Following on from Darran’s post yesterday, and seeing as I’ve been a bit invisible on the blog recently, I thought I’d write a few words about another of our cover ideas that fell to the cutting room floor.

Now the interesting thing about this cover – as astute readers will have no doubt twigged – is that while this image didn’t end up making it onto the face of the mag it was used for the leading page of our Top 25 Fighters feature.

We’re always pushing for quirky and originality in our covers and believe that colours play a vital role in deciding their grabability factor. Having a distinctive hue that overpowers the thousands of others is easily the best way to help make a cover stand out - try it, Magic Eye past RG covers and you may notice a subtle colour theme. For the Elite cover the colour was black, OutRun it was blue, Red Moon it was Red (obviously), and for the Atari cover it was brown – yes, brown! This cover was no different. It has a kind of sky bluey tinge.

Anyway what I like most about this cover treatment is its simplicity. There’s a real sense of geekyness to this image. I also like the fact that the two generic fighters, taken from the Splash Screen of SF2, get to take centre stage. These are two characters that everyone is familiar with despite knowing nothing about them. And I thought that was kind of cool. I also remember thinking how funny it would be if the guy at Capcom who created the intro spotted the mag in a newsstand in Japan and laughed so hard that people began flocking around him just to find out what all the commotion was about, and we picked up a few more readers from overseas. 

The incandescent 25 appearing from the windows, which was suggested by Stephen, is a nice touch and really adds colour and quirkiness to the image. Ultimately though, the skyscraper is too overbearing, which, if I remember rightly, was the reason the idea was rejected.     

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 2:20 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.