If you were a computer gamer in the West in the '80s, you’re probably familiar with Epyx and their iconic box art. I love a lot of it but I’m also curious what people that didn’t grow up with this stuff think of it.
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I love this stuff. Definitely what the future felt like in the 80s.
I’ve never come across these before. They have a cool aesthetic and certainly better than a lot of the modern rendered cg box art! So these are the games people inside the Encom mainframe play, interesting.
I really only knew about Winter Games on the NES, didnt know they had that same style throughout all their games. Very cool, thanks for sharing!
They gave up on that style around 1986 (aside from ports to consoles) and started doing a mix if more typical handdrawn art and photos of real people for sports games.
Gotcha. Still, this series as a whole is really cool. A framed poster of these titles would look awesome in retro game room.
Never saw these before but my answer is yes… HELLS YES!
Same, these are cool as hell
I love the blurred edges of the neon.
And I always appreciate a time when games were based on Asimov novels.
Yes! I had forgotten about this signature neon art style on the old Epyx games!
I loved it when the mid-80s game companies did this, for example, the classic Atari games with the dramatic painted art style, there’s even a book about it:
and the classic Activision stylized cartoon art with rainbow:
I may be a bit biased since I have large, framed poster prints of both of the above…
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Welcome! Yes that aesthetic is great, they look particularly good lined up like that too!
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Welcome!
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The art isn’t brilliant in some cases, but the aesthetic is great, as is the consistency.
More generally I think it’s kinda interesting that in the 70s/80s the ‘cool guy/girl’ in art and advertising etc seemed to be in their 30s or 40s, whereas now it’s all very young. Like Winter/Summer Games guy and Impossible Mission guy appear to be Roger Moore Bond age.
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I love it… tons of companies did that back in the day, and I’m a huge fan.
Here’s a couple VIC-20 examples from my collection.
And they did it with the Tandy TRS-80 too
My favourite though, has to be the Odyssey II. The art is just full send retro goodness.
And of course, nobody can forget the Master System. 
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I’ve always liked the Master System box art, so simple, clear and effective.
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Yes, the standout is the Odyssey 2 art! 
We owned an Odyssey 2 back in the day…
I also learned the Sega SMS had a decades long life in Brazil for peculiar historical reasons… check it out.
You can actually still buy new master system (and genesis) consoles to this day! They look quite different than what you’re used to seeing, and they have large libraries (132 in 1) built into the console.
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Yes! We have a coworker at Discourse from Brazil and he mentioned this Brazil-specific phenomenon to me. Interesting bit of retro game history…
You work for discourse? Cool
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Jeff @codinghorror is the co-founder of both discourse and stackoverflow. 
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