The deluxe object is a Western invention, Working Designs' argument that a translated RPG deserved ceremony. When the Library documents Lunar editions, the boxes are not packaging around the editions. In the West, they are the editions.