Tracing the Influence: Retraced Edition
Imagine you're a video game producer in the late 1980s, a week before the deadline and you still haven't got a cover for your game. Desperate and exhausted from weeks of crunch, you tell your underpaid contract illustrator to just rip off some Schwarzenegger action movie to get the job done. Turns out the artist took the order a bit too literally and delivered an all too obvious copy, but you need that cover right now so you run with it anyway.
In such or similar fashion, many vintage games have taken images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games as sometimes more than just inspiration or homage. The subjects of this article aren't simply similar designs or characters (or else we'd never quit counting the games influenced by Nausicaä, Hokuto no Ken, or Alien), but very specific images that might have been either literally traced, digitized or just used as a very obvious reference for promotional or in-game artwork.
Special thanks go to Tatsujin from the old Assemblergames.com forums for the original inspiration to look for and catalog these images, as well as to Kurt Kalata of Hardcore Gaming 101 for hosting the original incarnation of this gallery, first posted in 2012. This Retraced Edition is slowly being rebuilt, comparison-by-comparison, with many improvements, additional features, and new discoveries. For updates on the latest additions, follow me on Bluesky. (That's also where you can tell me if you think I made a mistake, or found an even better match for a covered piece of artwork.)
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Jim Power Amiga cover (1992) 🔗

Sure was a choice from Loriciel to take a tough martial arts movie star like Jean-Claude Van Damme and stick him in the game protagonist's super dorky outfit. The game isn't even horror themed, but they complemented that with the body horror image of one of the thugs from Robocop grossly melting away after getting doused with toxic chemicals. The rocket powered guy to the upper right is from yet another kind of source, a painting by sci fi illustrator Peter Elson, apparently originally commissioned for Harry Harrison's short story collection Prime Number (but also published on a variety of other books). This is incidentally also the only element this cover has in common with the otherwise very different PC Engine version. I'm sure all the other elements on here are also adaptions, but this is what we know so far.
The Peter Elson connection was discovered by 'just hangin around' (that's the screen name) on Bluesky.



