Kill Screen #2 – Back to School by Kill Screen

Author:Kill Screen [Screen, Kill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: vl-nfcompvg
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The strange and exotic world of cover art

by PATRICK CASSELS

As any aging gamer of the FuncoLand era who once tossed good money at a bad game can attest, the artwork of early videogame boxes was rooted in deception. Or, if not quite “deception,” then certainly a drastic, drastic embellishment of what the rudimentary gameplay itself was actually like. “In the absence of truly engaging in-game art, manufacturers tried to capture gamers' imaginations via auxiliary aesthetics,” wrote critic Josh Jenisch in his book, The Art of the Video Game.

Videogames are not the first medium to utilize sensational and misleading ancillary art. In the early 20th century, busty femme fatales and sinister serial killers leered out at potential readers from fiction-magazine covers. “Artists,” writes Pulp Culture author Frank Robinson, “were as prized for their ability to depict action and strange or horrifying scenes as were the writers of the stories for their unique talents.” Later, in the 1950s, the studios behind B-movies were eager to tap into the fantastical base desires of teenagers. “The shocking, thrilling elements were emphasized to pull in the crowds and the posters often promised more than the films delivered,” note commercial-art historians Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh. In fact, studios would often design the posters before a film was produced. “[Only] then, if it still looked good, would they go ahead with a script.”

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