Amazing Artwork: Guardian Legend

A new little segment I thought is one that covers any artwork that I think should be recognized for being amazing in a good way or amazing in a bad way. On the first one I'm starting off on an outstanding one. Nowadays, most cover arts look the same or similar because now games already have the real life graphics or stories to be able to sell you on the game. Back than, because they knew games were still limited with what could be displayed for graphics, (and there was also no internet yet so news of good or bad games couldn't spread around nearly as quick as it does today) publishers and developers often would employ artists to create some artwork to promote the game. The artwork often didn't depict exactly how the game worked or played, or how characters might have looked, but it was done to sell people on the game. And in a sort of retrospective side effect, they also made some classic cover arts that to this day still are never topped. Often artists were given screenshots or footage of gameplay, or told how the game plays by the developers. They would base their artworks off these tidbits. Some turned out great, and became classic and even iconic covers such as Doom and Castlevania, and some turned out abysmally like the original Mega Man NES cover. 

Above is the artwork for the 1988 Japanese release of The Guardian Legend, a classic NES/Famicom title by Compile that blended overhead adventure action exploration (similar to the original Zelda) with vertical scrolling shooter stages. In the game, you play as the Guardian, a female cyborg with wings who can transform into a ship for the shooter stages. Your goal of the game is to infiltrate Naju, an alien world headed straight toward Earth and deactivate it's self destruct program before it destroys the planet. The game was ambitious for the time, blending multiple genres together successfully and smoothly. It was a sleeper hit, but over time has attained a cult following and is considering one of the most successful games at combining multiple genres, especially back then. 

The art is short of fantastic. The artist, Naoyuki Kato, took inspiration from H.R. Giger's theme of mixing cold, technological steel with living organisms, an image that goes great with Guardian's title character. I like how detailed everything is and how it slowly morphs down to what might create a whole technological/biological being. 

The game actually got different cover art for each region it was released in. Europe got the 2nd best one, with a similar cyborg women in space. This cover is probably the most accurate because this looks much closer to how the Guardian actually appears in game. Still not bad art by any means.

And finally, the North American version. And wow, we really got the short end of the stick here....

It's pretty much a pair of reptilian looking eyes, with a what look like some sort snake or something in between, looking out over a landscape. That's about it. It would be hard to look at this cover and think that the game inside is about a controlling a cyborg who can turn into a ship. They should have kept the European art and it would have been much better. Again, it's much more representative of what's in the game.