I'm not sure what caused all this to become a proper "thing," but I would like to officially give the Double-Quadruple Thumbs-Ups Seal of Approval to the trend of fan-made art that reinterprets video games as though they were paperback books from the 1960s. As far as I can tell, it started with this fellow Olly Moss, who posted a set of images on Flickr entitled Videogame Classics that he adroitly sums up as “Video games vs Penguin Classics.” There's something about the marriage of abstract design and clever symbolism that just makes my toes tingle.
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Then the Photoshop-savvy goons over at Something Awful got a hold of the concept and really ran with it. What their efforts lack in the focused design style of Mr. Moss, they more than make up for in sheer volume. There's so goddamn many of them that I'm not going to try and post them all here, so here's my favorites. You can go check out this thread to see the rest.
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Perhaps even more delightfully, this hasn't remained limited to video games, and somewhere along the way the fellow who runs Spacesick decided to give some classic movies the same treatment. They're not video-game related, but I think I actually like these designs best, partially because of the incredibly convincing wear-and-tear that these imaginary books have gone through. I would be fully unsurprised to fish any of these out of a cardboard box with "25 CENTS" Sharpied on the side at a garage sale.
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As much as I absolutely adore the whole retro styling of this stuff, it's a little bittersweet knowing that video-game packaging has to swing for the lowest common denominator, and no one would ever have the balls to actually package their games like this.
