Tag: Home video game consoles

I'm not sure if today's generation realise the wonder of arcade and home console/computer game art, travelling into a world of Chris Foss and pulp sci-fi covers crossed with D&D fantasy, cutesy pop art and plain Robert Crumb psychedelic strangeness. The thrill of seeing new worlds, and being able to travel to them on your computer or local arcade. There's a new book called The Art of Atari released later this year - WANT! I've always loved these illustrations since I used to look at the adverts in the early computer press - PC World, Your Sinclair, ACE, Sinclair User, etc...and on the few games I had for my Sharp MZ80K and Memotech 512, my friends had for ZX81 and later on Spectrum ZX. But usually the classic arcade and console images usually trumped most of those, I guess before the crash of 1983 they had a LOT money to spend on artists: What isn't mentioned in the nostalgic warm fluffy press for this book is how disappointing some of these could be, the misleading distance between the amazing images of dragons, heroes, spaceships and the sad unidentifiable pixellated speck on the screen. There was a general rule during those times: the more impressive and expensive the artwork was, the shitter the game usually was. You were hoping for Hard Drivin' or Space Harrier - hell even Pole Position or Carnival would do: what you got was more Cassette 50 or Advanced Lawnmower Simulator. Sometimes it was just plain odd and bore little or no relation to whatever was in the game. Take Tempest, one of my Favourite Games Of All Time and one of the Atari golden age games. You go down a tunnel and shoot things - this is what it looks like: So of course, Atari advertised it like this: And obviously a lot of padding went on - in a master stroke of stretching a superthin story so far it probably fell into a black hole AND came out again, Super Breakout (pictured above) incredibly has a back story AND a record to explain it. I think I prefer 'Buzz Aldrin Space Rainbow Tennis', it makes more sense! BTW, I think I knew about this, but I (re)found it by accident. Try Googling 'Atari Breakout' in Google Images... (Book info via Ian Fondue)