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Why do homebrewers make their game's boxarts modern looking?


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xDragonWarrior, you got it all wrong. Back in the day, game graphics were so crude and primitive that the marketing department relied on big bombastic and fanciful artwork to sell the game. To some extent, the opening blurb of the manual where the story is introduced, served the same purpose: to immerse you into a story that seemed larger and more exciting than the blocky pixels on the screen.

 

Retro game artwork, therefore, evokes this old form: it exaggerates the action and game elements in an exciting, colourful, and very detailed way.

 

Most of them have a specific artistic style, based on the aesthetics of the period. For instance, lots of watercolour or airbrush; and when people were depicted, it's easy to notice 1970s fashion in clothes, colours, and hairstyles.

Exactly! I've described it this way in an earlier thread about game art:

 

I always thought the Atari artwork in particular was intriguing, and yes, I knew even at the time I saw my first game (when I was about six years old, in 1982) that I couldn't expect the game to look like the box art. For me, the paintings on the packaging served as a visual aid to prime my imagination, giving me a mental image that I could impose on the more primitive audiovisuals of the actual game as I was playing it. Perhaps that's one reason those games were so immersive for me; they were engaging my imagination on multiple levels. Just look at everything that's going on in the 2600 Missile Command artwork, for example. I'd say the same about the early Mattel Intellivision artwork, which used a similar visual style, although I didn't see those games until much later.

 

I suspect that any stylistic differences between homebrew game art and vintage game art are simply because homebrew developers usually aren't in a position to create their own artwork. They must instead get help from the limited number of artists who are interested in serving that market as a sideline to their day jobs, in which they understandably work primarily in modern styles.

 

I've seriously considered studying painting and drawing specifically for the purpose of creating my own artwork for my games, but I think it would be difficult even for many professional artists, let alone amateurs like myself, to match the style and craftsmanship of Atari's Warner-era box and cartridge art. The artists who worked for Atari—people like Steve Hendricks, George Opperman, Susan Jaekel, Cliff Spohn, John Enright, etc—were just amazingly good at what they did.

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Just to add my voice I also think the originals were more stylized than what the OP remembers. The Duck Attack cover is fairly spot on except the sharpness is too high, an effect of digital art versus tradition media. As many pictures above show classic game art had little to do with the graphics and more to do with the idea.

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