Electromistress

Hi everyone! I can't exactly call myself a new member, as I've made this account years ago, but so far I haven't been actively... Active around here. My name is Luna, I live in Croatia (although I hope to change that in the future) and I have been a steady LEGO fan since the early 90s. You can take a look at my Brickset to get an idea what kind of sets I like, but in short, my primary focus is everything sci-fi related. I've never had a real "dark age" and I have been collecting LEGO all my life, however due to time/space/budget constraints, I haven't been building much MOCs in the past 10 or so years. Since I'm hoping to change that going forward, I decided to become a more active in the community to keep the building motivation and spirits up. On that note, here's a tiny MOC I whipped up a few weeks back: Recon party scouting ahead by Luna S Cheers!

Wow, that's a really straight to the point name, I wonder how I never came across it before... But it seems even the topic here never got much attention. Thanks so much for the share!

Wow, this one looks quite amazing. I know Star Wars had them, in fact, when the first X-Wing was made, the instructions even included a little comic about all the alternate model suggestions. But again, nowadays you pretty much only get to see these builds if you personally own the box of the set, it's a shame.

Hi, as I've said, I'm currently on the lookout for M-tron boxes (1990), but ideally I would like to see all box backs available online. I'm not exactly sure how long was LEGO doing that? I think it was from somewhere in the 80s to somewhere in the late 00s,

For the large part of LEGO history- as I presume most of you know- the backs of LEGO set boxes had on them "ideas" for alternate models that could be built from the set. This was always a very dear feature to me, and as a kid, I would always make sure to try to assemble all the alternate builds. Unfortunately, at some point LEGO stopped with this practice, and to this day I hope they will change their mind on that eventually... But that's not what I want to discuss today. What I want to discuss now is the backs of the boxes of old sets, or better said, where to get photos of them? It's very simple to find photos of the front side of boxes online, and instructions for almost every set are available in dozens of places. But the back sides, with all those nice alternate builds... Not so much. The best that I've managed so far is to dig through BrickLink listings, hoping that some seller will take a photo of the back of the box as well. It would be a real shame if all those alternate builds ended up lost to time. After all, the LEGO designers of the time certainly put effort into coming up with those. Personally, my current goal is to collect all the M-Tron ones, to use as inspiration for my own M-Tron themed MOCs. So, did I miss something? Is there a website out there that stores those photos? Do you think a website like that should exist? Should maybe LEGO put in some effort and upload all those photos, just as they upload instructions? Please share your thoughts.