An ill-fitting helmet and a rocket in need of some serious panel beating, I’m guessing this is 60′s Sci-Fi though it might be 50′s – generally I’m not a fan of this far back, but this struck a chord..
I know nothing about the image or artist other than than I a came across it on this French site http://www.noosfere.com/ – not sure if this is French, but just like to say no-one does Sci-Fi quite like the French – Anyway it’s ended up here.
Retro Game box art from 1982 this time. According to mobygames.com “Andromeda Conquest” was A Galactic Empire building strategy / conquest game for the Apple II and similar early 80′s computing behemoths, interestingly due to it’s age the game package included a pad of graph paper for keeping track of ship and colony locations – so pretty much not like World of Warcraft.
Amazingly intricate fantasy illustration by Russ Nicholson, somewhat reminiscent of Art Nouveau and specifically Aubrey Beardsley but swap his mythological erotica for Russ’s orks, elfs and what have you… Anyway I’m not a huge fan of fantasy stuff these days, although I will admit to owning several of the 80′s Fighting Fantasy books (good toilet reading material) from which this illustration was taken.
Russ Nicholson Illustrated a number of Fighting Fantasy Books right through the series (82-95?) and he also produced work for other Dungeons and Dragons / RPG work from that era. I’ve always thought his work is excellent and certainly formed part of my early inspiration to learning to draw….
** Addendum: 3rd March 2009
If anyone wishes to contact Russ please email me: kiekelly [at] gmail.com
Roger Dean’s most famous for his otherworldly album sleeves for 70′s Prog Rockers YES, in the 80′s and early 90′s he also produced a number of of pieces of Cover Art for scouse Software House Psygnosis (mentioned elsewhere in this Blog). “Shadow of the Beast” was one of their most popular releases and featured – for the time – pretty slick graphics, including a lavishly animated main character and parallax scrolling. The gameplay wasn’t all that, it did however have a wicked atmospheric score from computer game music innovator David Whittaker.
Some of the Game Boxes came with a free T Shirt, now highly sort after, and boxes featuring the tshirt show up on ebay selling for north of £50 / $100. As a sucker for geek but knowingly cool rubbish I would pay that, but I’m betting its a shit fruit-of-the-loom job.
OMNI was both a science magazine and science fiction magazine. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction, and ran from 1978 till 1995, read more about it at Wikipedia. As you might expect for a Science fiction Magazine it features some pretty unusual covers such as the above issue, the art here produced by Austrian artist Wolfgang Hutter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Hutter