Video Game Collecting

I decided to try and repair some of the damage that occurred to a Nintendo Game Boy box. Below I present to you Double Dragon. I received this beat up gem complete from eBay about 5 or 6 years ago. I had some theories to try and restore some of the more obvious damage. I tried them but I’m not 100% convinced by the results. Decide for yourself. I’ve highlighted in red areas I thought were of particular interest.

Street Fighter Alpha for SEGA Saturn.  This game was the second reason as to why I had to buy a SEGA Saturn.  It seems like now that the Fighter Alpha series is mostly forgotten and replaced with the more popular VS series of fighting games from Capcom including Marvel VS, SNK VS, etc.  This game always felt like a demo and Street Fighter Alpha 2 was the polished product.  The roster of fighters was small, the backgrounds were even smaller (as several were recycled with different color palettes and music) and the characters were not balanced at all.  But the music was fantastic!

But more important to me was the terrible box art.  I believe this was the last of the terrible Street Fighter box art that Capcom churned out.  World Warrior, and Hyper on SNES and Special Champion Edition on Genesis all had artwork done by what seemed like the same artist.  With its rubbery looking characters it seemed like I was browsing through an issue of MAD Magazine.  It was truly nasty.

Until I received my Choplifter! marquee, this Super Street Fighter II marquee was the only plexiglass marquee I had.  The rest were thin vinyl.  For a series that was so great and generated so much revenue for Capcom it doesn’t make sense to me why they couldn’t get a better artist.

And yes, it does appear that T-Hawk wet himself.

Over at gamefront.com and on several other gaming sites is a posted similiarity between the box art of Call of Duty 2, and Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos.  The photo they provide as evidence is this:

The exact quote from their site reads:

Nice “catch” by Reddit user igotdapowa in identifying Discovery’s Deadliest Catch cover for Xbox 360, and its clear inspiration.

I can’t really shame Discovery for borrowing from Call of Duty, but I imagine that players (and hell, maybe World War II veterans) would take issue with comparisons between getting shot at by Nazi gun emplacements and a job the end result of which is a plate of steamed crab legs.

This isn’t a “nice catch”… it isn’t anything but the demonstration of ignorance towards real video game box art.  The inspiration for both of these came from none other than the box art of Rampart which pre-dates (predates! ha funny!) those games by more than 15 years.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if Rampart got it’s inspiration from somewhere else.

What would happen if Archaeologists thousands of years from now were to dig up some Atari 2600 games?  What would they assume the artwork would mean?  The History Channel has been showing the documentary  series Ancient Aliens in heavy rotation which is good for me because… well I believe in Ancient Aliens.  If you’re not familiar with the theory it basically means that Alien visitors have came to Earth through-out antiquity and have influenced human development and intelligence.

Theorists and the show cite many pieces of art be it pictures, statues, jewelery, etc. that unmistakably look like space crafts, aliens, and other out of this world crap.  So that got me to thinking about archaeology and what one might think of Atari art.  There are plenty of sites on the Internet that mock the art of video games but collectively the Atari 2600 had some incredible specimens.  Below is a mash-up of several of the space-themed games.

Click to make larger:

There would have been a massive pile of crap in the khaki’s of the archaeologists once the harsh reality of the late 1970′s and early 1980′s sunk in based on this art alone.  Alien abductions, mechanical demons, birds and bugs, some cool porno guy (lower left).  But this was meant just for fun.  The serious issue will come by way of the Atari logo itself…

Remember that movie Close Encounter of the Third Kind?  The aliens were coming and planned to make contact with humans at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming?

Despite being the focal point of that goofy movie there is a Native American legend about the tower that goes something like “The daughters were being chased by a bear, and the Great Spirit lifted them into the sky by means of the tower, and when they reached the sky the daughters became the Constallation Plaeides.  And the bears clawing at the mountain made those scratches. ”

Now consider the Atari logo for a moment.  Some refer to it as ‘The Fuji” because it “resembles Mt. Fuji.”

I don’t know about you, but Mt. Fuji doesn’t look like the Atari logo to me.

The Atari logo looks like Devil’s Tower to me complete with bear scratches.

