Has video game label art gotten better or worse?

[garrett123]

early atari 2600 cartridge labels had basic pictures of tanks, and mines.
some older games label artwork made a game seem better than it was.
does the sonic and knuckles logo look better than a modern first person shooter scene label on the cd container. is video game labels art, if so, are modern day computerized artwork not better? did they put more time into the drawing of the older link or the newer link on the cover art.

do newer game/older game artwork jump out at you more or less?

[BurningDoom]

I like the hand-drawn box-art of the 8-bit and 16-bit days. But that's probably because I'm a longtime comic book fan, so it's gonna appeal to me more. The downside though, is that it doesn't accurately reflect the actual game, and as a youngin I was bamboozled by awesome artwork with a crappy game inside more than once. Conan on NES is the biggest culprit of that, for me.

[Crabmaster2000]

I prefer the over the top exagerations of games on the older packagin compared to the stuff nowadays that is more represtative of whats in the actual game.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Not necessarily better or worse. New covers are tend to show the gameplay or at least what the game looks like, while older games had to be more imaginative. Either a 3D model or anime art if it's Japanese.

On older games, we got more comic book style art or art that never would've made it in game. Sparser graphics and sound also leave more to imagination, which gives the artwork a much larger role in contextualizing the game world. That's probably why I like 90s CRPGs more than modern ones.

So, I guess game art has gotten less important, even if it hasn't dropped in quality.

On the other hand, I sure would like to see art like this on a beautiful PS3 case:


Hey. Maybe there should be a "Best old school game covers" thread.

[TEKTORO]

I cant think of too many covers around today that I like,I do love Deadly Premonitions and from 8bit days covers were great!
I bought Deadly Towers cause of this,now we're married..For better or Worse,till death do us part.

[AznKhmerBoi]

On the fence on this one, but modern game have more of a movie-ish like feel to their art. Feels like your buying a movie rather than a game.

Now


Then



Then again it varies on games for current gens, some looks great while some just are blah!

This is an example of a decent to good artwork for a modern game

[Xeogred]

Definitely worse to me. This applies to movies and just about everything out there too.

[AppleQueso]

On the other hand, I suppose the days of stuff like the US cover for Ico are behind us.

[isiolia]

The majority of covers/art from any generation is going to be uninspired at best, with only a relative few really standing out.

That said, personally, I think the average quality these days - for games - is higher than a lot of previous generations. 16-bit and earlier tended to need to abstract things, so the paintings/etc that they came up with could be great.

When 3D graphics became more prevalent, however, a lot of games (at least in the U.S.) started using CGI for cover art. It took a good long while for that to not look fairly terrible in most cases. We're at the point now, however, when competent CGI can make a nice cover, certainly different from a painted one, but not as glaringly bad as before. Compare, for example, the not-particularly-great Soul Calibur covers to ones from the Toshinden series. You're still not reaching artistic excellence, but at least they don't look like someone's 13 year old nephew did them.

[BoneSnapDeez]

It's a mixed bag.

Back in the 80s/90s a lot of distinctly Japanese (or anime) artwork was changed for Western releases. Sometimes we'd end up with artwork that was even cooler than the Japanese release (Contra, Ys Book I & II) but most of the time we'd end up with complete disasters (Cosmic Fantasy 2, The Krion Conquest). I guess some could argue that a lot of the classic "bad" artwork is actually hilarious and should actually fall somewhere in the "so bad it's good" category, Shatterhand would be a perfect example of this.

The two Lunar games for Sega CD were the first two I can recall without westernized artwork, though I'm sure there are others that predate those.

Western artwork was really cool back in the DOS/Amiga days. I think we had a thread awhile ago about that. Games like Shadow of the Beast looked awesome.

I'd say I like most of the covers of modern games I've bought recently. I find that if I like the covers I generally like the graphics in the game (Radiant Historia), the same goes for the opposite (Mass Effect 2). I like anime and hand-drawn artwork and graphics, I strongly dislike CGI/uncanny valley type stuff. No surprises there.