NIDZUMI+

Cover art for a music album or possibly even a DVD is often held in the highest regard. Many covers for albums are preserved as works of art instead of simply trying to sell you a product. From large vinyl art works to smaller Digipak cases, the cover for an album is almost as important as the music it’s self. Meanwhile if you look at art for the front of video games you see a different picture. Normally publishers are just trying to sell you on the product by promoting violence or by showing action shots of everything even if the game is deeper than that. The truth is that if you delve through the masses of discardable covers you can actually find some pretty interesting and great graphic work.

Now obviously if the game is bad it won’t perform well at retail but even globally massive hits can have appealing artwork. For example what is arguably 2008’s best game of the year in Grand Theft Auto 4 has a brilliant shot of a mural that was painted on a wall. Granted it was similar to what we’ve seen from previous Grand Theft covers but it’s now moved from an overly cartoony and almost childish approach to more of a realistic and artistically painted Mural.

Another good example of how the industry is maturing would be within the Burnout covers. Previous games have often featured cars being wrecked and smashed at high speeds while the recent rendition entitled Burnout Paradise boasted a cleaner look. We see a simplified version of the skyline from the game on a slant that has been covered by a stylised vector of a car. The car’s texture is then replaced with a real shot of the skyline from the game and the rest is really just white space except for the logo, rating and publishers logo. It’s interesting to see that the cover was simplified to show a lot of white space and unfortunately this title didn’t sell very well. Possibly due to the simple art work but I highly doubt it. The fact of the matter is that the cover is very well designed and it would have been even nicer to see the car laser cut out with the real screen shot of the game underneath.

Traditionally sports games often feature a few action shots of a famous athlete in that chosen field with a name slapped on front. With EA’s Skate we find a complete change. With some of the more well-recognized faces signed to deals with similar game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Skate goes for a more simplistic approach by featuring a shot of a board with the logo that really captures the sub-culutre of skateboarding. Easily achieved by a simple photoshot combined with a few grunge effects. Grunge is featured throughout various designs within the sport yet it’s grunge but in a clean way. For example most logo’s will be a clean sans serif type but that will often be combined with some clear grunge in a bright colour which comes off as quite refreshing.

Special editions are starting to become a commonplace on store shelves. Now not only limited to the biggest selling productions as even more artistic games such as Bioshock are seeing these alternative sleeves. The game that heavily relies on art deco influences uses such fonts on the back combined with a grungy and rusty pattern on the front. We can see a hole that is embossed with a similarly embossed logo inside. The metal tin it’s kept inside might be everywhere now but it’s how it’s used. For example John Woo’s Stranglehold saw a similar tin edition but any embossing wasn’t limited to a few elements it was just a fat square that had no relation to the art work.

It’s true that we are starting to see limited editions just for the case of making a quick buck. Sometimes you’ll find a few extra promotional items along with the original cover but some games such as Forza Motorsport 2 came in a thick cardboard box. The carbon tuner look was featured all over the box while a slip on plastic sleeve was used to display the information. Another simple but effective way of turning a normal product into something special and most importantly something that people will want to keep.

The previously mentioned Burnout Paradise’s developers are making people hold onto their copies by offering extra levels of content for free. The truth is that great game art printed on brilliant boxes would be another way of making people hold onto their games. People do trade in bad games but more often than not they’ll trade in great games. Now I’m not suggesting that this would put pre-owned aisles out of business but by making something that people can cherish instead of disregard would be a step in the right direction.

It’s true that the industry as a whole is learning about everything it does as it does it. Cover art is no exception as we can see in the recently release Fable 2 cover art. The special edition’s box is featured sideways on the normal amaray case. It’s nothing brilliant but it is interesting and it shows that designers are starting to play around with what you can do within the confines of the manufacturers set limits.

The problem is that first party console manufacturers like to keep some kind of continuity between games on their system. All games must get a standard release in inside the standard box. The back must also feature publishing information along with loads of other useless facts and address’ about the console owner. Up to a third of the back is taken up by this information alone and that doesn’t leave much left for creativity.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if companies like Nintendo and Microsoft opened up their respective continuity issues and just let great art shine through. It’s easy to understand why companies at the moment don’t put that much effort into the cover art as the cost of games is spiralling out of control and it’s all to easy for companies to just knock up something quick for the release. A great casein point would be when a few months back Japanese publisher Capcom re-released Okami for the Nintendo Wii for it to feature a watermark of a screenshot taken from popular games site IGN.com. Nevertheless I truly believe that if games had nicer cover art like the examples above and more creative shapes and designs the pre-order trade would dip. It works with music so I can’t see why it shouldn’t work with the now larger video game industry.