My Days Doing Box Art for Video Games - by James Gurney
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My Days Doing Box Art for Video Games<br>Should box art develop the fantasy? At what point does "truth in advertising" matter?
James Gurney<br>Jul 30, 2026
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When I was starting out as a freelance illustrator, I did a few cover designs for Activision and Atari.
Here’s what the screen graphics looked like for a game called River Raid, where you fly a jet up a river and shoot at helicopters and ships.
The whole idea with the package art was to develop the 3D fantasy in the player’s imagination. I painted the original in oil.
Galaga and Galaxians had arrays of bug-like monsters swarming overhead and dropping bombs on you.
Although there were home versions of the game, you had to play the arcade version to see the latest levels. I wasn’t very good at playing the game, so I went to the arcade and offered quarters to the kids who were good at it. I said all I wanted to do was watch them play and sketch the monsters. When I came back the next day there was a whole line of kids with their hands out. Don’t know if I would do that now.
Here’s one of the oil paintings I did for Galaga. I’m not sure where this turned up in print, but it was fun to paint.
I believe this one was for Galaxians. The painting is in oil, about 16 x 20. Since there was a lot of room for imaginative elaboration, I chose a more comic book look.<br>Do you think I pushed the fantasy too far? Should I have stayed closer to thte graphics of the game, or was this elaboration OK?<br>Leave a comment<br>This blog doesn’t have paywalls, thanks to the generosity of its paying subscribers.
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Discussion about this post<br>CommentsRestacks
Javier Vera<br>3m
on one hand I'd say that you pushed too much. But in total honesty I was delighted as a child for just looking at the game cartridges illustrations and also instruction manual illustrations used to be amazing!<br>I used to play a ton with the 8bit - NES and also Atari on my cousin's and damn how I liked those illustrations!<br>Thanks for bringing back these memories :-)
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