British band Queen have released quite a number of career-spanning box sets over the years. The first one was, to my knowledge, called Queen Complete, released in Sweden in 1985 featuring 11 studio LP’s from Queen (1973) to The Works (1984). A few months later, The Complete Works was released worldwide which also contains Live Killers and a compilation album featuring all non-album B-sides up to the One Vision single.

Queen Mania was the first box featuring all albums on the CD format which was released in Germany in 1990. A lengthy feature about this beautiful set can be found here. Five years later, a worldwide CD box was issued in coincidence with Queen’s album Made In Heaven called Ultimate Queen or, more commonly called, The Ultimate Queen 20CD Box Set.

This feature will focus on this lovely 1995 set and takes a deep dive into its looks and contents.

The packaging

The CD box was originally supplied in a (very) large custom-made carton box, which has the band’s crest and name printed on the top. It measures 50 x 55 x 12,5cm (19,7″ x 21,7″ x 4,9″) whereas the CD box itself measures 43,5 x 43,5 x 5,9cm (17,1″ x 17,1″ x 2,3″) so yes, there is quite a lot of padding inside the carton to protect the item. The carton was sealed by a large white sticker which has the catalogue number (QUEENBOX 20), barcode, a copyright statement and the limited edition number. Indeed, this set was limited and numbered to 15.000 copies worldwide.

The outer carton with the Queen crest and white seal

Let’s open this carton and see what’s inside by going through each layer.

When you open the lid, you are greeted by a thick piece of polystyrene, folded bubble wrapping and something below the wrapping. The bubble wrapping is stuck against the polystyrene with a piece of tape.

The view when you open the lid of the carton box

After removing the bubble wrap, you see a folded leaflet which contains assembly instructions in English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese on the inside. The front and back of this leaflet contain photos of the assembled box.

Below this leaflet is a sheet of paper with a hole or die-cut in the middle and has a size of 33,4 x 33,4cm / 13,1″ x 13,1″. It is taped against the Styrofoam and probably used to protect the item which is below it. You can already see it peeping through the hole: it’s a nice looking golden booklet with 12 pages and an embossed front cover.

The 31 x 31cm / 12,2″ x 12,2″ booklet resides in a lowered recess so it cannot move around during transportation. When you remove the booklet, you find four more recesses which hold the twenty CD’s. Each CD is housed in a sealed paper sleeve with a transparent window on the front. Each recess contains five CD’s.

It is then time to remove the top polystyrene layer. Once done, you will see the actual box set, obviously without any CD’s attached to it. The front acrylic window is protected by thin sheets of plastic on the front and back.

When you lift the box set out of the bottom polystyrene piece, you find the last part of this set which is a small plastic bag with two screws and two wall plugs. These can be used to hang the box on the wall.

Once you’ve peeled off the protection layers from the acrylic window and removed the discs from the wallet sleeves , you can mount each disc onto the golden CD hubs. The set is now ready to be enjoyed!

Box set contents

This set originally sold for approximately £300 (which equals to a whopping £615 in 2025) when it was released on the 13th of November 1995, a week after Made In Heaven. Based on the next few paragraphs and photos you can decide whether that price was justified or not. It is interesting to note that the box set’s current value hasn’t increased that much based on the original selling price in today’s money: a complete set as shown above tends to sell for £700 these days. Add “a few more” £ for a sealed one.

The cabinet

It is arguably a fantastic looking cabinet. As we already saw while unboxing the set, its front features an acrylic window so you can see two of the twenty CD’s. Below the CD’s is a golden sheet bearing the Queen crest and name on the left and a moving hologram of Freddie from Wembley 1986 on the right. All of this is set against a (royal) blue felt which feels extremely satisfying to the touch.

You can basically stick any disc on this front panel, though Queen Productions made the suggestion to present the band’s first and last album here. And in my opinion this indeed works best. I think it is also lovely to see Freddie in similar poses from different eras next to each other.

The front view of the box, numbered 005435

In the bottom right corner is the limited edition number. “Only” 15.000 were produced, of which (probably the first) 3000 were available in the UK, 1850 in Germany, 1200 in the Benelux, 1200 in Australia, 900 in Japan and 1000 in Brazil. The remaining 5850 were for the rest of the world or maybe mainly for the US. Even though 15.000 were made, the limited edition number shows six digits (012345) and not the expected five.

