Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)

ppeter_d_sherman about 6 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on mightygodking.com

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gorgoiler•about 4 hours ago

“Rainbow Tennis” was actually pretty good, if it’s a reference to International 3D Tennis! The games back then gave a frisson of the glamorous international world of the professional tour by changing the court ambience as follows:

Solid lime green: Wimbledon!

Hard brick red: Roland Garros!

Deep blue: the hard court ones!

Here’s an example of the, at the time in the mid 1980s, some pretty innovative 3D wire rendering in the game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1JorNBSs4Q

smcin•25 minutes ago

"Buzz Aldrin’s Space Rainbow Tennis" just needs a four-fingered sentient alien opponent. The great man would have approved...

Panzerschrek•about 4 hours ago

Was it allowed to use such cover art having nothing to do with in-game (pretty-limited) graphics?

krapp•about 3 hours ago

Yes. And it's actually part of the reason the video game market crashed in the 80s, because of how misleading the artwork was.

This is why the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges.

vunderba•about 3 hours ago

Yeah I think the first-party early titles (Excitebike, etc) were definitely more representative of the game play.

But third parties definitely didn't respect this. I'm sure everyone who grew up in this era remembers the infamous Megaman cart by Capcom [1].

One of the things that Nintendo learned from Atari was that massive amounts of shovelware did not help their cause.

As a third party company, you were actually limited to a certain number of games you were allowed to release per year in North America (five I believe). There were ways around that, like Konami forming the subsidiary Ultra.

Additionally they locked the system behind the 10NES chip that made unauthorized game production difficult (unless you pulled the classic Taiwan voltage snap trick or just blatantly copied the source from the US Copyright Office like Tengen).

[1] - https://imgur.com/a/5hUUDnM

Lerc•about 3 hours ago

It's strange, I learned Forth on the Atari and found that the cover was a surprisingly accurate depiction of how I turned out.

musicale•about 3 hours ago

> the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges

This is why the ESRB was created.

vunderba•about 3 hours ago

These are great.

Salvador Dalí’s Pinball Thrills could also have been the title of the pinball segment on Sesame Street back in the day.

Every sport ever in pong form was completely true. Magnavox Odyssey Pong + a crappy blue cellophane transparency overlay == ice hockey!.

Anyone remember Slalom for the NES?

https://imgpb.com/hvszd

lelanthran•about 3 hours ago

Not so different from the usborne series of game books.

Imagination had to work hard, back then, to see the game in the characters on screen.

Triphibian•about 4 hours ago

This feels like stolen Worth1000 content.

qingcharles•about 2 hours ago

Or b3ta.

sublinear•about 4 hours ago

For something from 2008, this holds up pretty well. The years blend together and I read them in my head in Mr. Plinkett's voice.

adzm•about 4 hours ago

See also paperback paradise which did sci-fi book cover parodies https://paperbackparadise.bigcartel.com/category/prints you can see the Instagram and x links at the bottom too

NetMageSCW•about 3 hours ago

I guess they were all written by teenagers.

smcin•26 minutes ago

"Found a Way to Date my Cat" seems to predict romantasy...

krapp•about 5 hours ago

Oh shit, actual human talent!

raldi•about 5 hours ago

These are the original illustrations with just the text changed.

krapp•about 4 hours ago

Yes and nowadays no one would even bother put in that much effort. They would have an AI generate the box art and the jokes. The jokes wouldn't even be funny, but no one would care because "human jokes aren't usually funny."

kraquepype•about 3 hours ago

I wish we were still in the "haha funny" era of AI, and we could laugh at the absurdity it came up with. Fun times.

One of my favorites: https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/i3kr2z/humor_...

Lerc•about 3 hours ago

It depends on what the joke is. I can see people making an image for a joke that they already have in their head. Or they can AI generate an image and think up with a caption to make whatever it generated is funny (partially clips does exactly this with clipart). Sometimes it can be completely AI generated because the humour comes from seeing how the model misconstrued what it was supposed to do. A lot of these require humans to do the work of curation.

I'd be kind of tempted to give these box art images to an AI and ask it to make the game. I suspect there would be much amusement to be had in seeing how they do at a cursed task like that.

cubefox•about 3 hours ago

Exception: Gwern's AI-assisted cartoons include some funny ones. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/comics/index (scroll down)

Apocryphon•about 4 hours ago

tbh, there is some novelty when AI first imitates a distinct human style. And then it gets old immediately after not unlike when VC Twitter discovered AI could imitate Studio Ghibli art.