my favorite stuff ever

Without a doubt, my single greatest joy as a kid was spending hours upon hours alone in my room playing video games. Had I to do it over again, I might have gone a different route...you know, actually seeing the outdoors and other kids. But the past being what it was, it still had an enormous impact on me artistically. I used to sketch out complex designs for new games literally all night long. I dreamt of creating the sequel to Bionic Commando using advanced 16-bit parallax scrolling and mode-7 scaling. I imagined entire worlds that spawned from the images I sat and lovingly digested for hours. No images were more permanently seared into my cranium than that of the classic video game cover.

This is such a lost art. Now things are so...literal. But back then, it was the wild west. The cover didn't really have to bear any real resemblence to the game inside because the graphics were so low-fi, to render any artistic image to represent it was conjecture. It was FANTASTIC. And the crazy stuff that people put into the games back then. Insane man. I'm talking, if I'm in Ninja Gaiden, I'm fighting hunch-backs, crazy insects, birds, machine gunners, and robots all in the span of a single 2-D level. And these artists had to interpret that shit into something that would sell. There is truly no wonder why 8-bit game art is some of the most unintentionally hilarious cover art ever.

To that point, I've collected a small gallery from all over the interwebz. Please, take a stroll through memory lane to a time when men could be men, and tennis playing astronauts broke down rainbow walls with square balls.

>gallery