The golden sheet and the limited edition number are in my opinion the biggest letdown of this set. They are basically large stickers which do not stick that well on the blue felt. The left and right edges therefore tend to curl up a bit over time (in most cases within minutes). Even when you press them down again.

The back of the cabinet is (obviously) anything but attractive or interesting. It has a thin wooden backing plus a thicker piece of wood near the top which is used to fix the two hanging tags. These tags come pre-installed. The supplied screws fit nicely in these tags, but you can obviously use any screws and wall plugs. As long as they fit and can carry the weight (2,8 kg / 6,2 lbs).

The back view of the box

Switching back to the front. The front door consists of two parts. One with just the acrylic window which can be opened first to reach the two CD’s and then there is the panel with those two CD’s against the blue felt. When you open that panel, you have access to the remaining 18 discs which is a nice sight to behold.

The left inside view showing nine CD’s

Each side, left and right, has room for nine discs. As you can see, the discs are mounted in the same way as the two on the front. Though this time they are against a maroon-coloured felt background.

The right side contains two black elastic bands which are held in place by a fairly heavy golden crest buckle. You can detach each band from the crest so you can access the CD’s easier on this side. When the bands are in place, you can store the golden booklet behind it so it will not fall out when you open the cabinet.

It is unfortunate that, when the cabinet is stored upright (as it should) and due to the weight of the crest, the elastic bands will start to loosen up over time and the crest will no longer be in the center. Keep this in mind when you want to buy a copy. Any box set that has been lying down flat should not be impacted by this.

The right inside view showing the remaining nine CD’s and the Queen crest

The below photo gives a nice view of the inside of the full cabinet when opened. On the right you will furthermore faintly see the lock to properly close the cabinet. There are two close-up photos of this lock below the photo of the full view: one when it is closed and one when it is opened. It may look simple but it gets the job done.

A full inner view of the opened cabinet

All in all I think this is a very impressive looking box set. It is however a bit impractical. Especially when you want to play an album that is housed on the right side. As you would then first need to unbuckle the crest, remove the booklet and then pick your album. Alternatively, you can slide the booklet up from behind the elastic bands and then take a CD. Though the bands and/or crest might be in the way.

The booklet

As lavish the box might look, the booklet unfortunately doesn’t and isn’t.

Yes, it has a nice mat gold finish and the crest and band name are embossed on the front cover, but that is where it ends.

The front cover of the booklet

The booklet contains sixteen pages (including the front and back covers) of which ten feature the front artwork of two albums on each page. You will also find the track listing and some relevant credits, but nothing else: no additional photos, no liner notes. The first page is basically a repetition of the crest and band name, though in full colour and the last page has minor credits for the box set itself. The cabinet’s inner panel maroon background colour is used on the inside of the front and back covers. That colour also reminds me of the colour used for the 1992 Box Of Tricks release.

Some samples of the booklet can be found in the next few photos:

So much more could have been done in my opinion. Like a nice essay about the band and/or each album. Supplemented by unseen photos related to each album. Especially for this set, this feels very bare bones and it contains zero new information or photos for any fan who is familiar with the band’s work. It is almost like an afterthought.

The CD’s

I’ve covered the box and booklet, but not the main content of this set: the music!

This collection contains, as mentioned a few times already, 20 CD’s which cover all of the band’s studio and live albums, being:

• Queen (1973)
• Queen II (1974)
• Sheer Heart Attack (1974)
• A Night At The Opera (1975)
• A Day At The Races (1976)
• News Of The World (1977)
• Jazz (1978)
• Live Killers (2 discs) (1979)
• The Game (1980)
• Flash Gordon (1980)
• Hot Space (1982)
• The Works (1984)
• A Kind Of Magic (1986)
• Live Magic (1986)
• The Miracle (1989)
• Innuendo (1991)
• Live At Wembley ’86 (2 discs) (1992)
• Made In Heaven (1995)

They used the 1994 digital remasters for the albums from Queen up to and including The Works and the original masters for the remaining albums as of A Kind Of Magic. No remasters were made at that time for post 1985 albums. The discs for those albums also do not mention anything about a possible remaster whereas the older albums do (“Digital Remasters ℗ 1994 The copyright […]“). Sound-wise I think they are fine. At least the track indexing errors have been corrected when compared to the 1986 CD releases and a lot of background noise has been removed (though this may then impact the sound quality itself, a topic I don’t want to start here). However, this remaster (and also a 1992 repressing of the 1986 edition) has an annoying click around 5 seconds into the song Fat Bottomed Girls.

