/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2673303 >>2673585

It's not a screenshot; if the trail lines weren't enough of a clue, there's the fact that back then there was neither such thing as a native "screenshot" (you'd have to actually take a "shot" of a screen with a camera -and probably a macro lens-, and that wouldn't result in this kind of cleanly delimited square pixels), nor was there any widely used Neanderthal Photoshop software you could use to enlarge it through Nearest-neighbor interpolation into a "high resolution retro pixel art background pls upvote".

The covers in those early NES boxes were motherfucking paper collages. Look at this detail, you can see slightly beveled paper edges catching the light and some fibers from the bits where the cuts weren't clean enough. Somebody received the commission from Nintendo of America (these were probably done by an staff designer, though), played the game, paused around to copy sprites and tiles into graph paper, planned the final illustration, and spent hours cuting the exact pieces of paper needed and precisely pasting them together (again, with actual paste). Of course there was no need to reproduce the actual behavior of the game's visuals. The idea was to show Mario and the fireball, and add a background. But why that particular bit of background? It's intentional; Mario is fucking dying in the cover; Whatever the original designer of the game has to say about the matter is meaningless: whoever employed a day of his or her life to pull this off and actually got it accepted has earned the right for this to be so.