NBSEEs

The 16 bit era was fantastic for box art, console and otherwise. The Genesis/Mega Drive had its fair share of this, despite Sega’s attempts to completely ruin the look of their packaging (transition to card boxes, the god awful red framing).

I wanted to post an article about one artist in particular, Boris Vallejo. Boris did ten covers for Genesis games, while having a pretty straightforward ero-fantasy style popularized from the late 80’s, he did some pretty atypical ones. My favourite feature of his work is a complete disregard for human anatomy. Five of the covers graced the sturdy boxes of Ballistic/Accolade releases, all in 1991.

Wings Of War (Gynoug in Japan and Europe) – 1991

His artwork only appeared on Wings Of War itself, this piece is called “Bug Eyes”

Golden Axe II – 1991

The artwork itself has a title of “Journey”

Turrican - 1991

This also made it’s way onto the Game Boy & TG-16 ports, I guess because they were all released in the same year.

FUN FACT : The game that would have been Turrican II on the Genesis was reskinned and released as Universal Soldier; you can thank JCVD for that.

Onslaught – 1991
Mike Ditka Power Football – 1991
Hardball – 1991

I’m pretty sure he had a scrapped piece of fantasy art with a dude holding a massive sword and simply painted over it. HOME RUNS REQUIRES MASSIVE, VEINY ARMS!

Star Control – 1991

His most famous cover among fans. There are a bunch of conspiracies around this piece of art surrounding L Ron Hubbard (See “The Invaders Plan”). It’s all bullshit. It was a simple reworking of the original PC artwork. This piece is called “Star Control” – woah.

Phantasy Star IV – 1993

Sadly, this one came about during the HEY THIS IS A GENESIS GAME red box era and suffered some cropping and recolouring. The original is called “Blackstar”

…and now for the reason I felt compelled to write this post

…ready?

Ecco The Dolphin – 1992

With heavy ass cropping

Ecco: The Tides of Time - 1994