Both A Kind Of Magic and The Miracle feature the three CD bonus tracks from the original 1986 and 1989 CD releases. Live Magic contains the full-length live versions for some of the songs when compared to its vinyl counterpart. Same for Innuendo though by 1991, CD was more or less the leading format.

Each disc is gold plated, to give it optically a better quality, but also to make it corrosion resistant. It is debatable whether gold gives better sound quality versus the standard silver CD’s.

The arguably best part of these CD’s is that each disc is now presented as a picture disc CD. In my opinion, they look lovely and I especially love the ones for Queen, Jazz, Hot Space and Innuendo. I do think that they could have been a bit more creative with the two double albums (Killers and Wembley) by maybe using alternative artwork for the second discs, but at least there is some unity now. These picture disc CD’s were in the end only used in this box set, making the set a bit more special.

A selection of some CD’s can be found below:

The box makes a reference to being “ultimate” though it arguably isn’t, as the band’s non-album B-sides are missing here. These were present in the 1985 The Complete Works vinyl set, but only up to Blurred Vision, which was the (great) B-side of One Vision. The non-album B-sides from the single A Kind Of Magic and The Miracle and Innuendo albums (four in total, or five in case you want to include Made The Swine from 1973, released on Headlong) remained exclusively to those singles until a few years ago. You could even take it a step further and wish for stuff such as single edits and extended mixes, but they remained exclusive to the Greatest Hits releases and the 1992 12″ Collection at that time.

What’s in a name

For years I wondered what the actual title of this set is since it is nowhere mentioned on or in the box itself, nor in the booklet or the original outer carton. I always went for The Ultimate Queen 20CD Box Set or something similar until I stumbled upon a 1995 promo display this year which was used in stores. This display states:

Ultimate Queen

20 CD limited edition collector’s set

November 13th

Based on this I expect that the title is Ultimate Queen. Yes, it could also be Ultimate Queen 20 CD Limited Edition Collector’s Set. However, the first two lines use different font colours which tells me that they intended to separate those two lines.

Promo display

The one from the photo is 30,5 x 30,5 cm (12″ x 12″) in size, whereas there should also be a 12,5 x 12,5 cm / 5″ x 5″ variant. I wonder whether there are displays from other countries which may list the available number of copies as well?

Since we are touching the topic of promotion, I stumbled upon an old promotional photo featured on my own Queen website. This may be an image from a prototype or very early version as there are some notable differences. Unfortunately it is a very small and low-res image and I don’t know its original source, but at least it still exists. These are the differences that I could spot:

• There are two Sheer Heart Attack, News Of The World and Innuendo discs
• There does not appear to be a title on the A Night At The Opera, A Day At The Races, News Of The World and The Miracle discs
• The album title/band name for Queen (1973) is in a different position
• Brian is white on the Hot Space disc instead of grey, though this might be due to lighting
• The cover of the booklet appears to be glossy or reflective instead of the mat material used for the final product

An old promotional photo showing some variations

Was it all worth it?

“Yes it was a worthwhile experience, ha-ha-ha-Ha!”

I may have already showed it throughout this post, but I really dig this set. It looks fantastic, feels great (especially the soft felt) and you actually have a feeling of owning a quality product. It may be for this reason that I own two sets which allowed me to create this deep-dive in the first place.

Should you get this set in 2025? If you are only interested in the band’s music and already have some albums, you might want to pass on it. Especially since copies tend to sell for £600-700 with the original outer carton and £475 without which is quite a significant sum of money for just some music and a lot of fluff. If you are also interested in the visual aspect of this set, it might be worthwhile to look for a copy as it is definitely lovely to look at.

Obviously, if you are a collector and completist, this should be a no-brainer 😉