Over at our favorite mainstream gaming news site, 1UP, Kurt Kalata has put up just an excellent history of video game cover art, from the bizarre imaginings of early cover artists attempting to extrapolate a four-pixel sprite into an incredibly detailed painting to the modern disparity between American, European and Japanese cover designs.

I have to admit, I really love those old covers. You can just imagine some random cover artist just pouring the booze down his throat as he tries to do the impossible: take all of Pac-Man's abstraction and trying to sum it up in a picture that tells some kind of story. "Okay, so there's this floating yellow pizza, and he has to eat dots and fruits, and he runs around a maze, and ghosts chase him! Wait! I got it! What if he's a deformed, buck-toothed jogger, the dots are hamburgers, and ghosts are chasing him around a castle? That makes sense, right?" Well, I'm sure it does when you've got a 9am deadline and you're on your third bottle of scotch. Florian Eckhardt

Judging A Game By Its Cover [1Up]