Bonkers NES Box Art!

Once upon a time, I played video games. Also once upon that very same time I'd even go so far as to blindly rent them from the video rental store, sometimes based on hype or sequel familiarity, but often I found myself lured in by the lurid box covers. And not unlike the folks who would rent movies based on the picture on the front, it was extremely rare that the content would match what was suggested. Obviously an 8-bit video game was never gonna resemble the Frank Frazetta painting they used to sell it but man did they sell it, and I bought it.

I have favorite covers - and by favorite I mean some of them are on my list of greatest artworks of the 20th century, and I bring them up here pretty often. But while this list is still in the rad to awesome range, these are the weird ones: whether they're indicative of their game or entirely misleading, these masterpieces of consumer art were too off the wall to be ignored and continue to hang nicely in my headspace gallery. 

- Paul

Bomberman

This game is a pixelated grid; squared squares upon squares. And yet, this depiction is pretty accurate. The action shot is soft and simple enough to be a frame from a Saturday Morning Cartoon (probably a pretty good one). Bomberman himself is from the exceedingly generic gene pool of armored warriors that headlined so many games around this time, but it's less about the predictability of the costume and more about the color - of everything. Atypical of the dreary, confusing SciFi hellscapes that grace the covers of games like this, this one is an all-over rainbow jumbled into a janky design of letters and shapes. Nevermind the red, purple, and pink, it's that orange on that blue that just drives me wild. 

Super Contra

This is the kinda overly ambitious SciFi art I was talking about, but I'm totally all over this one. Notably, the game actually is this exciting; every level is continuously running and jumping and shooting at soldiers, machines, and monsters, always in various locales - from a tropical setting to a black void in which the ground breaks beneath your feet. All adequately represented, so literally that I don't even notice the aesthetic gulf between game and box. All that context aside, it does what these covers usually tried to do: to give one pause and ask themselves, "Is that a movie poster?" Aliens and Predator were a constant influence in this realm, but no film ever could live up to the imagery here. 

Legacy of the Wizard

In several cases the artist was only given a written description of the premise without actually witnessing any real gameplay. It's entirely possible that this was the scenario here; the game is crude, but its music and sound design and graphics all create a very specific and pleasing aesthetic that I've always loved. This Fantasy Porn painting is totally its own separate thing - I link them together due to forced context, but one doesn't put me in the world of the other. My only complaint is that as much as I love this red, I feel shortchanged on a lotta potentially atmospheric sky and terrain by this compromised composition; I want a larger sense of this world. 

California Games

I had no interest in games depicting easily accessible, real life activities: sports, board games, even Pinball (yes that's a video game) were all life's other options outside of this electronic land of make-believe. My interest shifted when I spotted a photograph made entirely of legs, nestled in between Burgertime and Castlevania. They clearly knew what they were doing, at least doing to me; what chance did Q*bert have against bikini bottoms and roller skates? To be fair the game was kinda okay - I enjoyed perpetual forward motion scenarios, even if it was skateboarding, surfing, etc. but that's still not as exciting as this tanned & oiled tribute to 1989.

The Guardian Legend

This is the best example in my mind of the cover and the game having nothing to do with each other in any literal sense, but they compliment each other in weird thematic ways. The game is a creepy, complex maze full of monsters and creatures and symbols and things that generally just don't resemble anything in nature. By that same token, the box art always seemed to me to be a traditional depiction of Hell - particularly these devilish eyes that I always thought they lifted from Tim Curry in Legend.* I've never been able to beat the game, so in my mind I still hang onto the wonderful probability that it all culminates into something vaguely echoing this atmospheric nightmare. 

*Years later (like 3 decades later) I stumbled across an alternate poster for the 1985 movie Creature and I was incredibly startled and a little saddened. It wasn't out of the ordinary for artists to borrow or steal imagery for this burgeoning platform so I'll let it slide. (Honestly the Creature poster is also a gross misrepresentation of the film.)

Pipe Dream

My entire reason for starting this list, as it's one of my favorite artworks of all time in any medium. I was obsessed with it when I was like 8 years old: the concept, the colors, the composition, all somehow embodied things that spoke to me on a molecular level. I could draw straight lines or make analogies about the checkerboard tiles or green slime or the overall playful abstraction and surreal minimalism, but in the end it's not quite like anything other than this graphic tribute to the blossoming Pop Art of the 1990s (predominantly spearheaded by Nintendo). Without a smudge of irony, this is a Modern Art Masterpiece, and it belongs in a museum.