Back before the Internet, there were very few ways to find out about games, especially if you weren’t one of the cool kids who subscribed to Nintendo Power or some like magazine. In fact, when you showed up at Walmart or KMart (RIP), you more or less had two pieces of info on a game: its name and what the cover looked like. I guess you could also read the back, but who reads stuff?
As someone who was indeed a kid before the Internet, I had mixed results in my “buy based on name and cover art” endeavors. I had hits like “Link’s Awakening,” which was not only my first “Zelda” game, but remains one of my favorite games ever. And then there were games like “Turn and Burn: The F-14 Dogfight Simulator.” The cover proclaimed that it was “very hot.” It was not. I played for an hour and a half and did not find a single plane with which to dogfight. That was a total waste of $30.
Anyway, the cover is kind of a big deal. Over my many years of collecting, I’ve seen my share of the best and worst covers ever, whether it’s iconic, like the wide shot of the protagonists in front of the Mana Tree in “Secret of Mana,” bad, like the Xbox pinball game that featured scantily-clad women (?!), or just weird, like “Phalanx” on the Super Nintendo, which had a cover of a hillbilly with a banjo despite being a space shoot-em-up. Even today, I can admit that a well-done cover can come close to swaying me. Now, if I’m tempted by some nice cover art, my next move is to pull out my phone and check on reviews, but I did look at the game, so I guess it accomplished its goal.
But in no genre is your cover going to be more important than in sports games.
At some point, a marketing person decided that having an athlete be on the cover of your game was a pretty solid move. Thus, the idea of cover athletes was born. Now it’s a big deal - there are online polls and press conferences and all that for who’s going to be the cover athlete for “Madden” or “The Show” or whatever. Being named as a cover athlete is like winning your own version of ESPN’s “Who’s Now,” if “Who’s Now” were still a thing. And in retrospect, each cover is like a microcosm of the sport at the time.
Sure, actual Hall of Fame types like Derek Jeter and LeBron James may have graced the covers of games, but then you have choices that, looking at them now, are more humorous than anything, like Vince Young or Keith Van Horn. Then you have games where the cover athlete is someone like Cade McNown, whose lasting legacy - besides being awful for the Chicago Bears - is probably when he got busted with a fake handicapped parking pass at UCLA.
It’s all a very interesting reflection of the exact time the game was produced.
A game’s cover is a glimpse into its world. It’s what the publishers want you to immediately think of when thinking about purchasing it. It might even catch your eye years later when it’s sitting on a shelf. Or it might make you think “Oh, Peyton Hillis. I remember when you were randomly relevant for a season. LOL Browns.”
Hope is a local attorney and video game enthusiast. He is reasonably certain that the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl because of the Madden Curse.
