Tracing the Influence: Retraced Edition
Tag: Fantasy illustrations
Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan cover (1990) 🔗
Crusaders of Khazan was not only the sole CRPG adaption of the Tunnels & Trolls role-playing game in it's time, but also a rare collaboration between US-based New World Computing and the Japanese CRPG publisher StarCraft. The cover was painted by Akira Komeda, who in his early career seems to have had a bit of a tendency to get overly inspired by famous artists. The cover for Crusaders of Khazan is a proper who's who of fantasy illustrators: A dwarf by Clyde Caldwell, a warrior by Michael Whelan, a kneeling rogue by Frank Frazetta (admittedly this one might come partially or wholly from another source), and I'm sure in time something will turn up for the wizard as well as the towering sorceress they're all facing.
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress cover (1982) 🔗
Ultima is one of the foundational works of fantasy CRPG history, so no wonder its production was inspired by two of the giants of fantasy illustration at the time. The demon's torso and parts of his pose come from a Frazetta paintign aptly titled Swamp Demon (sorry about the rough cutout for the comparison - it kind of blends in with the shadows, so it's hard to tell where the monster ends and the background begins), whereas the adventurer is teleporting in from Boris Vallejo's futiristic Behind the Walls of Terror. Ironically, it wouldn't be long before Origin System found themselves at the other end of such a "transaction" - and reportedly weren't amused.
Castlevania cover (1986) 🔗
Frank Frazetta's The Norseman is one of the most frequently copied influences among games illustrators, and his appearance on the original Castlevania cover is already fairly well known. There's a few changes to his gait and left arm, and of course Simon Belmont is holding a very different weapon, but the influence is unmistakable. What's not talked about often (yet) is that Dracula's floating head apparently also taps another secret text of video game artists, namely John Buscema's How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, although it seems to be an amalgam of different images. While the grin and overall head shape comes from that grinning dude, the dark lord's hairline and ears more closely resemble Namor, who's sketched in the same book a couple pages earlier.
