Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Collector's Edition

Jack in the box. Yes, you read that right. The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Collector's Edition on Xbox 360 shipped with an actual jack in the box alongside a physical map of Rome, an art book, and a bonus disc stacked with a making-of documentary, a digital preview of the Assassin's Creed comic, trailers, developer diaries, and the full game soundtrack.

It also included two additional single player maps, the Aqueduct and Trajan Market. That bonus disc is a time capsule of mid-cycle 360 development culture, when studios still put real effort into behind-the-scenes content because they knew collectors would actually watch it. The art book gives you a window into Brotherhood's visual design process, and the Rome map is the kind of physical insert that transforms a shelf display.

But let's be honest, we all want to talk about the jack in the box. It's weird. It's wonderful.

It's the kind of wild swing that only happened in the 360/PS3 era, when publishers were still experimenting with what a collector's edition could be. This is a conversation piece as much as it is a collectible.