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.

Jim Power PC Engine CD cover (1993) 🔗

Now, the original Amiga box art of Loriciel's Euro platformer has its own history of 'inspirations', but when Jim Power was brought to Japan for the PC Engine CD, it got a brand new cover image – which was once again cobbled together from other media. The hero is represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger from the poster for Raw Deal, whereas president's daughter he's tasked to rescue in the game is Lesa Ann Pedriana ripped straight from a Playboy photoshoot (which Loriciel had sourced for a cover before). There's two things I'd like to know about this cover: First, why did the artist feel the need to change up the positioning of both character's arms, quite weirdly in Schwarzenegger's case. Second, did they like the little rocket man in the background (scraped from a book cover painted by Peter Elson) so much that they chose him as the only element retained from the Amiga cover?