![]() ![]() We put 100% of our budget into the game, and had fuckall left over for the box art - deal with it. This game will blow your socks off, and tear you a new one. Unlike so many other video game companies that dressed up their low-quality on-screen graphics with a fanciful, professionally done painting, here was Capcom saying, in essence: “Look, we don’t care what you think about the cover. Like Princess Leia said to Han Solo: “You came in that thing? You’re even braver than I thought!” ![]() To me, it signified Capcom’s confidence in what was inside the box, that they were willing to use such a bad drawing for the cover art. But over time, I grew to love the terrible box art. I didn’t find out the true story until many years later. And daddy was so proud of what his little boy had done, he couldn’t not put it on the cover. Maybe it was just one of the guys who worked on the game had a young kid who drew it as a picture of what daddy does at work all day. But how could there be fan art for something brand new that hadn’t been seen by any fans yet? Could it have been a reissue done as some sort of contest for the fans? And that’s what I actually thought it was, for a long time. It looked like a crude piece of fan art drawn by a small child. It didn’t make good business sense - I’m sure the poor cover art must have hurt sales. I didn’t understand why Capcom would have chose this art, this art style. ![]() I didn’t expect it to be quite as good, but if it was only half as good as Mega Man 2, it would still be worth the money. I looked at the box art, and thought it looked awful, but I didn’t let that dissuade me from paying for it, because I knew how awesome MM2 was. I found a copy at my local Toys R Us a few weeks later, and bought it. It was incredible: great music, huge graphics, challenging and fun.īeing a sequel, I also sought out the original. It was definitely my favorite game after I played through it. I read the full-length review in Nintendo Power magazine, and immediately knew that this was a game to buy. Mega Man 2 is one of the best games ever released on the NES, and was an absolute blockbuster when it came out. The original didn’t sell very well in the States (I wonder why?) and the sequel only got produced because the developers believed in it so much that they snuck it into their spare time, working on it when they could, without formal approval from their bosses. I didn’t hear about Mega Man until after Mega Man 2 came out, in 1988. Today, it’s remembered and talked about far more than the cover art for any other game. And that’s exactly the right attitude to have about it. The people at Capcom must have a good sense of humor about the whole thing, because over the years they’ve embraced “bad box art Mega Man” and paid homage to it numerous times. But none of that excuses the apparent lack of artistic skill displayed by the guy who whipped out the colored pencils and drew this proportionless, perspective-free monstrosity. The story goes, Capcom US rushed a replacement, giving the artist assigned to do the work like a day to turn it around, and the artist had never seen the actual game, and only had a vague idea of what it was about. ![]() But, looking to appeal to 12-16 year old American boys, Capcom USA probably wanted something with more muscle and scowl. Even if the art style looks like it would appeal more to very young children, I’m not sure that it would have turned off older children. Now, there’s really nothing at all wrong with the Japanese artwork, and as it turns out, American kids love Japanese cartoons. How can we sell it to American children?!”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |