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Message: [QUOTE="What's His Face, post: 211275, member: 125725"] Oh, I read an interview with the advertising agency about Phalanx years ago! Turns out they [I]had [/I]played the game, they [I]were[/I] aware of the Japanese covers, and [I]had done[/I] covers to dozens (if not hundreds) of other games in the period, too! The reason why they did the cover this was was... [I]they had absolutely no idea how to differentiate Phalanx from the dozens of other shooters already on the market that hadn't already been done, [/I][B][I]many by them.[/I][/B] [LIST] [*]Ship speeding at you? Gradius 3. [*]Emphasis on the pilot? UN Squadron. [*]Hyper stylized space battle? Earth Defense Force. [*]Flying [I]away [/I]from the viewer? Thunder Spirits. [*]Flying out of a huge explosion? Darius Twin. [*]Stylized artwork of a boss? Super R-Type, among many others. [*]To say nothing of the metric duckton of other shooters on other consoles by Fall 1992 [/LIST] That's when someone, likely a fan of the first Superman movie, got the idea of making a cover based on the perspective...of a farmer seeing a spaceship fly by (much like Kal-El crib-ship falling onto the Kent farm in front of the Kent's startled eyes)! So, they used an actor (who they had used previously for other marketing photos, including dressing him as Santa holding an umbrella for the cover of an Oregon/Washington-based Christmas CD/album) who they thought had suffered a stroke at some point in his life and used the "old man model" gig to supplement his Social Security (pretty smart idea, if you ask me - nice side-hustle on the old guy), put him in overalls and gave him a banjo, snapped some photos, then had the art department do the rest. But did the game sell well? Eh, not really. But no-one really knows if the middling sales were due to the eye-catching cover (that we're still talking about 32+ years alter), or if it was due to the absolute [I]glut [/I]of shooters already on the market... [B]and a little game called "Street Fighter II" releasing earlier that same year[/B] diverting attention and money from shooters to fisticuffs. Oh, and those Japanese covers I mentioned? One was too "Japanese-y" (most retailers in that era refused to stock Japanese-looking anything on their shelves due to both retailer and consumer biases/racism of the time and is why everything in the US got a redraw back then, which I've written diatribes on before) that resembled a squatting duck begging for bread crumbs... and the other for[I] looking like a giant dong:[/I] [ATTACH type="full" width="346px" alt="1747846484860.png"]71576[/ATTACH][ATTACH type="full" width="255px" alt="1747846562198.png"]71578[/ATTACH] And that, my friends, is The Story of the Phalanx Box Art. [/QUOTE]

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