Mattel Electronics' Horse Race Analyzer

I stumbled across this 1979 handheld device / game / gambling assistant in a flea market a few months ago. Had to share it here for the beautiful graphics. That horse race icon is too perfect.

Cliff Spohn and the Art of Atari

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A lot of folks my age grew up with Atari. Those brightly-colored, but incredibly basic rectangular graphics flashing across our TV sets sustained our vast attention spans and transported us to different dimensions. If it weren't for the brilliant artwork on the game's boxes, though, we may have had no idea what the actual game graphics were supposed to represent. American painter Cliff Spohn created a great amount of artwork for Atari, and, to be honest, I never knew his name until I saw my friend Sam Smith mention his name as the artist for the Computer Chess film poster. Finally - a name and face to go with all of these gorgeous paintings! Have a look at some of my favorites from Cliff's huge portfolio of work.

Some of his non-Atari work:

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Check out much much more of Cliff's beautiful work over at Fine Art America.

Related: Intellivision Packaging

Art of the Arcade

DO check out this great Tumblr site Art of the Arcade. Too much good stuff on here that you don't wanna miss.

River Raid

I grew up fully fascinated with Atari. Not just the games, but the promotional graphics as well - the instruction manuals, the t-shirts and patches, and of course the boxes. Real heads know that Activision had the best box designs out there. Clean vector graphics, funny style illustrations, and the ever-present rainbow trailer - these visuals appeared on all of their box designs, giving them a consistently strong sense of identity. Their boxes are identifiable from a mile away. Here's one of my favorites - River Raid.




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Bonus beats:

Intellivision packaging

Everyone who knows me knows I'm all about classic video games. My dad got my brother and I hooked on Atari right when the 2600 was released and the rest is history. We never had Colecovision or Intellivision, so we missed out on a lot of games as well as their great packaging and accompanying artwork. As it went for just about every classic video game system, the lack of compelling graphics in the games necessitated compelling graphics on the packaging.

Here are a few Intellivision game boxes I came up on in a used game store recently. Really nice watercolor illustrations and classic late '70s / early '80s layout / collage style.