I seem to have started up a sideline of designing artwork for new “homebrew” games designed and programmed for classic video game consoles, so I thought I’d start up a gallery of the stuff that’s actually made it onto cartridge labels and manual covers (and a few that didn’t). All of these were done in Paint Shop Pro 8, with many elements hand-drawn and then textured – no 3-D software was used in any of them. (I think this goes without saying, because it really shows, but some folks have asked what I’m using…so…now you know.)
Haunted House II: 3-D (2002, Atari 5200 – AtariAge.com label contest)
Other entries I submitted for this game:
Game designed & programmed by John Swiderski
This game, with this label, made its debut at the 2002 Classic Gaming Expo, but after the Expo, another version was sold with a different label submitted during the contest.
Backfire (2003, Atari 2600 – AtariAge.com label contest)
Other entries I submitted for this game:
Game designed & programmed by Chad Lare
The unfortunate “space pilot” here is actually me, in my bathrobe – thankfully reduced to a featureless silhouette. Once Chad Lare and the gang at AtariAge managed to shake that disturbing image out of their minds, I also provided them with other artwork to use inside the manual itself.
Pong For Odyssey2! (2004, Odyssey2 – PackratVG.com commission)
Other artwork I submitted for this game:
Game designed & programmed by Rene Van Den Enden
This was the first time someone contacted me and asked me specifically to do the artwork, rather than me throwing a few entries into a contest. I tried to ape the “this is what the future used to look like” aesthetic from some of the 1970s Odyssey2 covers, showing fantastic situations, or robots running through mazes and the like. There was an earlier draft where the Pong paddles were gigantic, hydraulic-powered entities unto themselves, which in hindsight I’m not sure where I was going with that.
Calculator! (2006, Odyssey2 – PackratVG.com commission)
Game designed & programmed by Rene Van Den Enden
For Rene’s next game released through Packrat, there was a bit of a challenge – it wasn’t really a game at all, but rather an application that would let one use one’s Odyssey2 game console as a large calculator. This struck me as more of a tech demo than anything, so I cranked up the artwork a bit. As a bit of a nod to Pong!, the robot fingers in the foreground are meant to be the same hand that’s holding the Pong paddle. Since there was no precedent for a “Videopac+ Enhanced” (the European equivalent of the unreleased Odyssey3) banner on an Odyssey2 cartridge, I added a banner across the top in the Videopac+ packaging colors, rather than the diagonal banner used to announced “Voice Enhanced” or “Expanded Memory” on previous Odyssey2 releases.
Mission Impossible / Programmed Trip (2006, Odyssey2 – Videopac.org label contest)
Other entries I submitted for this game:
(Repro release of unreleased 1980s Brazilian prototype game)
Nothing to do with Mission: Impossible the series/movie franchise (just try telling the attorneys that, though), these were two entries in a contest to create “European-style” cover for a limited release. I probably killed my chances of winning this one by submitting two entries; ironically, while I spent a whole morning on hand-drawing, texturing and finessing my original artwork, the winning entry had cut-and-pasted ships from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda on the cover. Strangely enough, after the initial “limited edition” of 30 copies with the “Andromeda” artwork sold out, Videopac.org announced a general release, this time featuring not one of the two covers I entered, but a non-contest-entry version I had posted in a message board thread about creating a new, unified look for O2/Videopac games yet to be released. (My original post in that thread is reproduced here.) So, oddly enough, I’ve moved this entry from “didn’t make the cut” to “published works.” (You may notice that, in the two versions I created for the contest, my “signature” – a photo of my horse hidden in the background – vanished under the game logo. Bizarrely enough, she’s now completely visible in the spec artwork which was used. 😆 )
The Ones That Didn’t Make The Cut
Beef Drop! (2004, Atari 5200 – AtariAge.com label contest)
Game designed & programmed by Ken Siders
These were entries that didn’t win, but they’re both amusing enough that I thought I’d include them here. Beef Drop was, as one might expect, a game very similar to Burgertime. I loaned my own face, with an appropriately hideous expression, to “Frank” on the first label; the second one was meant more as a joke than anything, but was an actual photo of one of the cows from the farm.
Invader X (2004, Atari 2600 – Digital Press label contest)
I’m reluctant to list a “designer” on this one, since it was a fairly simple hack of an existing game, Imagic’s Demon Attack. With that in mind, I took a swipe at Imagic’s label style, which usually consisted of a photographic element kit-bashed together from models (both plastic and human) and the odd bit of artwork. In this case, I tried to make the cheesy space monster look like it might’ve been a physical model, if a cheap one; it was based on the altered shape of one of the game’s invaders.
Tom Clancy’s Frogger: The Final Option (2004, Xbox)
(THIS WAS A JOKE)
Ribbit!
