Marc Ericksen was raking in the big bucks designing killer art for classic video game boxes back when most of us were in diapers. Our digital underground arose and fell, him at one end of the software ecosystem and us at the other end, and I gather that his game illustration run was near its end in 2003, when he drew this art for an ad for the Lucasfilm PS2 game
RTX Red Rock in Gamepro magazine issue #176. As demonstrated in
the secret package he mailed me three weeks ago, when the magazine finally ran the art, it was obscured behind a writhing mass of red squiggles, using a technique much used in software copy protection of the era (eg. in Loom), the underlying content revealed only when viewed through a(n attached) red cellphane transparency representing the bionic eye of the game’s protagonist.
Which is, huh, there’s a lot going on there. But the high and low is that no one out in the public has ever had a chance to get a good look at the underlying art before, and here – due to my onetime Quixotic quest getting box artists properly credited on Mobygames – in MIST1016, the veil was lifted and they finally had a chance to appreciate how it looked before the squiggles were applied.
Instagram video by Cthulu • Nov 2, 2016 at 10:03pm UTC
No comments:
Post a Comment