LAZY SUNDAY
The Fine Art of Game Covers
By Jamie Love - March 22nd, 2009
Admittedly, I am a wordy bastard. So it’s never hard for me to write endlessly on nearly any subject regardless of how ignorant about it I may be. I find the real challenge is in deciding what is or isn’t worth writing about. It’s a hard question, and one that was once the challenge of journalism – forced to make a decision about the importance of information because of the limited space available for those old methods of delivery. But today there is no end to news, and every piece of information is seen as relevant one way or another. So maybe I’m stressing over nothing.
EA recently showed off their fancy new cover art for the upcoming Pandemic title, The Saboteur. And I have to admit that it is probably one of the best I’ve seen in awhile. I’m not the first to suggest that game covers are generally terrible and unimaginative eye sores that meld into one hideous retina repulsing lump on the store shelf, and I won’t be the last. Since EA has contributed to this problem with some merriment over the years, it seems reasonable that they were about due for something worth praising. But I don’t really feel that I have anything relevant to add to this conversation, and so I was very unenthusiastic when asked to spin together an article about it. Ultimately there were two factors that changed my mind. The first, and most important, was that no one had signed my cheque yet this week. The second was that I came across another post, which claimed to list the forty best game covers of all time. That’s a pretty significant claim. But giving the list a once over, it seems to have been largely assembled by someone who went as far as the nearest GameStop and glanced around at the walls for twenty minutes.
So with that in mind, I figure I can put about as much effort into this by walking over to my own shelves to see what catches my eye today. Enticed? Read on!
