Another offering from the imagination of Adam Campbell of Hot Meteor - Lost: The Game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The pixelated Jack Shepard evokes the best that NES box art had to offer – the “Black Box” series. These covers were reserved for titles stamped with the Nintendo Seal of Approval, making them the Criterion Collection of 8-bit gaming. Unlike many other NES box designs beguiled with illusory oil paintings of muscular ninjas or smooth, byzantine spirals, the Black Box cover art brandished the blocky nature of the gameplay with conviction.
I like to imagine Lost: The Game as a sandbox platform like Dragon Warrior. The hero can move freely over a scrolling map to explore hatches, dodge wild boar, evade the Black Smoke, and recharge lost energy with Periodic Resupply crates. You lose a life when:
- Ben Linus stabs you in the neck with a pen. A little digitized pen.
- Kate gives you a meaningful glance which in turn leads your smarter, more blonde girlfriend to throw herself down a well. (Your agonized cries are all the more maddening when they come out as 8-bit bleeps.)
- You leave the island. You weren’t supposed to leave!
Others have also used the Black Box design to create the games that never were. This collection from Game Spy reveals what our favorite HD titles might look like had they been released twenty years earlier.
For more temporal displacement of technology, see the long-running Worth 1000 Vintage Ads design contest featuring Jazz Age marketing for Ipods and Roombas!
{ 4 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }