The other day I was shopping at “Canadian Tire” (a chain of department stores in Canada, like Wal-Mart), and I noticed a father loading a brand new pink bicycle onto his truck. I saw it as a girly bike – the kind with multicoloured tassels flaring from the handle grips, white plastic training wheels haphazardly poking out of the sides, and a bare frame anxiously waiting to have My Little Pony stickers pasted all over it. I smirked a bit, and kept walking. As I passed the man’s truck, I saw his little girl sitting on the passenger seat, peering through the back window as her father loaded the bike. The look on her face – I cannot find the words to express it – was ecstatic! She was bouncing all over the seat, squealing excitedly like only a 4-year-old can. Like the infamous N64 Kids she looked to be in sheer bliss.
I remember that when I was young, getting a new game was about as exciting as my father coming home with a new bicycle. As I’ve mentioned in a prior post, Monkey Island 2 has a special place in my heart. It was the first game that my sister and I pooled our money together for, after months of back-breaking work on our farm, feeding horses and mowing acres of lawn. In those days, the recession of the early 1990s was hitting my family pretty hard. My mother was attending university at the time, and my father’s carpentry business was not going well at all; money was a constant problem around the house. While my parents paid my sister and I an allowance for doing chores around the acreage, I knew that an allowance was a frivolity that my parents could barely afford. Buying a new game with months worth of our pooled chore money was a big deal.
I would tear open the box as soon as we had left the store, and start digging into the manual. The 45-minute car ride back to my family’s acreage was like torture. The Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge box art (painted by Steve Purcell) became a playground for my imagination; by the time we arrived home I had already created a world and story based on what I saw on the box. My sister and I traded pieces of the game back and forth as we drove home, but inevitably there was something about the box’s front cover art that we both were attracted to. There was something about the cover art that invoked our imaginations. It had horrible tension, an utterly terrifying pirate on the front, and it told a story in one glance: whoever that guy is on the left, he’s in trouble!
So when the new cover art appeared recently for the upcoming release of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, I could not help but notice a stylistic change in the box art. I could not put my finger on it, but it felt like something was missing in the overall presentation. Fearing that this was mere nostalgia rearing its ugly head, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new box art, as well as some of Steve Purcell’s previously unreleased box art. In this article I borrow some terminology from an art critic by the name of Heinrich Wölfflin to help out in distinguishing between the two styles. Keep in mind that I’m no art historian or critic, so any errors I make are mine alone, and not Wölfflin’s. Thanks to Martyn Zachary of Slowdown.vg for posting his own comparison, and my friend Melinda for letting me know about Wölfflin in the first place.
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