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Archived: Video Game Cover Art

Hello Xbox America,

There is a lot that goes into a video game and personally I feel the art and design of any game, is one of the most significant aspects of a title.

Video game cover art, what a huge contributing factor in the way I decided what games I would purchase/play. I remember as a young naive child, walking up to the local video rental store (Watch Dog Video) with just $3 I practically had to beg my parents for, ready to make my big decision. A rental at the time cost $2.50 and you were able to keep it for 2 days. Sometimes I would spend anywhere between 15 to 20 minuets just staring at the cover art of all the different games available. Little did I know, you should never judge a game by it's cover.

For this thread I thought it would be fun for everyone to share their favorite video game cover art. It can be anything from beautifully illustrated covers, to just downright ridiculous covers and anything in between. I will share three of my favorite game covers of all time. I hope you all enjoy this topic and thank you for participating.

Doom - Playstation

What an amazing game! When I first saw the cover for Doom, I knew this was going to be a badass title. Here's what looks like a very pissed off man surrounded by a horde of demons with not a care in the world for his well being but a lust for killing those foul beasts. Two things I found funny about this cover were the soldier in the background flailing his arm, either wanting to lend a hand or tell his buddy to get the hell out of there and the demon on the bottom left hand corner. What is he doing?....waving at you? @_@ Either way this cover is awesome.




Super Smash Bros. - Nintendo 64

Smash Bros. a game that consumed my childhood like a fat kid consumes chocolate cake. This game had it all, literally it had it all. (Nintendo speaking) When I first saw this cover I was in awe. I remember thinking to myself, "OMG Samus Aran from Metroid, I love Samus! OMG Fox McCloud from Star Fox, I love Star Fox! OMG Kirby from Kirby's Dream Land, I love Kirby! OMG Pikachu from Poke'mon,....well I'd rather have Dragonite but Pikachu is fine! OMG Link from The Legend of Zelda, I love Link! Mario...cool games but I'll pass on playing as him." What a great game cover to draw in all the Nintendo fans. I just wish Bob-omb hiding in the right hand corner was a playable character, now that would be interesting.



Mega Man - NES

@___@ Um...ok, what exactly am I looking at here. Mega Man, now that is a name that should ring a bell in all gamers ears. An Iconic character that debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System way back in 1987 and has become so successful, there are now OVER 9000 titles!!! Just kidding, there's over 100 Mega Man titles to date and Capcom doesn't intend on stopping anytime soon. I was too young at the time to remember when this game was first purchased for my family but my brother tells me, he had my father buy it for him because he thought the title Mega Man was cool. Mega Man for the NES is the exact reason why you should never judge a game by it's cover. Although this game depicts a constipated, pedophylic cyber soldier enjoying his time in a futuristic Florida with his dildo gun, it will actually be one the best games you will ever play.<3

The original Suikoden box art is pretty cool. It's also very generic as none of these characters are in the game. The guy riding the black dragon is especially out of place as the only person who rides him is a 14 year old dragon knight trainee.




^ Best box this gen.




My favorite box art.

I agree that that DmC reboot cover art is awesome, I would love a huge text-less poster of it.

I also really love the original Mega Man art. It is so hilariously bad and inaccurate. Which leads me to...

Mega Man 9 (XBLA)
I thought it was awesome when Capcom said they were going to do a new Mega Man game with 8-bit assets and classic gameplay, and it was even better when it went on sale on Live Arcade! The icing on the cake was when they released promo art for the digital title that mimicked the old, so-bad-it's-good box art. You have MM's buster looking like a glassy telescope, a 50's sci-fi laser gun, inaccurate outfit, Dr. Wily looking like a cyber zombie version of Tekken's Heihachi, and some deforesting robot in the background that isn't even in the game. On top of that, WTF is "ultrasound graphic synthesis"?? The whole concept is so brilliant you can pretend it wasn't made by Crapcom. I bought a shirt of this and still wear it proudly, despite the fact that I have been stuck on Wily's Castle 3 level for years now.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (X360)
When Bethesda said the 4th ES game was going to be set in Cyrodiil, a lot of fans assumed that would also be the game's title, since 2 was in Daggerfall and 3 was in Morrowind. Instead, it got the title Oblivion, and the promo art looked like a faded white tome you might find in-game, emblazoned with a harsh stone Daedric symbol. I love how it is overall sparse but effective, and not just because I invested hundreds of hours in to it. The Norwegian metal band Keep of Kalessin was similarly impressed with the concept--they pretty much copied it for their 2008 album Kolossus and praised the game and its art in numerous interviews at the time.


Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (PC)
After mentioning Oblivion, I had to mention Daggerfall as well. I love this cover art not so much because it is great on its own, but for what it came to mean to me. I was hanging out at a friend's house and saw this box near his computer. I asked him what it was and he said, "You haven't played Daggerfall yet?? Dude, lemme show you! The graphics are better than Ultima Underworld, there are tons of quests, the map is freakin' HUGE, you can take all the stuff off your character and see them naked, you can wait for a shop to close after dark then break in and steal everything," and he went on as he was opening the game. I ended up calling my mom later that night and asking if I could stay at his house an extra day, pretty much just to watch him play. Revisiting the game later, it became very apparent how much of the explorable land was generic and randomly-generated, and it was way buggier and glitchier than I remembered, but it's still a great game just for starting so many of the Elder Scrolls tropes, and the cover art has always stuck with me.

King Arthur's World (SNES)
I can't think of many SNES games that had really great cover art, and I suppose a lot of that is due to how the box and cartridge labels were formatted in the NA market--with very freaking little space for art. I always really liked this box art though because it was like an M.C. Escher painting with medieval warfare thrown in. A friend and I (same one from the Daggerfall story, actually) read about this game in Nintendo Power and decided we had to have it, but we couldn't find it anywhere new. About a year later I randomly found a used cart at Funcoland and snatched it up. The game turned out to be just as fun as NP suggested, and the art stuck with me because I was searching for it for so long.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Zeonic Front (PS2)
I've always liked this cover art, in fact it was the the main reason I bought the game. I hadn't read or even heard anything about Zeonic Front; I had played the previous PS2 Gundam game called Journey to Jaburo, and it was mediocre at best, but seeing this new game that followed MSG's story but from Zeon's point of view got me very interested. The mobile suit on the front is a Zaku II, one of the "bad guy grunt" mechs--this also piqued my interest because part of what I liked about the different Gundam shows is that they avoided a lot of the 'super robot' tropes and instead showed numerous low-ranking troops and their experiences in combat. This was the first MSG game I had ever seen that didn't place the de rigueur RX-78-2 Gundam front-and-center on the cover, so I bought ZF brand-new on faith and it ended up being incredibly fun.