Tracing the Influence: Retraced Edition
Tag: Fantasy illustrations
Moulin Rouge Senki: Melville no Honō (1992) 🔗

I don't know the name of the artist who painted the cover for this Japan only Famicom strategy game, but I know for a fact that they're Boris Vallejo's biggest fan on earth. Somehow they managed to fit bits and pieces from no less than nine of the master's paintings on the box. (Well, they're a bit cropped on there, actually, but luckily Famitsu printed the full image in their coverage of the game.) From popular pieces such as The Eternal Warrior to obscure erotica like the Snake Women and Vallejo's dreamy painting of a demonic hookah, it has just about everything. I feel the central woman character's hair (and possibly facial features) might have some other source, and maybe the castle...?










Prince of Persia Sega Genesis version cutscenes (1993) 🔗





After Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia made waves on the already outdated Apple II, it got ported to a lot of different platforms over several years. When it finally made its way to the Sega Genesis, the graphics were updated quite a bit, adding new full screen art for the intro and ending sequences. The artist must have liked Boris Vallejo quite a bit, cause practically all the scenes originate in the master's paintings. My favorite of them all has got to be the ending where the hero finally gets to embrace he princess, but in the original he was a fearsome winged demon.
These sources have been discovered by barbarus from the Hardcore Gaming 101 forums.





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.



