How the cover art of Defender of the Crown (1986) was made (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How the cover art of Defender of the Crown (1986) was made (2013)

spelpappan.se

90 pointspncnmnp25 comments

To drastically age myself, I loved Defender of the Crown in 1986.

It is probably one of the most memorable games of my childhood.

Yet, sadly, glancing at it now, it has aged poorly. I don't see the magic I did then. I guess I'm (lots) older and jaded by the generations of games between then and now. I've never had a great memory for the right sort of details from my childhood to explain why, but emotionally at the least, DOTC was a fantastic game for a young geeky kid in the 80s.

I didn't discover it until much later, but still enjoyed it a lot. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a game that definitely knew what I wanted out of my games.

Same. At the end of the day it's just a handful of minigames. I remember I had a trackball at the time which made the jousting minigame nearly impossible for me, but others were fine.

Also, there was the time when pre-teen me stumbled across the somewhat hidden "nude" scene and thought he hit the jackpot.

I first played the NES version and I still fire it up in an emulator from time to time. I still enjoy the variety of the gameplay: attacking and defending castles, raiding, rescuing the princess, and of course jousting. It would be great for a modern game to give more depth to it. Maybe add some tower defense like elements for building up castles or something.

Yeah I had a similar experience with another game. I’m a little bit younger than you but it seems like the same kind of thing.

When I was in elementary school, Pokemon had recently come out, and for my birthday I got a GameBoy Color and a copy of Pokemon Yellow. I played that game for many many many hours, and I found the game so so captivating.

Fast forward to present day, it’s not the same now that I am an adult.

I still take pride though in the fact that I have a genuine Mew in my Pokédex on the cartridge. A couple of months ago I went and bought a gameboy cartridge dumper off of eBay and dumped the ROM and RAM of my Pokémon cartridges.

Now my Mew can live forever, and that brings me joy. Even though the game itself does not appeal to me anymore.

I want to make a video about the process at some point. And I want to create a service where people can mail in their physical GameBoy cartridges to me and I can dump the RAM and ROM for them so they can have a copy forever too.

But first I need to come up with a script for the video to make it interesting to watch. And I would like to try and reverse engineer the software for the GameBoy cartridge dumper, because I had to dig up an old computer and put Windows 7 on it because the software was for Windows only and I don’t normally use Windows since many years ago now.

Some other cartridge dumpers work with Linux or macOS, but this one didn’t with any of the software I could find. Not could I get it to work by making a VM with Windows. Would be neat to reverse engineer it and implement it so it can run on Linux and macOS.

Do the modern Pokemon games still appeal to you, or are you done with the genre in general?

The more modern games came out when I was older so I never checked most of them out.

I did try a couple of Pokémon games for the 3DS XL during the pandemic. But I literally played those Pokémon games for the 3DS XL for only a couple of minutes and decided quickly that they were not for me.

There were some non-Pokémon games for the 3DS XL that I played for a few hours during the pandemic which were more to my liking.

After I had played the non-Pokémon games for a while I sold the 3DS XL and the games, and even made a small profit when selling them while still having the price I sold at also be a good price for the buyer.

I think probably I enjoyed the small profit and the knowledge that both me and the buyer got a good deal, more than I enjoyed actually using the 3DS XL myself.

Just don’t ask me to account for shipping and handling when I talk about the small profit I made, or it might turn out that I did actually sell at a small loss rather than at a small profit :p

None of the C64 games aged well in terms of graphics. Back in mid 90's I borrowed from a friend a C64 with a floppy disk drive, as I sold my C64 a few years earlier and I only had the tape unit, and tried to play some of the games I was never able to play earlier. Even at that time the games lost most of the magic, PC screens of 800x600 were already the norm. Today the graphics in the games is so good that the pixelated games from our childhood look very bad by comparison - it does not make it bad, just antiquated.

I briefly worked for the resurrected Cinemaware in the 90's. I was drawn in by the amazing art from the original Cinemaware games. It was one of the worst productions I've ever experienced and it was clear from early on that the revamped Defender's of the Crown was going to be a disaster. I disagreed with the production lead, and got fired. IMHO he had no concept of "scope", and it shows in the final published game.

Relevant article from The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/defender-of-the-crown/

While the cover art was great, let’s not forget the in-game work of Jim Sachs.

Yes! And Jim Sachs was responsible for that fantastic aquarium screensaver that was on every PC in the 90's. I think he did quite well from it.

Anecdote: When I was a kid in the ’90s in Germany, I once went to a mega store to buy a NES game on discount. My final choice was between Defender of the Crown and, if I remember correctly, Wizards & Warriors 3, and I picked Defender based on the box art. Bad choice. In all my childhood years, I was never able to figure out how to play this game well.

Strange. Like most of the C64 games in that era in my country, my brother and I got a pirated copy with no instructions and we never had any problem figuring out how it works.

Maybe the NES version was harder. I sucked at everything: the raids, the bombardments, the jousting, the battles. I couldn’t do anything right and would pretty much always die before turn 10.

Lovely story. The same still happens today for any commercial artwork (game artwork, film artwork, products and advertising). It usually goes out to pitch, agency teams, contractors or subcontractors do the work, it goes through many many revisions agency side, then client side make amends, and many weeks later you end up with something. Ownership of any single piece of it is very grey.

I'm fascinated that they apparently took photos of actual human models in costume and based the cover art on that. I would understand using models if it were for animation in order to get motion capture, but you'd think for static pictures like cover art you wouldn't need to go to so much bother.

The quality of an illustration is almost always a reflection of the quality of the reference the artist gathered.

My understanding is it is one of those things that is more commonly used than you would think. https://www.michaelwhelan.com/faq/ has a section where he covers using models and images. I was trying to find links to some of the "making of" pages he has, as they sometimes have models showing poses.

Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell also use this technique, making some of the most amazing paintings because they're grounded in real anatomy and references, instead "this looks about right". The artist not using photographic references can miss important details or make proportion mistakes while being deep in the act of creation but those flaws are easily visible to observers after the fact. We saw this on box art of the 80s a lot. Take a look at the dude on the original mega man box, for instance. Who stands like that?!

In the comments it sounds like they found Greg Winters in 2015. Was there ever an update with his side of the story?

There is a follow up article

https://spelpappan.se/tag/defender-of-the-crown/

But it asks more questions than it answers.

That article also appears to predate getting in touch with Winters. It's clear they continued to research the topic and a little shame there wasn't an update, but perhaps nothing came of their contact worth sharing.

The C64 soundtrack was amazing, better than the Amiga version, in my opinion. Owned both, of course.

>dated from a gender perspective

Oops! I think I clicked on the wrong web site. Page closed.

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