Sci-Fi-O-Rama

Tim White’s another UK Sci-Fi Artist most prominent in the 70’s & 80’s. This painting of a long limbed robotic insect was also used as cover art by Software House Psygnosis for their 16 bit Game “Infestation”.

Cover art for the ZX Spectrum Version of “The Hobbit” 1983.

The Hobbit was an text adventure game for 8-bit computers like the C64 and the Speccy, it’s considered a bit of a classic, what’s interesting is the ZX Spectrum branding - 48K of RAM! The game itself featured some very early pixel art, crude but atmospheric and remember the speccy only had a palette of 7 colours!

Read more about the game at Mobygame.com http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/hobbit

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.

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.

Even More Game Box art Box with a Sci-Fi Theme, again from the golden age of 16-bit Computer gaming, a time of more original, intelligent and visionary game concepts etc, etc. Anyway Interphase was a first person and top down Action/Puzzle game that played a bit like a prototype “Descent” if anyones familiar with that… The cyberpunk themed plot is based around jacking into a large corporation (The Dreamtrack Corporation) and doing the rounds and - as you do with games - putting a stop to there evil world domination plans.

Read more about it over at the excellent mobygames.com site click here.