If you’ve picked up our latest eMag (available now from the Imagine eShop for a bargain £19.99) you may have noticed that there’s a large selection of covers there that were put forward at cover meeting, but never actually went any further.We felt the blog was the perfect place to describe the reasoning behind these covers and why we decided to pitch them, so here’s number 1 in what will no doubt be another patchy series from us .

This cover is particularly interesting as it’s the very first one that our current designer, Stephen Williams mocked up when he started working on Retro Gamer. We knew that we wanted to focus on the top 25 fighters feature and knew that we needed something instantly iconic, so Street Fighter II was the obvious choice.

Now I’m not sure who came up with the original idea of having 25 character boxes on the Street Fighter II map, but I do remember that it was Stuart who thought it would be amazingly funny if we had Ken or Ryu facing off against King Hippo. He was right of course (covers always tend to be a collaboration between all three of us, and it’s not unusual for everyone to chip in with the thoughts as the weeks progress).

I think the main reason that the cover didn’t progress any further here was due to the presented piece not being fully realised (you’ll notice that we’ve just re-used Street Fighter sprites instead of ones from the games that would have featured as we had first intended) meaning it didn’t really have the impact that we’d first intended.Still, the addition of the IK+ sprite (from the GBA game I think) is a very nice touch and it proved that Stephen would definitely be someone to keep an eye on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.