Even if this week’s 1UP cover story (the Essential 100) were loaded to the brim with junk writing of no merit, it would all have been worth it strictly for this beautiful piece of Secret of Mana art one of our illustrators provided:
Seriously. Look at that.
Since kicking of four cover story initiative, we’ve invested a fair amount of money into reviving the forgotten magazine concept of original artwork for feature whenever possible. Things like this give me confidence that we’ve made the right choice.
So who exactly did this stuff? Where can I find more? I was shocked at how good this is. I need contact info man!
Yeah, same request as Mark. I’m redoing my basement and I’m looking for original VG art of this ilk. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on DeviantART, but if there’s another gathering place of illustrators I’m not aware of, I would love to know.
If you click the link to the cover story the artists are credited on the linked page, including links to their blogs.
Great piece of art. Any possibilities of offering up those illustrations as desktops? I’ve really been struggling to communicate to my office that I’m a Secret of Mana fan, and this as a wallpaper might finally do the trick.
The entire series of of illustrations has been awesome, actually. Real big fan of the splash image for the cover story: http://www.1up.com/features/cover-essential-100-part-one.
None of the illustrations were submitted in a large enough format for desktops, unfortunately.
That piece is indeed totally awesome, and I love Mayumi’s Cave Story one as well. And Jiyoon’s Out of This World. And Jeremy’s header montages.
Hmm, speaking of which, is there any way to see yesterday’s header(#100-96)? Since the main cover article keeps aggregating everything and showing just the latest header, I can’t find any way to get to the previous one.
Wow, someone actually likes my crappy illustrations? Yeah, I’ll be publishing a blog with all kinds of extras (like Shawn Elliott’s complete Portal treatise, and Rand Miller’s entire massive response about Myst) at the end of the week, and all five headers will be included.
Given any consideration to eventually doing a 1up.com art book? Something like that may be way, way down the road, and I have no insight into whether it’d be financially viable, but in a perfect world it’d be cool to have a coffee table collection of all these commissions, as well as those yet-to-come (looking forward to ’em!).
I am absolutely LOVING this list. The writing is great, approaching oft-mentioned games like Tomb Raider and Secret of Mana from a fresh perspective.
And oh my god the artwork! It’s half the reason I can’t wait until tomorrow!
Beautiful artwork! But as much as I like your writing in general, I have to point out that “Final Fantasy Adventure” (or “Seiken Densetsu”/”Mystic Quest”) is not simply “a very direct derivative of The Legend of Zelda”. Play it again and you will notice that it already features “classic RPG-style experience and level systems”. Actually, it often feels much more like Final Fantsy than Zelda.