Favorite game covers

[CardinalXimenez]

Looking over the search results for my daily eBay saved search of retro games made me swoon over seeing some of my favorite game covers, so I thought I´d share some of them with you, and ask you what are your favorite game covers of yesterday and today? For me, it´s a matter of art, or the mood of the cover, or its nostalgic value. Let´s start with a series of covers that are an inseparable part of my childhood and life as a gamer:

As a child, part of the fascination with videogames was their promise of new and exciting worlds to explore, videogames were like a doorway into another dimension, and the cover for the first Super Mario Bros was the essence of that, with the image of Mario and cast in the Mushroom Kingdom. The next three SMB games also have some of my favorite covers, but for nostalgic reasons.

[CardinalXimenez]

You yanks may know this game series as Contra, but in Europe, the games were considered too violent, so the main characters got replaced by robots, and the games were renamed to Probotector. The cover for the first game struck a chord with my love of Transformers-style mechas.

I still remember the first time I viewed the cover for the Super NES sequel, it was a full page ad in a British Nintendo mag, and I´ve wanted ever since to have that cover as a poster, its a case of part nostalgia and part love of TF-style mechas.

While looking for the Probotector covers, I also came across this old Contra ad, I couldn´t help but laugh at the 80esness of it, and wonder just when did videogame companies start using sex to promote their games?

Another early example, and a lovely cover in itself, is this cover for the Commodore 64 version of the old platformer Athena, which has to be one of the first games to have had a female lead.

When it comes to sheer "wow" factor, this NES cover never fails to thrill me:

I can probably think of more covers, but these will do for now.

[Areala]

I'm not sure exactly when the first ad using sexuality to promote a video game made its debut.

I can tell you the first link between sex and arcade games comes from a 1980 vector graphics space shooter called "Star Castle". The star background displayed is the outline of a centerfold from an issue of OUI magazine.

Does looking at this screenshot make you horny?

*huggles*

Areala

[Britanica]

I honestly couldn't choose one but I have always loved the Donkey Kong covers

[Diamond]

I always loved all the Mario ones. I can't pick just one. Thought I know it is a bit cheesy, I did like the Yoshi's island one quite a bit.