So ten thousand years from now, when our current society is just a collection of old fables, some archaeologists, perhaps from another galaxy will dig up a collection of Atari games.  Their preserved artwork and logo will lead them to Devil’s Tower where that goofy movie will re-enforce the belief that aliens made contact with us there.  Or that they played atari there.  Or something.

Note: This post is meant to be a parody and nothing more.  The design of the Atari logo has been well documented and has nothing to do with Devil’s Tower or my poorly pieced together collage above.

One of the cool things about the Atari 2600 was how frequently they recycled the box art.  Sure, when games got re-released to a silver or red label the art got recycled and that was probably to be expected.  But in some instances the art got recycled

Take for example Pole Position.  We have two cars, one red, one blue, peeling out of a turn.

Now look at Sprint Master.  Its the same art with just a little bit less detail.  And incase you are wondering these are two different games.  Pole Position plays like… well Pole Position, where as Sprint Master is a over head racing game in the vein on Super Sprint or Indy 500.

Some of the recycled art is less than obvious and actually crosses over consoles.  In this example we have Asteroids for Atari 2600.  Its pretty memorable artwork of a ship blasting away space rocks.  There is nothing unusual about it.

But Gates of Zendocon for Atari Lynx was released about a decade later.  Look closely at the ships.  Their differences are only subtle.  Perhaps they were drawn by the same artist, or perhaps the Zendocon artist was inspired by what he saw on the Asteroids boxart.  Either way its safe to assume one influenced the other.

But influences don’t stop there!  Take a look at the title screen of Astro Warrior on SEGA Master System.  This title was released between Asteroids and Zendocon.  Is it possible that Zendocon’s art is a hybrid of Asteroids Box art and Astro Warrior?  The world may never know…

The year was 1992 and I was a freshman in highschool, thumbing through the latest edition of EGM when I stumbled upon an ad for Power Moves for Super Nintendo.

In those days all you ever heard of was David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and Street Fighter 2. Well to be technically accurate that is all a 14 year old would hear. I’m sure there were other events going on in the world but this is all I can remember right now.

Anyways Power Moves was a port of Deadly Moves, a Street Fighter 2 knock off that went mostly unnoticed (I’ve seen this game only once in the wild.) Well Kaneko ported this monstrosity with ugly box art. Why are two homeless freaks killing each other? Why is the white guy a hemophiliac? Do people really bleed like that? Well that’s the Genesis version. The Super Nintendo version is the same art but with sweat. Punching the blood out of someone seems almost realistic… but punching the sweat out of someone? Shesh!

The excitement doesn’t end there. The Genesis box features a screen shot and a ‘crowd cheering’ caption. Much like the advertisement in EGM…. except… for… some unknown reason the screen shots are hand drawn! Who advertises a game with hand drawn screen shots?

Apparently Kaneko.

Thanks for the memories!

I mentioned earlier that PedroGames.Com delivers and he sure does. He is certainly my favorite ebay seller. One of the games I got recently was Renegade. This isn’t a rare game by any stretch of the imagination but it would have become an necessary purchase eventually if my ultimate goal is to collect every licensed Nintendo game.

This game translated sorta well from the arcade version. About as well as Double Dragon translated to the NES. But I have this facinating obsession with videogame box art and Renegade for Nintendo is an interesting gem. In the actual game you look like a greaser taking on other greasers- sorta like a a deleted scene from the movie Grease. But this box art depicts a calamity that the game just doesn’t deliver.

For starters it says something like “the subway is no place to be at 2:00am”, well duh, why state the obvious? And I’m assuming the punk in white is supposed to be you, the hero. This guy is clearly a loser. At least the other thugs have weapons. They could have at least have penciled in a knife or a gun! What kind of badass picks fights in a subway at 2am but carries no weapon?

Also the title makes no sense. Isn’t a renegade like a rebel? Someone who fights “the establishment”? Is he rebelling against a street gang? Or is he rebelling against society by disturbing the peace?

One last thing that disturbs me is that huge drop off to where the subway tracks are. Someone should post a “watch your step” sign… or something.

There was an old TV show called Renegade with Lorenzo Llamas (which someone compares Billy Mitchell to in the documentary Chasing Ghosts) but this clown on the cover is certainly no Lorenzo.

I know I know… you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but in the case of Renegade for Nintendo, it’s too damn fun!