Best Game Cover Art?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 16, 2010

One annoying tendency I’ve discovered with some  indie digital download games is that there’s a depressing lack of cover art sometimes. It seems this is more often an issue with newer indies on their first release, as they tend to be far more willing to invest in an impressive cover piece on their second or third releases. As a digital download, indie games don’t have box covers like their shelf-bound brethren, but the art does serve the same purpose as it would on a box. And it can usually double for main screen art.

The fact that second and subsequent games by successful indies tend to have cover art indicates that it does have value to sellers.

Several different kinds of box art styles emerged over the years, from the old Atari cartridges offering some idealized representation of what the action of the game might represent (as some say, pretty dang misleading), to Activision’s faked-up screenshots with things like motion-blurred monocolor rectangles.  Then you’ve got Ultima VII Part 1: The Black Gate, which was, like, a black box with the title on the front.

Some of my favorites included:

The Secret of Monkey Island: The box art for this one looked a lot like a movie poster, circa early 80s. Think Indiana Jones. Which is, I’m sure, not a coincidence as this game was by LucasArts.

Grim Fandango: Ditto, but even better. It looked like a film noir movie poster. With stylized skeletons.  That’s, like, triple the awesome.

F.E.A.R. – More like a modern movie poster, except it’s got freaky Alma front-and-center. Man, can you imagine this on an old Atari cartridge back in the day? We would have had parental freak-outs much earlier. Oh, wait, we had this crap.  Never mind.

Akalabeth: World of Doom. I don’t know if I was out of elementary school yet when this game came out. I never played this game until much, much later (like, two years ago), but I just loved the box art used for magazine ads. But I wasn’t even out of elementary school when this game was released. So I couldn’t afford it. Nor did I have an Apple computer to play it on – I think a few months later we’d actually get a Sinclair ZX80 with 1K of RAM which could run nothing. But even if we were proud Apple owners, there was no way I would have been able to convince my parents to get me this game with a cover like that. So I just imagined what it could have been like based on the cover. From what little I’ve played – well, it was pretty much nothing like the cover. I would have been very disappointed.

However, the box art from Ultima VI: The False Prophet really looked like this same demon-dude (now a smaller gargoyle) vanquished by a hero.  So there’s some kind of continuity. The game scored extra cool points for having an instruction book cover showing the opposite – said knight being vanquished by a heroic-looking gargoyle.

Karateka: This one wasn’t misleading – the artwork was pretty much about the game, but boy everything looked cooler on the box cover.

Everquest: Okay, any artwork by Keith Parkinson was pretty much awesome by default. All of the series had some outstanding cover art, but as I still have the original poster hanging over my desk, it’s still my favorite of the bunch.

Alone in the Dark: Man, they had their whole H.P. Lovecraft thing going on with this one. Actually, the cover reminded me  lot of the original Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper RPG cover art. What do you think?

Aveyond 2: Ean’s Quest – possibly my favorite indie game “box art.” As frequently happens, the art style is not like that of the actual game, but it’s still some incredible artwork for an outstanding RPG.

So there are some of my favorites. What are yours?

Incidentally, the fake Frayed Knights Atari Cartridge image was made by this convenient tool.

And indies: Please don’t neglect your cover art!

Filed Under: Art, General - Comments: 9 Comments to Read



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