Legends of the games industry: Roger Dean(spillhistorie.no)

130 ポイント投稿者 thelok9 か月前26 コメント

Legends of the games industry: Roger Dean

https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/03/legends-of-the-games-industry-roger-dean/

27 コメント

I've always loved Dean. He was one of my biggest inspirations, in my own artwork[0].

I remember playing a game called ZPC, for Mac, that was illustrated by Brute![1] (A few old thrashers may remember his work).

It's not unusual for artists that are successful in one area, to try expanding to others.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aidan_Hughes

alexjplant9 か月前

> I remember playing a game called ZPC, for Mac, that was illustrated by Brute![1] (A few old thrashers may remember his work).

I'd love for Aleph One (the OSS Marathon engine implementation) to support ZPC so that I can give it a try. By all accounts it was a bit of a letdown but it seems like a real visual trip based on the playthroughs I've seen on YouTube.

ChrisMarshallNY9 か月前

I enjoyed it.

The game was mediocre, but it was very ... Brute! ...

epiccoleman9 か月前

Your art is awesome! I can definitely see the influence from Dean.

ChrisMarshallNY9 か月前

Thanks!

That was quite a while ago (I think the most recent one is from 1989).

Lerc9 か月前

I never even thought about the possibility that the t-shirt inside the box might not be my size. I was probably in my late teens, just left home at the time, such considerations were life-knowledge yet to be learned.

The T-Shirt was just the right size. I suspect the standard deviation for late-80's early-90's teen geek body type was smaller than one might expect today.

johnea9 か月前

I loved this Sci Fi artwork ever since high school in the '70s.

I didn't know it from video games, but from the albums by the band Yes.

Especially Yes - Relayer. Spectacular futuristic images.

This inspired me to purchase the book, Views. This really expanded my understanding of his work. I especially loved his concepts of organic living spaces.

I had always wondered what happened to him, and I guess the answer is that he started working on video game art.

I've never seen any of that, but I wonder how well animation serves his orginal art. Especially in low resolution early games.

scns9 か月前

Got in contact with his art through Yes too. Fragile, Close To The Edge and Relayer. Their best albums IMHO.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ogdCG3tAWiL8m1GcsVL...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ktk8PtkXO8Gdsh...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mB2Z4c14a1jFhh...

[edit] Roundabout has an absurdly high number of views, totally deserved though

ndriscoll9 か月前

The absolutely insane thing about Yes is that (IMO) their best albums/best versions of their songs are the live ones, consistently. Something like the Yesshows version Gates of Delirium[0] with headphones can teleport you off completely into another universe until 15 minutes in where there's a lull and the crowd starts cheering and you remember this was a live recording, wtf. Yesshows and Yessongs are both mind-bending. Dean's artwork was perfect for Yes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPghboSkX6s&list=OLAK5uy_klz...

andrewgleave9 か月前

For any stamp collectors here, the Isle of Man Post Office [1] has just issued an official set of 6 Roger Dean and Rick Wakeman stamps [2]:

[1] https://iomstamps.com/collections/wakeman [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyqe679gqno

doublerabbit9 か月前

As my parents jokingly said to me, you buy vinyl records for the artwork not for the music.

Of course the music if you enjoy the band but the artwork is the centre piece. Some of the artwork is just magnificent.

Like pinball machine art. I love pinball machines just for the artwork.

hagbard_c9 か月前

A yes, Dean. I got to know his work through the Yes album covers he made, bought a book with his artwork and proceeded to copy the 'fallen planet shard sticking up through the clouds' on a large wall in my student room back in the 90's. I quite like the result, made with normal house paints, I do have a photo of it somewhere I think - back then making photos was a bit of a luxury, especially for a poor student. I wonder what the next person to occupy that room - above an old horse butcher's shop turned health-food place - did, probably painted or papered it over.

milchek9 か月前

Wow, didn’t realise he created band artwork and the Tetris logo as well! I remember seeing a lot of his artwork back in the C64 days as a kid and that style always struck me - this was of course the era where the cover artwork was far superior to the game graphics. I think Psygnosis did some PC and PS1 games later as well? My memory is a bit hazier there.

spankibalt9 か月前

> I think Psygnosis did some PC and PS1 games later as well?

Famous for the Wipeout and Colony Wars series. And of course G-Police. Which should've been a movie but was two games.

CaptainOfCoit9 か月前

As someone born and raised playing demo discs on my dads PS1 growing up, feels like half the popular games in the 90s were made or published by Psygnosis. Destruction Derby was probably my favorite one, together with The Adventures of Lomax. Wipeout coming close 3rd, mainly because of the out-of-this-world soundtrack.

WorldMaker9 か月前

Psygnosis' PS1 output relates to how Psygnosis ended. (Swallowed by Sony; what's left of their publishing house/dev studio survives under the much more droll corporate name today of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios: Studio Liverpool.)

hn_acc19 か月前

Ah, Barbarian.. That was like the holy grail of the Atari ST scene back in the day.. TWO floppies, not just one! And it took a couple of hours each to download at 2400 baud.. (my family hated picking up the phone and hearing the modem screeches)...

I've definitely seen and played multiple of his games. Wow, trip through memory lane..

emmelaich9 か月前

I was thought Barbarian was Vallejo. I was probably thinking of Barbarella!

https://posteritati.com/artist/602/boris-vallejo

zabzonk9 か月前

> Ah, Barbarian

game was almost impossibly difficult, imho. did look good, though.

blueberry_479 か月前

YEARS ago some of his paintings were on display somewhere in San Francisco -- Red Dragon and Blue Desert (ABWH) and maybe Relayer. So great to see up close and in person.

[deleted]9 か月前

nickdothutton9 か月前

Went to visit their offices once in the early 90s, felt like I was somehow visiting the future. We still haven't got there yet.

renewiltord9 か月前

Haha I remember that logo from the Destruction Derby series. Great fun. My brother and I played hours out of that one.

xbar9 か月前

I still want to play the games whose graphics are as lovely as what is shown in Roger Dean's box art.

egypturnash9 か月前

The 2016 remake of Shadow of the Beast did a great job of looking like the original's box art. It was more fun to play than the original, though that's really not saying much.

teddyh9 か月前

I always thought that the cover image for Terrorpods was stupid – it’s obvious that the image was made as an illustration of one of the final scenes of The War of the Worlds, and that someone just saw the image and made a game based on the image in order to have a cool image on the packaging; i.e. blatant shovelware tactics. (The game bears no similarity to The War of the Worlds.)

gizajob9 か月前

I totally get what you’re saying. That whole 8-but era leaned on such fantastical and detailed box art to kind of fill in the mental blanks between the world you were in and the handful of boxy pixels that actually represented the characters and sprites.