Few video games have been as well served by their box art as the Commodore Amiga's Shadow of the Beast. Roger Dean's airbrushed panorama is both prehistoric and futuristic. It shows a thicket of rangy trees, each one blasted with red leaves, while, in the middle distance, two gleaming Jurassic contraptions pass one another, oblivious of us onlookers. The game's title, rendered in a scythe-like font, completes the alien, prog-rock aesthetic (Dean also drew covers for albums by Yes and Asia).
Box art is the art of promise. In 1989, when video game graphics were rudimentary, that promise also had to be something of an exaggeration, showing characters and scenes not as they appear on screen, but as they first appeared in the imagination of their creators. In Shadow of the Beast's case the hyperbole worked. The game proved vastly popular, sales further encouraged by a pack-in t-shirt bearing Dean's artwork.
The original Shadow of the Beast, in which you played as a kidnapped boy turned into a demonic brawler by a wizard's spell, was also loved for its technical competence. Shadow of the Beast and its two sequels, created by Martin Edmonson and Paul Howarth (who would later launch the Driver series), provided a technical benchmark, one that inspired a generation of up-and-coming British game-makers.
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